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Benedeit, Le Voyage de Saint Brendan. Édition bilingue. Texte, traduction, présentation et notes par Ian Short et Brian Merrilees, 2006, Paris, Champions Classiques, 216pp.
Few stories have captured the imagination of readers from generation to generation more than the legends surrounding St. Brendan the Navigator. Although St. Brendan may not be widely known by contemporary audiences, for centuries his name called to mind the greatest of the medieval seafarers. To this day, the people of St. Malo in Brittany remember Brendan as one of their own, while the village of Brandon on the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland - right at the foot of a mountain named after the saint - claims to be his birth-place. In Scotland, the Orkneys, Greenland, and Iceland, place names refer back to visits (real or legendary?) made there by the historical St. Brendan during the 6th century. And as Denis O'Donaghue notes in his Lives and Legends of Saint Brendan (Llanerch, 1994), in England a little oratory standing at the point where the rivers Avon and Severn meet in the Bristol Channel still bears St. Brendan's name, "to remind the Bristol mariners that once upon a time the great sailor-saint [...] had blessed the seaward approach of their city of Bristol" (p. 214). Benedeit's Voyage de Saint Brendan is one of the most famous narrations of Brendan's visit to a plethora of distant and mysterious (even mythical) islands in the Atlantic Ocean, such as the great whale-island upon whose back Brendan and his monks celebrate the Easter Mass, and another island full of giant sheep. This story had such impact on the medieval imagination that a number of medieval and early modern maps include "St. Brendan's Isle" (which bears a certain resemblance to the mythical HyBrasil) or Brendan's whale-island in their depiction of the Western Atlantic.
Ian Short and Brian Merrilees's edition of the early 12th century Voyage de Saint Brendan by Benedeit, with facing modern French translation,...