Three Celtic Voyages: Brendan, Lewis, and Buechner

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The immram, or voyage tale, is an ancient Celtic story of spiritual adventure. Well established as a genre in pre-Christian times, its seafaring hero sails into the unknown west, drawn by the universal human longing for a perfect land of eternal youth, beauty, and happiness, the Island of the Blessed. His journey is hard and the outcome uncertain, but he encounters beautiful islands, wondrous animals, and supernatural personages to help him on his way. The common impulse behind these tales is the deeply human desire to attain some intangible ideal of perfection, the obverse of the all-too-familiar miseries of mortal life.1 When the Gospel and a culture of literacy came to Ireland in the …