Students love this book, which can be read on many levels. First, it is a science-fiction story: the protagonists travel to strange new worlds, and do indeed seek out new lives and new civilizations; they boldly go where only one person had gone before (to paraphrase Star Trek). Certainly a demon leaping out of a person’s mouth, spending a year on an island and thinking that only a day has gone by, and finding people who are over 120 years old is not in the realm of reality, not to mention finding a “grail”.
Second, like much of Medieval Latin, the prose is straight-forward and the word order easy to understand. Once you have gotten accustomed to the spelling (e.g., c instead of t, cepit instead of coepit), which is explained in the notes, and think of the English derivatives, the translating is easy, and the text can even be read without conscious translation.
Third, it gives us a different view on the Medieval and early modern world. That cartographers thought there really was a St. Brendan’s island (see illustration and note on p. iv) is surprising to us, with our rational minds. However, we see the world differently than they did, and it is always important to remember the time and context of a work.
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