[22] After traveling by boat for two days and nights, the group encounters the ocean deity Manannán mac Lir riding a chariot over the sea towards them.
Manannán explains that while this may seem like a body of water to Bran and his crew rowing the coracle, it appears as an otherworldly flowery plain to the god.
[23] After parting ways with Manannán mac Lir, Bran's voyagers make a stop at the Isle of Joy, where the inhabitants just laugh and stare, and will not answer to calls.
The leader of the women is reluctant to let them go, and cautions them not to step upon the shores of Ireland, and counsel them to retrieve the man left abandoned on the Island of Joy.
[26] Bran and his company relate the rest of their story to the gathered people, and also hands over a written record of their voyage inscribed in ogam letters, and then sail across the sea, never to be seen again.
For example, both Bran's and Máel Dúin's voyagers reach an island of laughter or laughing people,[28] and in each case a crew member is left abandoned.
Heinrich Zimmer contended that it led to the episode of the third latecomer being abducted by the demons (Navigatio 24), though Walter Haug [de] did not see this as an obvious parallel.
[34] However, there are also specific points of close similarity, because the immrama do "draw to a limited extent on the motifs of the native secular literate" (including the echtrae).
[35] The Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis stands out among other immrama since it mentions the terra repromissionis, which translates into Irish as Tír Tairngire ("Land of Promise"), which is the term for the Otherworld in the secular tales.
[48] Zimmer argued that The Voyage of Máel Dúin derived from the Aeneid, but this hypothesis was dismantled by William Flint Thrall.
[50] There is also a close resemblance between Atlantis being surrounded by concentric ringed walls made of metal (including orichalcum) and brazen ramparts around islands described in the immrama (Máel Dúin; Uí Corra),[50] and some resemblance to the findruine or white bronze "feet" or pillars underpinning the land of Emain, which the mysterious woman sings of in the Voyage of Bran.