Máel Dúin
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Máel Dúin is the protagonist of Immram Maele Dúin or the Voyage of Máel Dúin, a Christian tale written in Old Irish around the end of the first millennium. He is the son of Ailill Edge-of-Battle, whose murder provides the initial impetus for the tale.
In the story, the hero sets out on an immram, or voyage, to avenge his father's death at the hands of marauders from leicis (Old Irish fir leicis, "men from over the sea"). Máel Dúin seeks the advice of a druid who tells him how to get there and in what manner. Máel Dúin follows the druid's advice up to a point, except that he allows his foster brothers to join him, thus exceeding the number of people the druid stipulated should be allowed accompany him on his immram. Because of this Máel Dúin is blown off course and into a great voyage where he has a number of peculiar experiences both from within his boat, where generally he sees fantastic things, and on a series of islands he and his crewmen elect to visit.
During his immram, Máel Dúin has a Christian conversion experience. He also loses his three foster brothers at different points along the way, allowing him to finally reach the marauders who killed his father and whom he initially set out to kill in revenge. However, as he has incorporated a new, Christian element into his personality he does not kill them but instead forgives them before returning home.
The text exists in an 11th century redaction, by a certain Aed the Fair, described as the "chief sage of Ireland," but it may be gathered from internal evidence that the tale itself dates back to the 8th century. It belongs to the group of Irish romance, the Navigations (Imrama), the common type of which was possibly imitated from the classical tales of the wanderings of Jason, Ulysses, and Aeneas.
Imram Curaig Mailduin is preserved, in each case imperfectly, in the Lebor na hUidre, a manuscript in the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin; and in the Yellow Book of Lecan, MS. H. 216 in the Trinity College Library, Dublin; fragments are in Harleian MS. 5280 and Egerton MS. 1782 in the British Museum. There are translations by Patrick Joyce, Old Celtic Romances (1879), by Whitley Stokes (a more critical version, printed together with the text) in Revue celtique, vols. ix and x (1888-1889). See H. Zimmer, "Brendan's Meer-fahrt" in Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum, vol. xxxiii (1889). Tennyson's Voyage of Maeldune, suggested by the Irish romance, borrows little more than its framework.
The Immran Máel Dúin may be compared with a passage in the Rāma-ayana.
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This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
