Imram — Tolkien's Brendan

The poem was composed between late 1945 and the middle of 1946, inside The Notion Club Papers — the unfinished novel in which a set of modern Oxford dons begin recovering, in dreams, the memory of Númenor. ¹ It went through heavy revision: fourteen pages of dense initial drafts and four finished manuscripts. ² Inside the fiction it is not Tolkien’s at all. It belongs to Philip Frankley, who reads it to the Club and admits that the odd closing image — a round world with an old road still running off it — arrived as a flash of invention, not knowing he has blundered into something true. ³

That is the first version, “The Death of Saint Brendan.” It was printed posthumously in Sauron Defeated in 1992, with the novel it belonged to.

The second version is “Imram.” Tolkien pulled the poem out of the abandoned novel, revised it to stand alone, and published it in the London weekly Time and Tide on 3 December 1955, page 1561, with a wood engraving by Robert Gibbings — the same season in which The Lord of the Rings was completing publication. ⁴

Keeping the two apart is not pedantry. The revision removes the frame. Everything that makes the poem legible as Middle-earth — the Club, Frankley, the dreams of Númenor — is gone from the version Tolkien actually chose to publish under his own name in his own lifetime. What is left has to work as a poem about an Irish saint. Movement IV is where that matters most.

And the title changes. Imram is not a description; it is a genre label, the Irish word for the rowing-about tale, borrowed by a man who knew exactly what he was filing his poem under.

Brendan describes a light like silver set ablaze at the edge of the Outer Night, at a place where the ways part: where, in the poem’s phrase, “the round world plunges steeply down” and the old road nonetheless goes on, an unseen bridge running on arches to coasts nobody knows. ⁶

Anyone who has read the Akallabêth knows what that is. After the Downfall of Númenor the world was made round and the Blessed Realm taken out of its circles; what remained was the Straight Road, the old path running on beyond the curve, findable only by the Elves and by those specially permitted. Tolkien has put a sixth-century Irish abbot at the exact junction of his own cosmology — not describing Paradise, but describing the geometry at which mortal geography stops being able to hold it.

The theological weight of the poem is in what happens next, which is nothing. Asked about the last land, Brendan will not answer. If you want to know, he says, then get into a boat and labour in the sea and find things out of mind for yourself — “you will learn no more of me.” That is not failing memory and it is not coyness. It is a claim about the kind of knowledge involved: experiential, and not transferable by report.

Roche’s reading of the poem turns on the insufficiency of earthly paradise, and it holds up. Brendan has seen the Tree and it is not enough; the Star points past it. ⁸ The longing that runs west through the whole legendarium — the Grey Havens, the Elvish sailing, the wound that will not heal on this side of the sea ⁹ — is here given to a mortal, a Catholic saint, and a man who is about to die. He does not get there by sailing. Nobody does. The poem ends with him dead at Clonfert and his bones in Ireland, which is the plainest possible line and is doing an enormous amount of work: the transcendent returned to the material, the voyage ending in a grave in Galway.

In the Navigatio the birds in the tree are fallen angels, neither damned nor saved, who keep the Divine Office. Tolkien’s birds sing something the poem carefully declines to classify: not a man’s voice, not an angel’s, but perhaps a third fair kindred still lingering in the world beyond the foundered land.

Within The Notion Club Papers this is not obscure. The third kindred are the Elves — neither Men nor Ainur, the category the legendarium exists to hold — and the foundered land is Númenor, Atalantë, the drowned island. The poem is threading Tolkien’s mythology into a medieval Irish legend and suggesting that Brendan, sailing west, brushed the edge of a sub-created world. ⁷

The complication is Movement I. The published Imram has no Notion Club around it. A reader of Time and Tide in December 1955 met a stanza about singers who are neither men nor angels, and a foundered land, with no apparatus whatever — and the honest position is that in that text the lines are open. They can be read as the legendarium leaking into the primary world; they can be read as a medieval poem’s own reticence about what lives at the edge of the map. The site does not resolve it. It notes that Tolkien had the opportunity to close the ambiguity when he revised, and did not take it.

This is old ground for him, incidentally. His 1924 poem “The Nameless Land” had already said that neither Bran nor Brendan reached the beauty it describes — Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle. ¹⁰ The Brendan material had been rubbing against the legendarium for twenty years before this poem was written.

In 1937 Tolkien told his publishers that his tales were not Celtic, that he knew Celtic things in Irish and Welsh, and that he felt a certain distaste for them — bright colour, he said, but like a stained-glass window smashed and reassembled without design. ¹¹ Eighteen years later, in “English and Welsh,” he warned that Celtic of any sort is a magic bag into which anything may be put and out of which almost anything may come. ¹²

Both statements are real and both are regularly used to shut down the question. They should not be. Fimi’s article and the Glasgow thesis on his uses of Irish literature converge on the same finding: whatever he said, he read the material and used it. ¹³ His Irish was weak and stayed weak — he had nothing like his Welsh — but he did not need fluency to know the Navigatio, which is in Latin, and which he could read as easily as a newspaper.

So the position this wing takes is neither of the two available enthusiasms. It is not a Celtic Tolkien, and it is not a Tolkien innocent of Celtic learning. It is a philologist in competitive engagement with a body of material he thought was undesigned — who wanted to do what it did, with the design he felt it lacked. The 1955 warning is the sharpest one-line statement of the problem this wing exists to teach, and it is taken here as binding.

And then the title. A man who put the word Imram at the head of his poem in a London weekly was not distancing himself from the Irish tradition; he was filing his work inside it.

This site keeps a definition of the bard that has nothing to do with harps. The Bard’s Dilemma states it: a voice dies with the body that carries it, and survives only when the making finds a second maker — a hand with an instrument, willing to give the spoken thing a durable body. Suibhne composes in the branches; Moling writes it down; the poems outlast the kings who won the battle. The essay follows that office down a name through three vessels: a book of vellum, a Connemara forge, and a ballad.

Imram is a fourth vessel, and it is the cleanest instance the site has, because in it the two halves of the office collapse into one man. In the Suibhne material they are always separate — the king makes and the saint records, and the tale needs both. Tolkien read the Navigatio in the Latin, which is the scribe’s half: the competence to receive a thing accurately. Then he made a poem out of it, which is the poet’s half. Recorder and composer, in the same skull, working on a text eleven hundred years older than himself. ¹⁴

This is why the poem is better evidence for the claim than the novels are. The Lord of the Rings shows a world-builder, and a world-builder answers to nobody. A hundred and twenty surviving manuscripts of the Navigatio are a tradition, and a man who rewrites it is answerable to it — which is precisely the condition the bardic office is defined by. He is not inventing; he is keeping, and making while he keeps. That is the office, whatever he would have called it.

The last turn belongs to the poem itself. Its whole subject is a man who has seen something and cannot hand it over. Brendan will not describe the last land; he tells his questioner to go and labour in the sea, and dies, and his bones stay in Ireland. Everything he saw goes into the ground with him. The only thing that survives the voyage is the telling — and the telling survived because somebody wrote it down, and then, twelve hundred years later, somebody who could read it wrote it down again.

That is the bard’s dilemma, stated by a poem about a saint, by a philologist who answered it in the act of writing the poem.