The obscurantists and the sea-monster: reflections on the <i>Hisperica famina</i>

Abstract

Correspondences in vocabulary, together with divergence in plot, indicate that the authors of the adventure stories in the A and B versions of the Hisperica famina worked from a shared word list rather than from a textual model. They appear to have derived their themes from Irish oral narrative, for which the Hisperica famina may accordingly be our earliest witness.