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CHAPTER III ST. BRENDAN'S EXPLORATIONS AND ISLANDS THE LISMORE VERSION OF THE SAINT'S ADVENTURES The fifteenth-century Book of Lismore, compiled from much older materials, tells us that St. Brenainn (evidently St. Bren- dan, the navigator) desired to leave his land and his country, his parents and his fatherland, and he urgently besought the Lord to give him a land secret, hidden, secure, delightful, separated from men. Now after he had_alept on that night, he heard the voice of the angel from heaven, who said to him, "Arise, O Brehamn," saith he, "for God hath given thee what thou souglifesF, "even _the_Land of Promise" . . . and he goes alone to Sfiab Daidche and he saw the mighty intolerable ocean on every side, and then he beheld the beautiful noble island, with trains of angels (rising) from it. 1 Thus far, in the rather redundant style of such literature, from the Life of Brenainn in the Lives of the Saints of this old manu- script. After a century and a half of disappearance this manu- script was accidentally discovered in 1814, in a walled-up recess, by workmen engaged on repairs. Mr. Westropp holds that this Lismore version is the "sim- plest and probably the earliest;" 2 but its full-blown development of certain marvels (such as the spending of every Easter for at least five years on the back of a vast sea monster as a substitute for an island) may well awaken a question as to the validity of this conjecture. However, the suggestion of the voyage by a dream seems likely enough, and his mood was in keeping with the anchorite enthu- 1 Anecdota Exoniensia: Lives of the Saints, from the Book of Lismore, edited, with a translation, notes, and indices, by Whitley Stokes, Oxford, 1890, p. 252. 8 T. J. Westropp: Brasil and the Legendary Islands of the North Atlantic: Their History and Fable, Proc. Royal Irish Acad,, Vol. 30, Section C, 1912-13, pp. 223- 260; reference on p. 230.