1. Through the Christian literature of the Middle Ages from the eleventh century onwards runs a rich vein of legend, which Dante students have explored in search of a possible clue to the genesis of the Divine Comedy. The theme, it may be said, is also a visit to places, which, being inaccessible to the ordinary mortal, may readily be identifiable with the regions beyond the grave. These legends, having three main characteristics in common, may be grouped in one cycle. They are tales of wonderful voyages to fantastic islands; the protagonists are either adventurers, or saints, or conquerors, who are invariably more mythical than historical; and the aim of these is generally a religious one—to spread the Gospel, to do penance, to find the isle of earthly paradise or the fountain of life, or to seek the immortal prophets, Enoch and Elijah.⁠[508]

These legends may be roughly subdivided into three groups corresponding to the natures of the protagonist. Tales of mere adventure are the voyages of Harold of Norway and Gorm of Denmark; the Celtic voyages of Maldwin, of the sons of Conall Dearg Ua-Corra, and of Snedhgus and MacRiaghla. Of the adventurous pilgrimages by sea the most celebrated is the voyage of St. Brandan, a veritable monastic odyssey, imitations of which are the stories of the voyages of St. Barintus, St. Mernoc, St. Malo, St. Amarus, and the Armorican monks. Voyages of conquest are the parallels to the voyage of Alexander the Great, such as the legends of Hugh of Bordeaux, Baldwin of Seeburg, Ugger the Dane, Hugh of Auvergne, and Guerin the Mean.

2. By the tenth century, at the very latest—the epoch of flourishing trade in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean—Islam had produced and given widespread popularity to a whole cycle of similar legends; and the hypothesis that their influence was responsible for the genesis of the Christian legends is strengthened by the fact that they show the same three characteristics mentioned above. They also are stories of wondrous adventure in fabulous islands. The protagonists are seldom historical persons and, like the heroes of the Christian legends, are either adventurers or conquerors, religious devotees or pseudo-prophets. Thirdly, the aim of most of these voyages is religious. The adventurers set out to seek Mahomet or spread the gospel of Islam; to visit hell and the paradise of saints and martyrs; or to find the abode either of the prophets Enoch and Elijah or of the fabulous pseudo-prophet Khidr, who is the protagonist of some of the legends.

Like their Christian counterparts, these Moslem legends may be grouped, in accordance with the nature of the protagonist in each, under three headings. The voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, of Hassan of Basra, of Azim, of Ganisa, and of the Prince of Karizme, are purely voyages of adventure. The heroes of the religious voyages are prophets or ascetics, who are either wholly mythical or are historical personages clothed in mythical garb, such as Khidr, Moses, Joseph, Jonah, and Boluqiya. To this group also belong the tales of the birth of Mahomet, the tales of Abd al-Mutallib the Wise, Yarab the Judge, Tamim Dari the Soldier, Abu Talib the Lawyer, Zesbet, Abu al-Fawaris, and Sayf al-Muluk. The third group comprises the expeditions that are partly warlike and partly religious; typical of these is the Koranic legend of Dulcarnain, a mythical figure that in Moslem legend is strangely interwoven with the figure of Alexander the Great as depicted by the pseudo-Callisthenes.

3. This similarity in outline shown by the two legendary cycles is in itself significant of Moslem influence. But there is further evidence. Victor Chauvin, in his monumental work on the bibliography of Moslem fiction, has traced a number of episodes and descriptive features from the Moslem to Christian tales.⁠[509] Thus, the legends of Herzog Ernst, of Heinrich der Loewe, of Reinfried of Brunswick, of Hugh of Bordeaux, and of Guerin the Mean, would all appear to be derived from the Arabic story of the Prince of Karizme. Hence Chauvin’s conclusion that “the direct or indirect influence of Oriental tales of marvellous voyages is to be seen in several works of mediæval fiction.”⁠[510] In addition, there is the testimony of the Dutchman, De Goeje, the eminent Arabic scholar, whose inquiry into the close relationship between the “Voyage of St. Brandan,” the most typical of Irish tales, and the voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, has won at least the partial adhesion of so great an authority on Romance philology as Graf.⁠[511] Thus, the problem may be regarded as practically solved, and there only remains to add a few data corroborative of De Goeje, and to point out the hitherto unsuspected Arabic origin of some other Christian legends.

4. A typical instance of imitation from a Moslem source is provided by the “Voyage of St. Brandan.” De Goeje attributes its origin to the voyages of Sindbad the Sailor and a few other tales of adventurous voyages that are briefly recorded by Al-Idrisi. Even more likely sources, however, would appear to have been the tales of Boluqiya and of Dulcarnain, which, having been handed down by Thaalabi, must have been known before the eleventh century. Other Islamic tales of remote date also come into consideration.

St. Brandan chances upon an uninhabited castle on an island, and in the castle a table laden with the richest food, of which he and his followers eat their fill.⁠[512]

Boluqiya, on arriving at an island, likewise finds beneath a tree a table set with food of different kinds. A bird greets him from the branches of the tree and invites him to partake of the food, which has been prepared by the order of God for all His servants who come on foreign pilgrimage; and Boluqiya eats his fill.⁠[513]

On another island, visited by St. Brandan and his monks, grow trees, from which they cut wood and make a fire to cook their food. But what appeared to them an island was, in fact, an enormous whale, which, upon feeling the heat of the fire upon its back, begins to move and the monks throw themselves into the sea and swim to safety.

This episode, as has been pointed out by De Goeje, and before De Goeje by Reinaud and D’Avezac, is identical with that of the island-whale which Sindbad and his companions come across on the first of their voyages. This fact, however, does not dispose of the difficulty; for the legend of St. Brandan, though none of its extant versions dates back further than the eleventh century, is by some supposed to be derived from earlier Irish sources. Hence it is that Schroeder even goes so far as to suppose that the episode of the whale passed from Ireland to the East, and Graf himself does not deny the possibility of this.⁠[514] Weighty arguments can, however, be adduced against this theory. For one thing, the myth is contained in remote works of Oriental literature,⁠[515] for both the Talmud and the Avesta mention a sea-serpent or tortoise on whose back the same scene is enacted; so that, as any direct imitation of these works by the author of the legend of St. Brandan is out of the question, it is reasonable to suppose that Arabic literature was the medium of communication. Is it possible that the tale of Sindbad the Sailor formed this connecting link? In default of any documentary evidence of the date of the Arabic tale, De Goeje has recourse to an argument which, though interesting, is not conclusive. “In the oldest forms of the legend that I know,” he says, “the island-whale is devoid of all vegetation. The tale of Sindbad and the Navigatio (of St. Brandan) alone mention trees as growing on the fish.” Accordingly, he argues, as it appeared in the East in its simple as well as its more complex form, the tale originated there rather than in Ireland, where it appeared only in the latter form, and that at a comparatively late time. De Goeje’s argument would have been strengthened had he been able to produce an Arabic document giving the myth in its more complex form before the tale of Sindbad appeared. Such a document does exist in the Book of Animals, written by Al Jahiz, of Basra, who lived from 781 to 869 A.D., or more than a century prior to the date attributed to the tale of Sindbad,⁠[516] and certainly long before the composition of the Irish tales that have been regarded as the sources of the “Voyage of St. Brandan.”⁠[517] Al Jahiz, speaking of monsters that are supposed to live in the sea, mentions the sea-serpent or dragon, a certain crustacean of the sea called “sarathan,” and an enormous fish, which undoubtedly is the whale. He is inclined to doubt the existence of the two first-mentioned animals.⁠[518]

“To tell the truth,” he says, “we have never heard of these” (the sea-serpents) “except in tales of magic and in sailors’ yarns. To believe in the existence of the sea dragon is akin to believing in the existence of the phœnix. Never did I hear the dragon spoken of, but those present called the teller of the tale a liar.... As to the sarathan, I have never yet met anybody who could assure me he had seen it with his own eyes. Of course, if we were to believe all that sailors tell ... for they claim that on occasions they have landed on certain islands having woods and valleys and fissures and have lit a great fire; and when the monster felt the fire on its back, it began to glide away with them and all the plants growing on it, so that only such as managed to flee were saved. This tale outdoes the most fabulous and preposterous of stories.... However, as for the fish, I state that it is as true as I am alive that I have with my own eyes seen the fish of enormous size called Albala (the whale) and it was killed with unerring aim.”

Originating in Persia, the myth lived on in the neighbouring countries and, seeing that Al Jahiz gives it as a common theme of the sea legends of his time, must have passed into Islam at least as early as the eighth century. Thus, it is included in the popular tenth-century story of Sindbad the Sailor, and is handed down in various Arabic works to the twelfth century. Algazel refers to it in his Ihia, written at the beginning of that century. Speaking of the immensity of the ocean, he says, “in it live animals of so great a size that when the back of one of them appears upon the water it is taken for an island and sailors land upon it; but should they perchance light a fire, the monster, feeling the heat, moves and the sailors become aware that it is alive.”⁠[519]

The further arguments adduced by Schroeder in support of his theory, that the myth of the whale arose in the north, are feeble. His assertion that the whale is only to be found in the northern seas we have just seen categorically denied by Al Jahiz. Surely the myth would be more likely to arise among a people to whose seas whales would only come from time to time rather than in the northern countries, where their appearance was too common an occurrence even to suggest such a fable.

The next island to which St. Brandan comes is inhabited by a multitude of birds which are gifted with speech and conceal certain angelic spirits beneath their plumage.

Boluqiya, it will be remembered, also meets a marvellous bird, endowed with the gift of speech, which invites him to partake of the food spread upon a table. It explains that it was one of the birds of paradise sent by God to offer Adam, after he was driven out of Eden, food from that very table. Later it is this same bird, or another, also of white plumage, that is charged with carrying Boluqiya on its wings from the island to his home. It is seen, then, that the Moslem legend also mentions birds of white plumage, that are gifted with speech and act as angels or messengers of God. Moreover, in the discussion of the legend of St. Macarius, Moslem precedents were shown to exist for the idea of supposing human souls incarnate in birds gifted with speech from the time of death until the day of judgment. Some hadiths even go further⁠[520]; speaking precisely of white birds, endowed with the gift of speech, they say that they incarnate, not human souls, but angelic spirits, to wit, the angels that are entrusted with the duty of judging the soul after death. Again, several religious legends attest the Moslem belief that flocks of white birds, beyond all doubt angels incarnate, attended the burial of ascetics as if to receive their souls and lead them up to heaven.⁠[521] The strong hold this myth had on the Moslem imagination explains why in all books on the interpretation of dreams birds are said to signify angels.⁠[522]

Proceeding on his voyage, St. Brandan lands on another island, inhabited by holy monks whose only sustenance is the bread that falls from heaven; these monks observe strict silence and are subject neither to illness nor old age.

This episode is simply an amalgamation of two scenes appearing in some versions of the expeditions of Dulcarnain—the scene of the island of the monks and the island of the wise men.⁠[523]

On the former island Dulcarnain finds ascetics so emaciated by the austerity of their holy life that they appear as black as coal; the fish and herbs provided for them by God are their only nourishment, yet they assure Dulcarnain that they feel no desire for the things of this world. On the other island the wise men ask him whether with all his vaunted power he can vouchsafe them eternal life and freedom from sickness. To his answer that he cannot, they reply that God has granted them this, and many other things besides.

Another island in the voyage of St. Brandan is described as bearing enormous vines, from which hang bunches of grapes of monstrous size; the seeds alone are as large as apples and suffice to satisfy the hunger and slake the thirst of the saint and all his companions.

This incident is undoubtedly founded on the hadiths telling of the gardens of paradise, in which grow vines of monstrous size.⁠[524]

“Does the vine grow in heaven?” asked one of the first disciples of Mahomet, and upon the Prophet’s answering that it did, the disciple inquired, “Of what size are the fruit?” “As the distance covered by a raven in a month’s uninterrupted flight,” was the answer. “And what is the size of the seeds?” “Of that of a large jar.” “Then, with a single seed I and all my family could eat their fill?” “And thy whole tribe as well,” concluded Mahomet. Other hadiths even state the exact length of each bunch of grapes to be twelve cubits.

Continuing his pilgrimage, St. Brandan comes to an enormous column of the clearest crystal; rising from the bottom of the sea it appears to touch the sky, and around it is what seems to be a great pavilion formed of a silvery substance with large meshes.

Two very similar descriptions are found in the Islamic fables of Solomon, which depict a submarine dome and an aerial city.⁠[525]

Solomon sees rising from the bottom of the sea a pavilion, tent, tabernacle, or tower, vaulted like a dome, which is made of crystal and is beaten by the waves; from a gate emerges a youth, who proceeds to relate to him his life of solitary devotion beneath the waters. The aerial city is erected by the genii at the order of Solomon, who bids them build him a city or palace of crystal a hundred thousand fathoms in extent and a thousand storeys high, of solid foundations but with a dome airy and lighter than water; the whole to be transparent so that the light of the sun and the moon may penetrate its walls; a white cupola, surmounting the highest storey and crowned by a brilliant banner, with a resplendent light lit up the route of Solomon’s army during the night, when the king, floating through space in his aerial castle as in an airship driven by the wind, sallied forth on an expedition.

Upon reaching the regions of the damned, St. Brandan and his companions find Judas sad, and naked but for a rag over his face, seated upon a rock in the midst of the ocean. Other similar Christian legends show Judas standing in a pool or pit through which flow all the waters of the world; or again, he is represented as being consumed internally with fire in spite of the waters that beat incessantly upon him. The picture is an adaptation from the Moslem legends of the torment of Cain, one of which, dating from the eighth century, reads as follows:

A man of the Yemen, named Abd Allah, with various companions set out on a voyage, in the course of which they came to a sea that was wrapt in darkness. For several days they sailed onwards until suddenly the veil of darkness lifted and they found themselves close to an inhabited coast. “I went ashore,” said Abd Allah, “in search of water, but all the houses I came to were closed; in vain I knocked at the doors, for no one answered. Of a sudden two horsemen appeared, mounted on snow-white steeds, who said to me: ‘Abd Allah! follow yonder path and thou wilt come to a pool of water; drink thy fill and be not afeared at what thou seest there.’ I inquired of them about the empty houses through which the wind whistled, and they told me they were the dwellings of the souls of the dead. Upon arriving at the pool, I found a man leaning head downwards and seeking to reach the water with his hand. When he saw me, he cried out: ‘Abd Allah, I pray thee, give me to drink,’ and I filled the cup to give him water, but lo! my hand was stayed. I said to him, ‘Oh, servant of the Lord! thou hast seen that I would fain have served thee. Tell me, then, who thou art!’ And he answered, ‘I am the son of Adam who first shed blood upon earth.’”

Another tale, also dating from the eighth century, is similar:

A shipwrecked sailor saves himself by clinging to a spar and is flung upon the shore of an island. Proceeding along the shore, he comes to a stream the course of which he follows to a spot where the water seems to flow from the bottom of the earth. There he finds, chained by the feet just out of reach of the water, a man who begs him to slake his thirst, saying he is the son of Adam that slew his brother and since that deed is chastised for every murder that is committed on earth.⁠[526]

The last incident in the voyage of St. Brandan that is worthy of note is his meeting with the hermit Paul, who lives on a rock in the middle of the ocean, fed by a lark for the last hundred and forty years, and will there remain alive until the day of judgment.

Here, blended into one, we have two characters—the historical person of St. Paul the Hermit, who, fed by a raven until his death, lived in the desert of Thebes, and the mythical figure of Khidr, in the conformation of which Islam combined features of Elijah, Elishah, the Wandering Jew, and St. George. Khidr, like Elijah, is immortal, and in many legends is depicted as a sea-hermit, praying in the midst of a desert island, or on a rock beaten by the waves, where he is fed by a bird, which brings him food and water in its beak, or from a table sent down from heaven. There, it is said, he will live until the day of judgment and, having often been seen by shipwrecked sailors, he is regarded in Islam as the patron saint of mariners.⁠[527]

St. Brandan now approaches the Isle of Paradise, which is the goal of his pilgrimage; but, like Abd Allah of the Yemen, and like Dulcarnain in his search for the Fountain of Life, he first has to pass through a region of darkness. The German version of the voyage, moreover, contains two interesting features. The ground of the Isle of Paradise is, like the ground traversed by Dulcarnain, strewn with precious stones; and from a fountain spring four rivers, of milk, of wine, of oil, and of honey, similar to the rivers that water the gardens of paradise in the Koran (XLVII, 16-17).

5. It would thus seem that everything points to the same conclusion, namely, that an Eastern or, to be more precise, an Islamic origin must be given to this legend—the legend that Renan regarded as “the most perfect expression of the Celtic ideal and one of the most admirable creations of the human mind,”⁠[528] and that Graf, though admitting the influence of the story of Sindbad the Sailor, nevertheless believes to be Gaelic in foundation. Other Romance scholars, however—owing to their lack of all documentary evidence, they could never go beyond mere suppositions—came nearer to the truth. Labitte, for instance, was struck by “le tour, l’imagination brillante et presque orientale qu’elle décèle”;⁠[529] and D’Ancona admits that Eastern fables are mixed among its other elements.⁠[530] The very monotony of rhythm in the narration; the precise number of seven voyages, corresponding to the seven seas through which Boluqiya also sailed; the fantastic adventures, which led St. Vincent of Beauvais and the Bollandists to describe these legends as apocrypha deliramenta; and, lastly, the many episodes traced to Islamic sources by De Goeje⁠[531] and in the above pages—all go to warrant the conclusion that, if the voyage of St. Brandan and other similar legends were indeed written by an Irish monk on a basis of Celtic tradition, the plethora of Islamic elements that were grafted on to the native stock was such as to change their original character.

6. The same conclusion may be drawn from an examination of the other tales of voyages that are more warlike expeditions than mere pilgrimages. In these legends traces of the Arabic stories of the fabulous Dulcarnain are frequently to be found.

Thus, in the legend of the Frisian sailors, narrated by Adam of Bremen in the eleventh century, the adventurers, after traversing a dark region of the ocean, arrive at an island the inhabitants of which hide in caves while the sun is on the horizon, that is to say, at midday, the time of the arrival of the strangers.⁠[532]

This detail is characteristic of the country described in the legends of the voyage of Dulcarnain as being that in which the sun rises, “the inhabitants of which do not build houses, but take refuge in caves until the sun goes down, when they sally forth to seek their living.”⁠[533] The tenth century Moslem record is based on hadiths of a much earlier date, and they in their turn were written as gloss on a passage of the Koran (XVIII, 89), which alludes to the fabulous voyage of Dulcarnain to “the country where the sun shines on people to whom We have given no protection from its rays.”

A more striking instance of imitation from the Arabic is seen, however, in the final episode of the Latin and German versions of the voyage of Alexander the Great to the earthly paradise.⁠[534]

The guardian of paradise presents Alexander with a precious stone, the hidden virtues of which, he says, will cure him of his ambition. Alexander returns with the stone to where his army awaits him, and of all his followers a wise Hebrew alone is capable of solving the riddle. The stone, he finds, outweighs whatever quantity of gold is put in the balance, but, when covered with a little dust, it at once loses its weight and becomes as light as a feather. The aged Hebrew concludes his interpretation with the words: “This precious stone is an image of the human eye; when alive, it is insatiable, but, when dead and covered with earth, it aspires to nought.”

Graf, after tracing the story to its most ancient sources both in Greek and Hebrew lore, comes to the conclusion that its model is to be sought in a tale of the Babylonian Talmud, though that tale mentions a real human eye. A more likely model, however, is provided by the Arabian story, recorded in the tenth century and attributed to Ali, the son-in-law of Mahomet⁠[535]:

Alexander, or rather the Koranic Dulcarnain, with his army reaches the region of darkness that lies before the Fountain of Life, and, beyond this region, he beholds a palace rising to an enormous height. Advancing to the gate, he speaks to the youthful guardian, who hands him an object like a stone, saying, “If this be satisfied, thou also wilt be satisfied; if it be hungry, then wilt thou be hungry too.” Alexander returns to his companions with the stone and summons the wise men to discuss the riddle. They test the stone in the balance with first one, then two, and finally a thousand similar stones, and find to their amazement that it outweighs them all. Khidr, a counsellor of Alexander’s, upon seeing that all the sages are unable to solve the riddle, thereupon intervenes and places on one of the scales an ordinary stone and, on the other, the miraculous stone covered with a handful of dust; and, to the amazement of all, the scales now balance. To Alexander, Khidr then explains the riddle as follows: “God has granted thee the utmost power achievable by man, yet thou art not satisfied. For man is never satisfied until dust cover him and the earth fill his belly.” According to another, longer, version, Khidr ends his explanation with the words: “The stone is the human eye, which, whilst alive, even though it should possess the whole world, is insatiable, and which only death can satisfy.”⁠[536]