craft built of wood or skins, and manned by human oarsmen, and the direction of the voyage is usually westward or north-west, several of the voyages starting from or near Galway or Kerry on the western coast of Ireland.
But the really distinctive feature is that the voyage itself, instead of being undertaken from motives of pleasure or desire, becomes a penance or an expiation for crime. Maelduin goes to discover the murderer of his father, and the adventures of the Sons of O'Corra, of Snedgus and MacRiagla, and of St. Columcille's Clerics, arise out of the commission and the punishment of crime.
Even the Voyage of Brendan, which sprang out of that desire that lay deep in the heart of many a dreaming Celt to find "great rivers and fertile lands" beyond the ocean, is shadowed by the doom of misfortune entailed by exceeding the number of passengers allotted for the voyage—a motif that is found in several of the stories, and which, if it is Irish at all, springs from the desire for fixed numbers that pervades Irish literature.
These voyages are, then, penitential journeys, and this fact entirely revolutionises the structure and tone of the tales. The incidents assume a moral aspect, which becomes more and more marked as time goes on, and in their latest evolution the voyage incident entirely drops out, and the whole tale is concerned with the description of the joys of paradise and heaven and the tortures of the lost in hell. Let us trace the way in which this idea enters the tales. In the Voyage of Bran we first find the central idea of the other world shrunk into the special characteristic of a single one out of a number of islands. The Land of Women no longer fills the central place. The palace where the wanderers are entertained, the food of every flavour
