Chapter 1 Apocalyptic Solidarity and Worthless Gems in Benedeit’s Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot

Deu en prïet tenablement / Cel lui mustret veablement (He prayed to God about it persistently / That He would show him Paradise for his own eyes).32 —The Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot

The Anglo-Norman Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot was one of many vernacular adaptations of an older Latin story—the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis—originally composed in the eleventh century. The title specifies the story’s subject as one of Ireland’s great patron saints: Brendan, the Benedictine abbot who became a legend for his prominent role in the development of early Irish monasticism. Eventually canonized, Brendan died in the sixth century. Half a millennium later, Brendan’s star had not waned in the medieval imagination. After the Latin Navigatio was composed, translations and adaptations sprung up in a range of languages from Catalan to Dutch. Among these adaptations was the Anglo-Norman Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot.33 Composed in rhyming couplets, the Anglo-Norman version of the tale follows its Latin predecessor in describing the perilous oceanic quest that Brendan undertakes with a small band of fellow monks. Their destination is the Earthly Paradise. Brendan displaces himself from the monastery to seek this land for the spiritual edification he anticipates upon arriving. As an expression of his exemplary piety and devotion to God, Brendan is said to pray that God

Thus, Brendan’s pious desire expresses three theological associations with the Earthly Paradise: it is the land that was humanity’s ancestral home, a home that humanity lost, and which is perhaps a home to which humanity may hope to return. Through the elaboration of Brendan’s piety, Benedeit’s presentation of the Earthly Paradise manages to telescope the primal and the ultimate, ancient pasts and distant futures. The entire narrative of Christian salvation is, from Brendan’s point of view, implicit in the Earthly Paradise.

The Irish monk also formulates an associated (and troubling) motive for his quest. In addition to his pious wish to contemplate humanity’s once (and possibly future) home, Brendan formulates a conjoined desire to perceive the torments of the damned. On this score, the poet does not spare us the grim bluntness of the abbot’s wishes:

We will revisit this disturbing dimension of Brendan’s motives in the fourth and final chapter. For now, it suffices to observe that the journey to Paradise exacts a toll on both Brendan and his company. From riding the backs of whales to witnessing cosmic battles between dragons, the monks pass through all manner of fantastic challenges and obstacles before finally arriving at the place whose alleged holiness first set Brendan’s mind away from Ireland.

The Many Meanings of Gems: Lapidary Texts and the Earthly Paradise

When Brendan finally arrives at the Earthly Paradise, he and his monks have endured the loss of companions, visions of Hell, and the terrors of the ocean. After many tribulations, the journey’s first sign of relief is the sight of a gem-encrusted wall: the gates of the Earthly Paradise. The monks’ encounter with the wall is a passing moment in a long poem, a transition between the quest and its true conclusion inside the Earthly Paradise. And yet this wall and its gems refract—literally and poetically—many of the text’s most important narrative and theological concerns.

The entire episode of the Earthly Paradise is a narrative innovation on the part of Benedeit, the translator of the Anglo-Norman version of the poem; Benedeit’s Latin predecessor describes no such moment in the Navigatio.34 In the Anglo-Norman Voyage, this episode begins with a lengthy description of the several gems and jewels that Brendan and his company behold as they arrive on the shores of the Earthly Paradise:

The monk’s ignorance of the wall’s origins only heightens the superlative quality of its impressive physical dimensions. Only God could possibly have made this imposing sight. As the next lines make clear, the walls of the Earthly Paradise are doubly impressive owing to their distinctive material beauty:

In this passage, Benedeit’s Anglo-Norman verse elaborates eleven precious stones on the edifice of the Earthly Paradise: topaze, grisopase, jargunce, calcedoine, esmaragde, sardoine, jaspes, amestistes, jacintes, cristal, and beril. This specific list of gems has led Ian Short and Brian Merrilees to entitle this portion of the poem “Le lapidaire divine” (The divine lapidary).35 The title is apt. As a medieval textual genre, lapidaries elaborated the extensive properties associated with gems, jewels, and precious stones. Yet despite Short’s and Merrilee’s suggestion, no scholarly treatment of the Voyage has investigated medieval lapidaries to consider how the accounts of gems developed in such texts may have interacted with Benedeit’s literary description of Paradise’s walls. If the Earthly Paradise is a holy lapidary, then we can expect to identify enlightening intertextual resonances between Benedeit’s presentation of precious stones and similar treatments found in lapidary texts.

Among those lapidaries dated to the early second millennium, none was so celebrated, copied, and translated as the Latin De lapidibus of Bishop Marbode of Rennes. The impressive popularity of the text is evident in the 160 extant manuscripts that informed a recent critical edition of the De lapidibus compiled by Maria...