This ancient Irish tale of a voyage, that of Bran, is the archetype of the vaster and slightly more recent Voyage of Mael Duin.
Bran is thus the hero who first reaches Ireland coming from various smaller islands.
This story is not at all Christian, nor made so? It is entirely pre-Christian. The references are purely pagan, and yet there is an allusion to Eve and the serpent so it might be a first step towards receiving the Christian religion and adopting it, which is clearly stated in the case of Mael Duin. The parallel with the Voyage of Saint Brenan (Brennain) is interesting since that Saint is supposed to be the founding father of Ireland.
But the religious dimension of things seems to be more the result of the story than the spring box of it. It is the hypothesis of a certain protection against the strange dangers of this pagan world they discover in the various islands.
They manage to come across several mysterious islands that all contain some dangers, dangers Bran is swift enough to know and avoid. Altogether it is more a tale of initiation than a real voyage of adventure and discovery.
The most interesting idea I find in this tale is:
"It is a law in this world
To believe in the creatures, to forget God,
Overthrow by diseases, and old age,
Destruction of the soul through deception." (verse 47)
That reminds us of one particular trait of Irish literature from Defoe onward, their use of some black humor or exaggeration. Flann O'Brien used it in order to cure the Irish of their submissive spirit. He used exaggeration of the deceiving clichés to which the Irish cling in order to cure their real soul of that soul-destroying deception. He used the deception to restore the soul that had been destroyed just before by the same deception. That's probably what these old "Voyages" were all about: to make these monstrous creatures appear so dangerous and monstrous that it cured the soul of its destruction by these deceptive myths, pagan myths of course, and thus this pagan "voyage" becomes a tool to orient the Irish of the time towards the true religion of the true God, a protective God what's more.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
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