Tales of Ireland II - St. Brendan and his Voyage Across the North Atlantic

In this podcast, I do love to find the links between myth and history and have done so quite often with the Norse gods, mainly with Odin and his ancestry to many of the kingdoms that still exist in Europe today.

However, to find those links, I do need to use the humanized versions of those gods with the text that Snorri Sturluson gives us in Heimskringla and his Prosa Edda, with Snorri as a Christian writing in his Christian worldview.

What he did was he minimized the power of gods to be simple mortals that had magical traits that caused other people to follow them, and then per Snorri, incorrectly worshiped them as gods.

The Book of Invasions sorta did the same thing with some of the invaders.

For example, the Tuatha De Danann, the Irish gods.

But for the sake of the Book of Invasions, they were just humans with supernatural powers.

And the text also states that they are the direct descendants of Noah.

As Noah is nine generations below Adam, a man created directly by the Abrahamic God, you can see just based on this that the Tuatha De Danann are being minimized in this text as well, because the Book of Invasions was also being written by a Christian and inserts them into this Christian worldview.

But I did wanna highlight the Tuatha De Danann because of something interesting I discussed in part one.

Remember according to the Book of Invasions, the Tuatha De Danann weren't simply another group that showed up in Ireland.

Before they arrived, one branch of the descendants of Nemed, who was descended from Noah, had apparently traveled away from Ireland and eventually ended up in what the text calls the Northern Islands of the world.

The text tells us that they spent time in these northern islands learning druidry, prophecy, and magic until they become experts in what the text describes as the arts of pagan cunning.

So before the Tuatha De Danann arrived back in Ireland, successfully conquering it for a time, they have already spent some time in some mysterious northern land learning supernatural knowledge.

Now, I wanna be clear here that The Book of Invasions does not tell us the names of these northern islands, but I do think that this phrase is worth keeping in the back of our minds, because if you look at a modern map and start heading north and, for the sake of this episode, also west from Ireland, you eventually reach a part of the world that to the people living in early medieval Europe was largely unknown.

They did not have maps or the accumulated geographic knowledge that we have today.

So where exactly did the known world end and what might be waiting beyond it? And I think there's something really interesting about the way humans describe places they do not understand or know.

When you're traveling for weeks or even months into an unfamiliar world, you're not just necessarily going to understand everything you see.

Strange weather or land forms, unfamiliar animals, people who are dressed differently or have a different skin color, volcanic activity, or even something as simple as exhaustion, a lack of food, and poor visibility can turn what is actually an ordinary experience into something that the person may be perceiving to be supernatural, into something extraordinary.

And then when taking into account the traveler/storyteller's perspective, there's the other side of it.

What does the person back home wanna hear? If I tell them that I fought a sea monster, how much are the ladies gonna love me? If you're telling people about an exotic lands that they've never seen and will probably never visit themselves, you're not just giving them a set of geographic coordinates, you're telling them a story, one which there is a good chance they would be interested in hearing.

You might compare something unfamiliar to things your audience already understands, but exaggerated into something that seems incredible.

And sometimes the person writing the story may not have even seen the thing themselves.

They could be just repeating what somebody else told them.

And then over time, in a long game of telephone over centuries, the legend grows from something like seeing a golden retriever for the first time to, "Yeah, bro, that thing was totally a dragon." So when we start reading accounts of these mysterious northern and western lands, we have to keep all of that in mind.

Sometimes they may be geographical accounts, sometimes they're religious stories telling the readers about their accounts of a literal heaven on Earth, or seeing biblical characters condemned to hell in the middle of the Atlantic on a rock.