Arctic Dreams

by Barry Lopez

The Irish imramha, or sea sagas, recount the voyages of monks searching for the Isles of the Blessed and, as it happened, for bleak outposts in the “desert of the Ocean” suitable for contemplation. The most widely known of these was written down sometime in the ninth or tenth century, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, the story of the seven-year voyage of the abbot Saint Brendan, in a carraugh with seventeen monks. Brendan was born about A.D. 489 in County Kerry and was abbot at Clonfert in East Galway when he left on his journey (or a series of journeys). Their craft, the carraugh, was a long, narrow, open but seaworthy boat consisting of a wickerlike basket frame covered with oak-tanned oxhide caulked with tallow. Brendan and his monks sailed with wine and cold food, used oars and a single stepped mast to convey themselves, slept on a mattress of heather, and dropped a stone anchor in bays where they explored. Their journey is a wondrous epic, filled with ecstatic visions and astounding events. They met strangers with gestures of courtesy and used their healing arts among them. They took little note of the hazards they faced. The themes are of compassion, wonder, and respect (as distinct from the themes of property, lineage, bloodshed, and banishment that distinguish the later, Icelandic sagas). Reading loosely, it is possible to imagine that Brendan reached the Faroes and Iceland, and perhaps saw the towering volcanic peak of Beerenberg on the eastern end of Jan Ma...