Journal Article

THE GAELICIZATION OF BRASIL ISLAND: FROM CARTOGRAPHIC ERROR TO CELTIC ELYSIUM

Freitag, Barbara

2015

Overview

Brasil Island, better known as Hy Brasil, is a phantom island. In the mid-fourteenth century Mediterranean mapmakers marked it on nautical charts to the west of Ireland, and its continued presence on maps over the next five hundred and fifty years inspired many an enterprising seafarer from England to search for it. Writers, too, fell for its lure. In seventeenth-century English literature it is envisioned as a place of commercial and colonial interest. A century later, in the vision of Ulster writers the island becomes bound up with questions of national identity and millenarian prophecy. With the development of cultural nationalism in Ireland Brasil Island acquires a new identity: having fabricated an Irish pedigree (including a Gaelic name and an ancient pagan as well as a medieval Christian track record) artists and poets, in both the North and the South, fashion it into a wondrous fairyland of Celtic lore.

• Publisher: Brill Academic Publishers, Inc
• Subject: 14th century / British & Irish literature / Celtic languages / Culture / Folklore / Islands / Mythology / National identity / Prophecies