In connection with fabulous voyages, it is natural to think not only of Lucian’s Traveller’s True Tale, but also of Gulliver’s Travels, but these are skits, satirizing with wild wit certain features of life which lay before the authors.  The gravity of Brendan’s Voyage renders it impossible to place it in any such category.  It can hardly be said to contain any grotesque adventure except that of the monster’s back, and from the way in which this is told, it is evident that it did not appear grotesque to the narrator; and the religious tone of the whole thing forbids any such explanation.

On the other hand, I cannot perceive any hidden meaning in it which would assign it to the same class of allegorical romance of which Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is the most famous example.

It is impossible that it could ever have been intended to be believed.  Some of the incidents are so obviously fabulous—­for instance, that of Judas,—­that such an hypothesis would be simply to condemn the author as a profane forger, and his tone is much too pious for that; besides which, there would have been no possible motive; and again, although this romance stands alone or nearly alone in the popularity which it has attained outside its own country, as Professor O’Curry remarks, it does not stand by any means alone within the native literature of that country, albeit its literary merit may place it above all or nearly all the old Irish compositions of its class.  It is, however, an extraordinary fact that it has actually been sometimes taken for sober truth.  This has not been, I think, so much the case in Ireland.  There are, it is true, one or two incidents in the Life which may be remotely identified at bottom with incidents in the Voyage, there is even mention of the Land of Promise, but I am more inclined to regard these as, more or less, distorted legendary statements about Brendan’s real career, afterwards seized upon, magnified, and worked in by the romancer, than as incidents of the romancer appropriated and nationalized into comparative possibility by the biographer.  Thus the Land of Promise may have been a fond title for the imaginary site of a monastery for which he was seeking in the Western Isles.  But even in Ireland the son of Finnlogh O’ Alta seemingly obtained a character for certain adventures which must have been taken from the fable, and the Martyrology of Donegal gravely refers to the Voyage as well as to the Life as an authority upon the subject, although I confess I can hardly believe that Cuimin of Condeire was not jesting when he wrote the verse—­

     ’Brenainn loves constant piety,
     According to the synod and congregation;
     Seven years on a whale’s back he spent;
     It was a difficult mode of piety.’