Voyages and Otherworld Adventures
The Voyage of Bran
Immram Brain
Music puts Bran to sleep, and he wakes beside a silver branch in blossom. He is gone a year, he thinks. At home he is already an old story.
I Music Behind Him
One day Bran son of Febal was walking on his own near his stronghold, when he heard music behind him.
He looked back, and the music was still behind him. He walked on. However often he turned to look, the music was always behind him, until at last, for the sweetness of it, he fell asleep.
When he woke, there was a branch of silver close beside him, in white blossom. The blossom was so white and the silver so bright that you could hardly have told the one from the other. 1
Bran took the branch in his hand and carried it home to his royal house.
The hosts gathered there, and the house was full of kings, and the ramparts were closed. Then they saw a woman standing on the floor of the house. Her clothes were strange to every one of them. None of them knew where she had come from, or how she had come in.
II The Woman from the Unknown Lands
She sang to Bran there on the floor of the house, while the whole company listened and every one of them could see her. Fifty quatrains she sang, the old book says. 2
This is a branch of the apple tree of Emain, she sang, like the ones you know: twigs of white silver, and blossom on them bright as crystal.
Then she sang of Emain itself. An island far off, with the sea-horses glittering all round it, standing on four feet of white bronze above the swell. A plain where the hosts hold their games, and a boat races a chariot. An old tree in blossom, where the birds call out the hours all together, in harmony. No wailing there, and no treachery; no grief, no sickness, no death.
She sang of golden chariots that rise with the tide towards the sun. Of horses yellow as gold, and horses of crimson, and horses with wool on their backs as blue as the sky. Of a wave that shakes crystal from its mane. Of a stone the hosts row to over the clear sea, where a hundred strains of music rise, and none of them sad. Of thousands upon thousands of women in bright colours, with the clear sea all round them.
A fair man will come at sunrise, she sang, and light up the level lands. He will ride over the plain the sea washes, and stir the ocean until it is blood.
And out in the ocean to the west of us, she sang, there are thrice fifty islands, and every one of them is twice the size of Ireland, or three times.
III The Branch Leaps
And she sang of a birth to come after ages, and not in any high place: the son of a woman whose mate would not be known. He would take the rule of the many thousands, a rule without beginning and without end. It was he who made the heavens, and the earth and the sea were his. He would wash the hosts clean under pure water, she sang, and he would heal your sicknesses.
My words are not for all of you, she sang. Let Bran hear, out of all the crowd of the world, the wisdom that has been told him. Do not lie down on a bed of sloth. Do not let the drink get the better of you. Set out over the clear sea, and you may yet reach the Land of Women.
Then she went from them, and none of them knew where she went. She took her branch with her. It leapt out of Bran’s hand into hers, and there was no strength in his hand to hold it.
The next morning, Bran went to sea.
IV The Plain of Flowers
Three companies of nine went with him in his currach, and over each company he set one of his foster-brothers.
When they had been two days and two nights on the sea, they saw a man coming towards them over the water in a chariot. He sang to Bran, and told him who he was: Manannán mac Lir.
What is clear sea to you, Bran, he sang, is a plain of flowers to me. You count the waves that break across it; I see red-headed flowers without a flaw. You see the sea-horses glittering as far as you can look; in my country the rivers pour out honey. The white sea you row on is yellow and blue to me. It is land, and it is not rough. And the speckled salmon you see leaping from the white sea are calves, and coloured lambs, living in friendship, and not one of them killing another. 3
There is only one chariot to be seen on Mag Mell of the many flowers, he sang, but there are many horses on it, though you cannot see them. And your little boat is swimming over the tops of a wood: a wood in blossom and in fruit, with the true scent of the vine on it, a wood without decay or flaw, with leaves the colour of gold.
V What Manannán Foretold
His people, Manannán sang, were there from the beginning of creation. Age never came to them, and sin never came to them. It came into this world on an evil day, when the Serpent went to the first father in his city and spoiled the times, and brought in a decay that was not there at the start. But a noble salvation would come from the King who made them all, a white law over the seas. Besides being God, he would be man. 4
Then Manannán told Bran where he himself was going. After long ages he must go to Ireland, to a woman’s house in Mag Line. He would lie with Caíntigern there, and she would bear him a son, and Fiachna would call the boy his own. The boy’s name would be Mongán. 5
He will be the delight of every sí, Manannán sang, and the darling of every good land. He will make secrets known, and no one will fear him. He will take the shape of every beast: a dragon before the hosts at the onset, a wolf of every great forest, a stag with antlers of silver, a speckled salmon in a full pool, a seal, a white swan. Fifty years he will have in this world. A dragon-stone from the sea will kill him, in the fight at Senlabor, and the white host will carry him off under a wheel of clouds to the gathering where there is no sorrow.
Row on steadily now, Bran, he sang. It is not far to the Land of Women. You will come to Emain, bright with every kind of welcome, before the sun goes down.
VI The Island of Joy
Bran left him, and rowed on, and saw an island.
He rowed round it. A great crowd stood on it, gaping and laughing. Every one of them was staring at Bran and his people, but none of them would stop to speak. They only laughed at them, gust after gust.
Bran sent one of his men ashore. The man went in among them, and he was one of them, gaping at his own comrades like all the rest.
Bran rowed round and round the island. Whenever his man came past, his comrades called out to him. He would not speak to them. He only looked at them, and gaped.
The name of that island is the Island of Joy. They left him there.
VII The Land of Women
It was not long after that they came to the Land of Women, and they saw the chief of the women at the harbour.
Come ashore, Bran son of Febal, she called. Your coming is welcome.
Bran did not dare. So she threw a ball of thread at him, straight over his face, and Bran put up his hand to it, and it stuck fast to his palm. 6 The end of the thread was in her hand, and she drew the currach in to the harbour.
They went into a great house. There was a bed there for every couple, three times nine beds. The food that was set on every dish never grew less, and there was no taste that any of them lacked.
It seemed to them that they were there a year.
It was many years.
VIII Srúb Brain
Then homesickness took hold of one of them, Nechtan son of Collbran, and his kinsmen kept on at Bran to go back to Ireland with him.
You will be sorry if you go, the woman told them. They went all the same. She told them that not one of them was to touch the land, and that on the way they were to call at the Island of Joy and take back the man they had left there. Whether they found him, the tale does not say.
They sailed on until they came to a gathering at Srúb Brain. The people there called out to ask who it was that had come over the sea.
I am Bran son of Febal, said Bran.
We know no one of that name, one of them answered. But the Voyage of Bran is in our old stories. 7
Then Nechtan leapt out of the currach. The moment he touched the earth of Ireland, he was a heap of ashes, as if he had lain in the earth for hundreds of years. Bran sang a quatrain over him: great was the folly of Collbran’s son, to lift his hand against age. 8
Then Bran told the people of the gathering all his wanderings, from the beginning until that day. He wrote the quatrains in ogham, and he bade them farewell.
Where he went after that, nobody knows.
What the tale keeps
Two men look at the same water. One counts the waves. The other drives his chariot across a plain of flowers, where the salmon are lambs and a boat is swimming over the tops of a wood. The tale lets both be true. The other country was never far away. It was under the keel.
The tale knows what the crossing costs, too. A year that is many years. A longing for home that home can no longer answer. Nechtan steps ashore into all his missing centuries at once, and Bran does not follow him.
He tells his story instead, writes its verses in ogham, and turns back to the sea. The people on the strand had the Voyage of Bran in their old stories already. Now it is in ours.
Notes
- The tale never says where the music came from. Kuno Meyer thought it was the branch: “That it was the branch that produced the music, when shaken, appears from a similar incident in Echtra Cormaic.” (Kuno Meyer, The Voyage of Bran, 1895) ↩
- The prose says she sang fifty quatrains, and later that Manannán sang thirty. The manuscripts keep twenty-eight of each. ↩
- “Speckled salmon leap from the womb / Of the white sea, on which thou lookest: / They are calves, they are coloured lambs / With friendliness, without mutual slaughter.” (Kuno Meyer, The Voyage of Bran, 1895, §38) ↩
- Both songs carry Christian verses, and they are part of the text as it survives. The woman foretells the son of a woman “whose mate will not be known” (§26). Manannán sings of the Serpent, the fall of the first father and the Incarnation: “Besides being God, He will be man” (§48; Kuno Meyer, The Voyage of Bran, 1895). The tale was written down by Christian scholars, perhaps around 700, and in their telling even Manannán foretells Christ. ↩
- Mag Line is Moylinny in Co. Antrim, between Lough Neagh and Carrickfergus. Mongán son of Fiachna was a real man: the Annals of Clonmacnoise, under the year 624, remember him as “a very well-spoken man, and much given to the wooing of women”, killed by a Welshman with a stone. (Kuno Meyer, The Voyage of Bran, 1895, which prints the entry) ↩
- The oldest copy of the tale, in Lebor na hUidre (written about 1100), is a fragment. It begins here, with the ball of thread sticking to Bran’s palm, and runs to the end. ↩
- “We do not know such a one, though the Voyage of Bran is in our ancient stories.” (Kuno Meyer, The Voyage of Bran, 1895, §64) ↩
- The whole quatrain: “For Collbran’s son great was the folly / To lift his hand against age, / Without any one casting a wave of pure water / Over Nechtan, Collbran’s son.” (Kuno Meyer, The Voyage of Bran, 1895, §65) ↩
Where the tale comes from
Medieval manuscript. An Old Irish voyage tale in prose and verse, probably first written down around 700. It survives in several manuscripts; the oldest copy, in Lebor na hUidre (about 1100), keeps only the ending.
- Kuno Meyer edited and translated the tale in 1895 from seven manuscripts. The oldest, Lebor na hUidre, was written about 1100. He believed the tale was first written down in the seventh century and copied again in the tenth, when the prose was partly modernised but the verse, held in place by metre and assonance, was left almost intact. Later scholars date it to the late seventh or early eighth century.
- Meyer’s heading calls it both a voyage and an outing: “The Voyage of Bran son of Febal, and his Expedition here below”. He explains imram as “rowing about”, a voyage made by choice, and echtra as an outing into the Otherworld. Some scholars argue that it belongs with the echtrai, the Otherworld adventures, rather than with the true voyage tales.
- Meyer printed the Voyage with the other old tales of Mongán. In “The Conception of Mongán”, Manannán comes to Fiachna’s wife at Rathmore of Moylinny while Fiachna is away fighting in Scotland. In another, Mongán turns out to be Fionn mac Cumhaill born again: “Mongán, however, was Find, though he would not let it be told.”
- The Irish text is edited by Séamus Mac Mathúna, Immram Brain: Bran’s Journey to the Land of the Women (1985). Irish Sagas Online, at University College Cork, prints it beside Meyer’s translation.
Sources
- The Voyage of Bran, Son of Febal · Kuno Meyer (1895)
- Irish Sagas Online: Immram Brain · University College Cork
- Placenames Database of Ireland · logainm.ie