In the mid-6th century, legend has it, St Brendan set off from Ireland with a currach-load of monks on a mission to find the Isle of the Blessed. The Irish like to think that his Atlantic odyssey took him to Newfoundland before the Vikings; what seems more probable, if you believe the medieval account, is that it brought him close to the shores of Iceland where he passed a mountainous island with ‘a great smoke issuing from its summit’ and ‘flames shooting up into the sky’.
If there were any doubts that what is meant here is a volcano, they would be dispelled by the drawing in the margin of the version of the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis currently on show at the Bodleian Libraries. This 14th-century manuscript is not the oldest object in the Bodleian’s new exhibition Volcanoes. That honour belongs to a carbonised scrap of papyrus from a private library in Herculaneum buried during the great AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius described by the 17-year-old Pliny the Younger, who survived it.
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