The Parsed Corpus of
Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)
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Saint Brendan
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| Text name: | Saint Brendan |
| Alternative names: | Saint Brendan the holy man was here of our land; Life of St. Brendan; Life of St. Brendan in the South English Legendary |
| Content: | Saint Brendan, a monk intrigued by a story about fabulous far-away lands, sails away with his fellow brethren. They experience a long sequence of adventures: (1) an island with a talking dog, (2) a place with huge sheep, (3) Jacsom, the largest fish of the sea, (4) Easter with musical birds, who are fallen angels, (5) four months of torment at sea, (6) an abbey with pious monks who God sustains with wine, bread and eternal candles, (7) a celebration of the "Holy Resurrection" with friends they had previously, (8) battles on the high seas with fantastic beasts, (9) a swarm of fish that carries them at tremendous speeds, (10) a fight with a horrible creature at one end of hell, where one of Brendan's men commits suicide, (11) a wretched gnome sitting on a rock, who turns out to be Judas, (12) a hermit who let himself get shipwrecked forty years ago and who is nourished by a magical well, (13) another Easter with their friends, and finally (14) the Promised Land. Saint Brendan returns his men home safe and sound and dies soon afterwards. |
| Genre/subjects: | saint's life, legend, St. Brendan, religious tale, hagiography, homily, vie |
| Dialect of original composition: | Unknown The authorial dialect of the poem has not been discussed in detail. A northern dialect can be ruled out for the following reasons. First, rhymes presuppose that Old English long a had changed to and rhymed with Old English long o (e.g. also : therto, ll. 17-8), as would have been the case south of the river Humber. Second, the (non-negated) finite verb is always placed after a fronted constituent and before a subject pronoun (e.g. mi deth ich abide her 'my death, I await here,' line 654). With non-pronominal subjects, however, the finite verb can also immediately follow a fronted constituent, creating verb-second patterns (e.g. Gret wonder hadde the gode men 'Great wonder had the god men,' line 462). This pattern is typical of more Southern, but not Northern, Middle English texts (Kroch & Taylor 1997). |
| Date of original composition: | 1250-1290 The poem Saint Brendan appears in the earliest manuscript of the South English Legendary, Laud 108 from before 1300, and must therefore have been written by that time. The earliest texts of the South English Legendary may stem from the middle of the thirteenth century (archetype date of early thirteenth century implied in Horstmann 1887, 1270-1285 proposed by Görlach's 1974). If Saint Brendan forms part of this earliest core, its composition might have occurred as early as c. 1250. Some conservative (though inconclusive) features in the text that may indicate a relatively early date of composition are the preference of then over when-based temporal subordination and many examples of definite object determiners in -n (e.g. toward than est 'toward the east,' line 682). |
| Suggested date: | 1260 |
| PCMEP period: | M2a (1250-1300) |
| Versification: | couplets, aa The text is written in a septenary metre, with seven stressed syllables per line, subdivided into two half lines. The half lines are not shown in Wright’s (1844) edition. An example is shown below (stresses shown in boldface): Nou is the see of occian : grettest and mest also (line 17) This is the typical stress pattern found in the poems of the South English Legendary. There are many deviations from this norm. |
| Index of ME Verse: | 2868 (IMEV), 2868 (NIMEV) |
| Digital Index of ME Verse: | 4567 |
| Wells: | 5.19 (entry for South English Legendary) |
| MEC HyperBibliography: | SLeg.Brendan |
About the edition and manuscript base:
| Edition: | Wright, Thomas. 1844. St. Brandan: A Medieval Legend of the Sea in English Verse and Prose. London: Percy Society. 1-34. |
| Manuscript used for edition: | London, British Library, Harley 2277, ff. 41v-51r |
| Online manuscript description: | British Library: Digitised Manuscripts A Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts in the British Museum, no. 2277 |
| Manuscript dialect: | Southern, South-Western McIntosh et al. (1986: 111) place the scribe of Harley 2277 in Somerset. Serjeantson (1927: 322) believes that he was "probably from somewhere just over the Glo[ucester]s[hire] border, between Chipping Sodbury and the Bristol Avon." |
| Manuscript date: | s. xiii-ex, xiv-in Humfrey Wanley dated the handwriting of manuscript Harley 2277 to 1320 (D'Evelyn and Mill 1959: 4). Nowadays, however, "'[a]bout 1300' is the date generally accepted for Harley 2277" (ibid). For instance, Boyd (1958: 188) dates the manuscript to "c. 1300." Likewise, its MED date is "c1300." |
About the file:
| File name: | M2a.StBrendan |
| ID: | StBrendan,x.y.z: x=page, y=line, z=token |
| Word count: | 8,511 |
| Token count: | 656 |
| Line count: | 733 732 + 1 final "Amen" |
Other:
| General notes: | About the South English Legendary The South English Legendary (SEL) is the name customarily given to a collection of Middle English verse saint's lives. The SEL should not be thought of as a singular coherent text, but rather a composite of miscellaneous texts or groups of texts with their own history. Saint Brendan forms a part of the collection. The SEL likely originated roughly around the middle of the thirteenth century as a project initiated by scribes in an abbey, possibly in the South-West Midlands (Gloucester), with the aim of creating a so-called liber festivalis, a cycle of rhymed saint's lives for the saint's festivals of the year combined with a temporale for the festivals of Christ (Christmas, Easter etc.), ordered according to the church calendar (e.g., Horstmann 1887, Wells 1936, Boyd 1958). At the time, this was a massive undertaking, involving either collecting pre-existing poems or composing new ones, and could not be finished in one foul swoop. "Merely to collect the materials, the Vitæ, which had to be brought together from different places, as no library of the present type then existed, transcended the power of one man. The Collection grew slowly, and expanded by degrees" (Horstmann 1887: viii). It is possible that there exists a core of the SEL, the nucleus of the oldest poems which were first brought together and around which the collection grew. It might make sense to assume an "original" date for this core of the SEL of the middle to third quarter of the thirteenth century. "[T]he original [...] has been dated with varying degrees of assurance between 1260 and 1288" (Samson 1986: 185, citing Brown 1927: xi, Görlach 1974: 37, Heffernan 1979: 345). One must keep in mind, however, that the notion of an original composition for the SEL becomes murky on account of its complex ontogeny. For example, Brown (1927: xi-xii) finds a reference in the text Saint Edmund of Abingdon to deceased King Henry III, who died in 1272, suggesting the composition occurred after that date. This argument only works for the specific text, not for the SEL as a whole. "Clearly, the cited line from St. Edmund of Abingdon was written after 1272, as probably was all of the vita. [...] But, other than St. Edmund, we cannot be certain that any of the individual texts [the SEL] contains [...] were composed after that date" (Liszka 2011: 43). After the initiation of the project to create the SEL, it continued to evolve through accumulation of suitable, available material, reorganization and possibly omission of texts, as well as revisions according to local customs. The many modifications of the SEL could even lead to the point of fundamentally different redactions (e.g., Manuscript Egerton 1993 changes the metre from septenaries to Alexandrines). This process results in a complex present-day situation with some 45 surviving manuscripts of the SEL with overlapping texts and partially variable organization. We "discover again and again material in the same style appearing in one and not in another [manuscript], according to no evident principle of selection" (Boyd 1958: 191). The most important manuscripts of the SEL are the following. The list also indicates if the manuscript includes Saint Brendan: (1) Laud 108 (before 1300). Earliest witness in disordered condition. – Includes Saint Brendan (2) Harley 2277 (c. 1300). Second earliest witness, independent of and larger than Laud 108, with saint's lives now ordered in calendar form. Used for the parsed file. – Includes Saint Brendan (3) Corpus Christi 145, Egerton 2891 (both c. 1310-20). Third earliest witnesses, most likely from the same scriptorium. There are two additional fragments, Leicester City Museum 18 D 59 and Nottingham University Mi LM7/1, most likely from the same time and place – Includes Saint Brendan (4) Ashmole 43 (before 1350). Fourth earliest witness. – Includes Saint Brendan The text Saint Brendan is also included in the Parsed LAEME corpus in file "corp145selt.psd,"” from token CORP145SELT.351 to CORP145SELT.1061. Researchers who use both corpora should delete those tokens from the Parsed LAEME or ignore the PCMEP version. The PCMEP file is based on Ms. Harley 2277, "the earliest orderly text of the S.E.L." (D'Evelyn, and Mill 1959: 3) whereas the Parsed LAEME file is based on Ms. Corpus Christi 145, which is "more fairly copied" (ibid: 11). Each manuscript makes its "own mistakes and transmits in turn doubtful readings. Neither manuscript can claim to be a good copy of the original" (ibid.). |
| Remarks on parses: | The parses are largely unproblematic. The edition does not indicate half lines or line numbers. Half lines are not provided in the electronic file. Line counts are provided in the IDs. |
References
Boyd, Beverly. 1958. 'New Light on the South English Legendary.' Texas Studies in English 37. 187-194. (available online)
Brown, Beatrice D. 1927. The Southern Passion. EETS o.s. 10. London: Oxford University Press.
D'Evelyn, Charlotte & Mill, Anna J. 1959. The South English Legendary: Edited from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge 145 and British Museum MS. Harley 2277, with Variants from Bodley MS. Ashmole 43 and British Museum MS. Cotton Julius D.IX. Volume 3. Introduction and Glossary. EETS o.s. 244. London: Oxford University Press.
Görlach, Manfred. 1974. The Textual Tradition of the South English Legendary. Leeds Texts and Monographs, n. s. 6. Leeds: University of Leeds.
Heffernan, Thomas, J. 1979. 'Additional Evidence for a more Precise Date of the South English Legendary.' Traditio 35. 345-351. (available online)
Horstmann, Carl. 1887. The Early South English Legendary or Lives of Saints. Volume 1. EETS o.s. 87 London: Trübner & Co. (available online)
Kroch, Anthony & Taylor, Ann. 1997. 'Verb Movement in Old and Middle English: Dialect Variation and Language Contact.' In: Kemenade, Ans van & Vincent, Nigel (eds.) Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 45-68.
Liszka, Thomas R. 2011. 'Talk in the Camps: On the Dating of the South English Legendary, Havelok the Dane, and King Horn in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108.' In: Bell, Kimberly & Nelson Couch, Julie (eds.) The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108: The Shaping of English Vernacular Narrative. Leiden: Brill. 31-50.
Samson, Annie. 1986. 'The South English Legendary: Constructing a Context. ' In: Coss, Peter R. & Lloyd, Simon D. (eds.) Thirteenth Century England I: Proceedings of the Newcastle Upon Tyne Conference 1985. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. 185-195.
Serjeantson, Mary S. 1927. 'The Dialects of the West Midlands in Middle English. III. Tentative Assignment of Texts to the West Midland Dialect Area.' The Review of English Studies 3.11. 319-331.
Wells, Minnie E. 1936. 'The South English Legendary and its Relation to the Legenda Aurea.' PMLA 51. 337-360.
Wright, Thomas. 1844. St. Brandan: A Medieval Legend of the Sea in English Verse and Prose. London: Percy Society. (available online)