Brasil (mythical island)

The etymology of the names Brasil and Hy-Brasil is unknown, but in Irish tradition it is thought to come from the Irish Uí Breasail (meaning "descendants (i.e., clan) of Bresail"), one of the ancient clans of northeastern Ireland. cf. Old Irish: Í: island; bres: beauty, worth, great, mighty.[1]

Despite the similarity, the name of the country Brazil (Portuguese: Brasil) has no connection to the mythical islands (although J. R. R. Tolkien's essay "On Fairy Stories" linked them[4]). The South American country was at first named Ilha de Vera Cruz (Island of the True Cross) and later Terra de Santa Cruz (Land of the Holy Cross) by the Portuguese navigators who arrived there. After some decades, it started to be called "Brazil" due to the exploitation of native brazilwood, at that time the only export of the land. In Portuguese, brazilwood is called pau-brasil, with the word brasil commonly given the etymology "red like an ember", formed from Latin brasa ("ember") and the suffix -il (from -iculum or -ilium).[5][6][7]

Nautical charts identified an island called "Bracile" west of Ireland in the Atlantic Ocean as far back as 1325, in a portolan chart by Angelino Dulcert. It also appeared on the Catalan Atlas, in 1375.[8]

Later it appeared as Insula de Brasil in the Venetian map of Andrea Bianco (1436), attached to one of the larger islands of a group of islands in the Atlantic. This was identified for a time with the modern island of Terceira in the Azores, where a volcanic mount at the bay of its main town, Angra do Heroismo, is still named Monte Brasil.

A Catalan chart of about 1480 labels two islands "Illa de brasil", one to the south west of Ireland (where the mythical place was supposed to be) and one south of "Illa verde" or Greenland.

On maps the island was shown as being circular, often with a central strait or river running east–west across its diameter. Despite the failure of attempts to find it, this appeared regularly on maps lying south west of Galway Bay until 1865, by which time it was called Brasil Rock.

Expeditions left Bristol in 1480 and 1481 to search for the island; and a letter written by Pedro de Ayala, shortly after the return of John Cabot (from his expedition in 1497), reports that land found by Cabot had been "discovered in the past by the men from Bristol who found Brasil".[9]

In 1674, a Captain John Nisbet claimed to have seen the island when on a journey from France to Ireland, stating that the island was inhabited by large black rabbits and a magician who lived alone in a stone castle, yet the character and the story were a literary invention by Irish author Richard Head.[10] Roderick O'Flaherty in A Chorographical Description of West or H-Iar Connaught (1684) tells us "There is now living, Morogh O'Ley (Murrough Ó Laoí), who imagines he was personally on O'Brasil for two days, and saw out of it the Aran Islands, Golamhead [by Lettermullen], Irrosbeghill, and other places of the west continent he was acquainted with."

Hy-Brasil has also been identified with Porcupine Bank, a shoal in the Atlantic Ocean about 200 kilometres (120 mi) west of Ireland[11] and discovered in 1862. As early as 1870 a paper was read to the Geological Society of Ireland suggesting this identification.[12] The suggestion has since appeared more than once, e.g., in an 1883 edition of Notes and Queries.[13]

Irish poet Gerald Griffin wrote about Hy-Brasail in the early nineteenth century.[14]

Mary Burke's short story uses the myth as an allegory of the breach caused by the Northern Irish Troubles. Mary Burke, “Hy-Brasil” in The Faber Best New Irish Short Stories, 2004-5 Ed. David Marcus. London: Faber & Faber, 2005, 101–05.[15]

In The Hollow Hills, part of Mary Stewart's Merlin Trilogy, several characters believe (incorrectly) that the wizard Merlin has hidden the young Prince Arthur on Hy-Brasil.[16]

In The Magician's Daughter by H.G. Parry the protagonist and title character is raised on Hy-Brasil. The island plays a main part in the story.[17]

Canadian singer-songwriter Allison Russell has a song named after the island, and casts Hy-Brasil as the spiritual home to which Russell's soul would travel to escape the trauma of the mental abuse she was suffering. It draws on Russell's Scottish heritage and acts as a tribute to her grandmother, Dr. Isobel Roger-Robertson, whom Russell describes as the “brightest light of my childhood”. Her grandmother would often tell her stories of the island as a child.

One of the canons in the SCP Foundation, War On All Fronts, centers around the destruction of Hy-Brasil by an enormous monster and the subsequent diaspora of its fairy population.

• Avalon
• Etymology of the country Brazil's name:
  • Brazil § Etymology
  • Name of Brazil
• Irish mythology in popular culture
• Inisheer
• Tech Duinn, a mythological island to the west of Ireland where souls go after death.
• Great Ireland, a similarly west-of-Ireland place, Irish myths of which are believed to have influenced the Vikings.

• Freitag, Barbara (2013). Hy Brasil: the metamorphosis of an island: from cartographic error to Celtic Elysium. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ISBN 9789042036413.
• Lynch, Sean (2010). "Preliminary Sketches for the Reappearance of HyBrazil". Utopian Studies. 21 (1): 5–15. doi:10.1353/utp.0.0003. S2CID 145104066.
• Hy-Brasail by Gerald Griffin