Faroes - The Brendan Voyage
Explorer Tim Sevrin and Trøndur Patursson recreate legendary voyage.
Writer Tim Severin built a reproduction of St Brendan's boat and with a crew that included Faroese artist, Trøndur Patursson, recreated Brendan's voyage to America.
It was The Brendan Voyage, a piece of music by Irish Composer Shaun Davey, that first drew me to the Faroes. Davey’s music was inspired by the legendary travels of St Brendan and a group of Irish monks. The story was preserved in the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, a mediaeval parchment, which chronicles his journey from Ireland to America via the Isle of Sheep. Studies of the document have confirmed that that to be the Faroes.
On June 24th 1976 a strange craft, made of ox hides stretched over a wooden frame, was sighted off the coast of the Faroes. Two square sails, painted with Celtic crosses, billowed above The Brendan, a replica of the craft in which the monks had first sailed this way. Explorer and writer, Tim Severin, built her from the descriptions in the Navigatio to prove that the journey was possible.
Severin was keen to include a Faroese in his crew, but was at first doubtful when Trøndur Patursson presented himself. ‘He could have stepped straight from an illustration in Grimm’s fairy tales. His head was encased in a mass of hair extending from his chest to an arc a good three inches from his scalp’. When he discovered that Trøndur was not only an experienced sailor and the Faroes most famous artist but that his family had lived for sixteen generations in a huge and ancient log cabin at Kirkjubøur, sometimes known as Brandansvik or Brendan’s Creek, his doubts disappeared. When the Brendan sailed from Kirkjubøur, the hairy Viking was aboard.
I walked from Tórshavn, the Faroese capital, across to Kirkjubøur guided across the trackless hill by a series of stone cairns. I had come to visit Trøndur and his wife Borgny. Over coffee and pastries in their cottage, above Kirkjubøur, Trøndur told me about his adventures with Tim Severin. He was the expedition’s artist and his distinctive pen and ink illustrations captured the anger of the sea, the fragility of the craft and the effortless arch of the great whales surfacing for air.
He took me to visit his family home, supposedly the oldest log cabin in Europe, part of which is now open as a museum in the summer. The large Roykstove, or smoke room is where the entire family would have eaten, slept, worked and entertained. Not unlike a Viking Longhouse, it had an open fire for heating and cooking but no windows or chimney. Underneath in the basement is a dungeon, once part of the residence of the Bishop, when this was the ecclesiastical centre of the Faroes.
The diocese was abolished at the Reformation but the gaping windows of the small roofless Saint Magnus Cathedral stare like wide dead eyes at the intrusion of the modern farm next door, where the Paturssons produce 100,000 litres of milk every year for the dairy in Tórshavn.
