The Prologue to the Grand St. Graal and the Brandan Legend.

I believe the only parallel to this prologue to be the one furnished by that form of the Brandan legend of which SchrÖder has printed a German version (Sanct Brandan) at Erlangen, in 1871, from a MS. of the fourteenth century, but the first composition of which he places (p. 15) in the last quarter of the twelfth century. The text in question will be found pp. 51, et seq.: Brandan, a servant of God, seeks out marvels in rare books, he finds that two paradises were on earth, that another world was situated under this one, so that when it is here night it is day there, and of a fish so big that forests grew on his back, also that the grace of God allowed some respite every Saturday night to the torments of Judas. Angry at all these things he burnt the book. But the voice of God spake to him, “Dear friend Brandan thou hast done wrong, and through thy wrath I see My wonders lost.” The holy Christ bade him fare nine years on the ocean, until he see whether these marvels were real or a lie. Thereafter Brandan makes ready a ship to set forth on his travels.

This version was very popular in Germany. SchrÖder prints a Low German adaptation, and a chap book one, frequently reprinted during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. But besides this form there was another, now lost, which can be partially recovered from the allusions to it in the Wartburg Krieg, a German poem of the thirteenth and early fourteenth century, and which is as follows:—An angel brings Brandan a book from heaven: Brandan finds so many incredible things in it that he taxes book and angel with lying, and burns the book. For his unfaith he must wander till he find it. God’s grace grants him this at last; an angel gives him the sign of two fires burning, which are the eyes of an ox, upon whose tongue he shall find the book. He hands it to Uranias, who brings it to Scotland (i.e., of course Ireland) SchrÖder, p. 9.

The closeness of the parallel cannot be denied, and it raises many interesting questions, which I can here only allude to. The Isle of Brandan has always been recognized as a Christian variant of the Celtic TÍr-na n-Og, the Land of the Shades, Avalon. SchrÖder has some instructive remarks on this subject, p. 11. The voyage of Brandan may thus be compared with that of Bran, the son of Febal (supra, p. 232), both being versions of the wide-spread myth of a mortal’s visit to the otherworld. It is not a little remarkable that in the Latin legend, which differs from the German form by the absence of the above-cited prologue, there is an account (missing in the German), of a “conopeus” (“cover” or “canopy,”) cf. Ducange and Diez, sub voce; the old French version translates it by “Pavillon of the colour of silver but harder than marble, and a column therein of clearest crystal.” And on the fourth day they find a window and therein a “calix” of the same nature as the “conopeus” and a “patena” of the colour of the column (SchrÖder, p. 27, and Note 41).

Thus there is a formal connection between the Brandan legend and the Grail romances in the prologue common to two works of each cycle, and there is a likeness of subject-matter between the Brandan legend and the older Celtic traditions which I have assumed to be the basis of the romances. But German literature likewise supplies evidence of a connection between Brandan and Bran. Professor Karl Pearson has referred me to a passage in the Pfaffe Amis, a thirteenth century South German poem, composed by Der Stricker, the hero of which, a prototype of Eulenspiegel, goes through the world gulling and tricking his contemporaries. In a certain town he persuades the good people to entrust to him their money, by telling them that he has in his possession a very precious relic, the head of St. Brandan, which has commanded him to build a cathedral (Lambl’s Edition, Leipzig, 1872, p. 32). The preservation of the head of Bran is a special feature in the Mabinogi. I have instanced parallels from Celtic tradition (Branwen, p. 14), and Professor Rhys has since (Hibb. Lect., p. 94) connected the whole with Celtic mythological beliefs. This chance reference in a German poem is the only trace to my knowledge of an earlier legend in which, it may be, Bran and Brandan, the visitor to and the lord of the otherworld, were one and the same person.

It is highly desirable that every form of or allusion to the Brandan legend should be examined afresh, as, perhaps, able to throw fresh light upon the origin and growth of the Grail legend. In Pseudo-Chrestien Perceval’s mother goes on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Brandan.