Saint Brendan is one of the early Irish monastic saints. He is chiefly renowned for his legendary quest to the "Isle of the Blessed, " also called Saint Brendan's Island.
Background
There is very little secure information concerning Brendan's life, although at least the approximate dates of his birth and death, and accounts of some events in his life, are found in the Irish annals and genealogies. The first mention of Brendan occurs in Adamnan's Vita Sancti Columbae, written between 679 and 704. The first notice of him as a seafarer appears in the ninth-century Martyrology of Tallaght.
In 484 AD Brendan was born in Tralee, in County Kerry, in the province of Munster, in the south-west of Ireland. He was born among the Altraige, a tribe originally centred around Tralee Bay, to parents called Finnlug and Cara. Tradition has it that he was born in the Kilfenora/Fenit area on the North side of the bay. He was baptised at Tubrid, near Ardfert by Saint Erc
Career
At the age of twenty-six, Brendan was ordained a priest by Saint Erc. He founded his chief monastery at Clonfert in county Galway, c. 560. He founded other monasteries on the Shannon River and in Loch Corrib. He visited the Scottish isles, possibly the mainlands of Scotland and Wales, and died in 577 or 583, on May 16--now celebrated as his feast day. Brendan's fame was carried by the sailors and pilgrims of western Ireland to the other Celtic countries. As early as about 800, his renown as a navigator was thus established and he became the hero of tales, inspired by pre-existing stories, with which he had nothing to do in actuality. Sometime before 950, a master writer fused all this existing matter into the Navigation of St. Brendan, a Latin composition, artistically blending sailors' yarns and the mystic quest of the Land of Promise with hermitages or monastic communities reflecting the unknown writer's religious and liturgical ideals. In all, some 26 different "adventures" are narrated. Either separately or grafted into a life of the abbot of Clonfert, the Navigation survives in about 100 manuscripts in Latin, besides verse and prose translations in most of the vernacular languages of Europe.
