Columba E-Book

Tim Clarkson

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 483

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

St Columba is one of the most important figures in the early history of the British Isles. A native of Donegal and a nobleman of royal ancestry, his outstanding religious career spanned both sides of the Irish Sea. On the Scottish island of Iona he founded his principal monastery where he served as abbot until his death in AD 597. Iona eventually became the centre of a powerful federation of monasteries that preserved a memory of Columba and nurtured the saintly cult that grew around him. Drawing on contemporary sources – particularly the writings of Adomnán, abbot of Iona from 679 to 704 – and the latest modern research, this book traces Columba's achievements and legacy. It examines his roles as abbot, scholar and missionary as well as his involvement in the affairs of kings in both Ireland and northern Britain.

Leseprobe

Tim Clarkson is an independent researcher and historian who previously worked in academic librarianship. He gained an MPhil in archaeology and a PhD in medieval history, both from the University of Manchester. His other books include The Picts: a History and Scotland’s Merlin: a Medieval Legend and its Dark Age Origins.

Columba

Pilgrim, Priest and Patron Saint

Tim Clarkson

This edition published in 2024 by

John Donald, an imprint of

Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

First published in 2012

www.birlinn.co.uk

ISBN: 978 0 85790 205 4

Copyright © Tim Clarkson 2012, 2024

The right of Tim Clarkson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is availableon request from the British Library

Typeset and designed by Mark Blackadder

Printed and bound by Ashford Press, Gosport

Contents

List of Plates

List of Maps

Genealogical Tables

Introduction: Finding Columba

1  The Sources

2  From Ireland to Iona

3  King Áedán

4  Abbot

5  Iona and her Neighbours

6  The Picts

7  Saint

8  Paruchia and Familia

9  Legacy

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Plates

1  Leac na Cumhaidh, Gartan, Donegal: the cup-marked stone where Eithne is said to have given birth to St Columba, c.521.

2  The Grianán of Ailech, a cashel or ringfort of c.600, was a royal stronghold of the Northern Uí Néill until its destruction in the early twelfth century.

3  Early Christian grave slab at Movilla Abbey, Co. Down, the site of an important monastery founded by St Finnian, c.540.

4  The towering mass of Ben Bulben, Co. Sligo, overlooking the battlefield of Cúl Drebene where Columba’s Cenél Conaill kinsmen defeated the Southern Uí Néill in 561.

5  The Hill of Tara in the valley of the River Boyne, Co. Meath, symbolic seat of the high kings of Ireland in early medieval times.

6  Druim Cett, the ‘Ridge of Cett’: the Mullagh Hill near Limavady, reputedly the site of the great royal convention attended by King Áedán and St Columba.

7  Aerial view of Iona Abbey from the north-east, with the remains of the vallum of the earlier monastery.

8  St Martin’s Cross, Iona, a finely carved monument of c.800 adorned with religious imagery.

9  King Áedán’s caput regionis? The Rock of Dunaverty at the southern tip of Kintyre, an early stronghold of the Scots and the site of a later castle.

10  The island of Hinba? Looking northwards over Oronsay and Colonsay with Mull in the distance.

11  St Augustine’s Church, Derry, near the old city walls, is traditionally believed to stand on the site of a sixth-century monastery founded by St Columba.

12  Craig Phadrig: aerial view of the Iron Age hillfort, a possible candidate for the fortress of King Bridei visited by St Columba on one of his journeys in Pictland.

13  Clonmacnoise: the ruins of the cathedral built in the tenth century on the site of a monastery founded by St Ciarán in the 540s.

14  The Book of Kells, a lavishly ornamented Gospel book of c.800, in the library of Trinity College, Dublin.

15  The great cathedral at Dunkeld, which reputedly possessed relics of St Columba throughout the medieval period.

16  The Monymusk Reliquary, a house-shaped shrine of the eighth century, believed by some to be the Breccbennach of St Columba, a battle-talisman borne by the victorious Scottish army at Bannockburn in 1314.

List of Maps

1  Early medieval Ireland: kingdoms and kindreds

2  Early medieval northern Britain: territories and peoples

3  Iona

4  Northern Britain: major ecclesiastical sites, sixth to tenth centuries

5  Ireland: major ecclesiastical sites, sixth to tenth centuries

Genealogical Tables

CENÉL CONAIL

CENÉL nGABRÁIN

SEVENTH-CENTURY KINGS OF NORTHUMBRIA

Kings of Tara, c.540–1000

Tuathal Maelgarb, d.544 (Southern Uí Néill)

Diarmait mac Cerbaill, d.565 (Southern Uí Néill)

Forgus mac Muirchertaig, d.566? (Northern Uí Néill)

Domnall mac Muirchertaig, d.566? (Northern Uí Néill)

Báetán mac Muirchertaig, d.572 (Northern Uí Néill) or Báetán mac Cairill, d.579 (Dál Fiatach)

Eochaid mac Domnaill, d.572 (Northern Uí Néill)

Ainmere mac Sétnai, d.569 (Northern Uí Néill)

Áed mac Ainmerech, d.598 (Northern Uí Néill)

Fiachna Lurgan, d.626 (Dál nAraidi)

Colmán Rímid, d.604 (Northern Uí Néill)

Áed Sláine, d.604 (Southern Uí Néill)

Áed Uaridnach, d.612 (Northern Uí Néill)

Congal Cáech, d.637 (Dál nAraidi)

Cathal mac Finguine, d.742 (Eoganachta of Munster)

Áed Allán, d.743 (Northern Uí Néill)

Donnchad Midi, d.797 (Southern Uí Néill)

Áed Oirdnide, d.819 (Northern Uí Néill)

Conchobar mac Donnchada, d.833 (Southern Uí Néill)

Niall Caille, d.846 (Northern Uí Néill)

Máel Sechnaill, d.862 (Southern Uí Néill)

Áed Findliath, d.879 (Northern Uí Néill)

Flann Sinna, d.916 (Southern Uí Néill)

Niall Glúndub, d.919 (Northern Uí Néill)

Donnchad Donn, d.944 (Southern Uí Néill)

Ruaidrí Ua Canannáin, d.950 (Northern Uí Néill)

Congalach Cnogba, d.956 (Southern Uí Néill)

Domnall ua Néill, d.980 (Northern Uí Néill)

Máel Sechnaill mac Domnaill, d.1022 (Southern Uí Néill)

Introduction:Finding Columba

Christianity arrived in Britain during the Roman period. It was one of many foreign cults and, at first, attracted only a small number of followers. Not until the early fourth century AD, when Constantine the Great became a high-profile convert, did Christianity gain wider popularity throughout the Roman Empire. Even then, its progress in Britain remained slow. The native Britons and their Roman masters were reluctant to abandon their old beliefs. By c.400, when the Roman occupation of Britain was drawing to a close, much of the population still worshipped pagan gods. This was especially true of northern areas beyond the imperial frontier, in what is now Scotland, and also in neighbouring Ireland which had never been part of the Empire. During the fifth century, however, considerable headway was made by Christian missionaries labouring in what had once been the Roman part of Britain, roughly a large swathe of territory between the English Channel and the Forth–Clyde isthmus. In this region churches and monasteries were founded, priests were ordained and bishops were appointed. An ecclesiastical hierarchy arose, its personnel acknowledging the authority of the Pope in Rome. Before the end of the fifth century, missionaries from Britain had already crossed over to Ireland and were establishing churches there. Others perhaps ventured into the far north of their own land, into regions beyond the Forth–Clyde line, to bring the Word of God to the heathen Picts.

By the middle of the sixth century, the erstwhile Roman areas of Britain had been largely Christianised. In contemporary Ireland, too, the new religion was overtaking paganism as the preferred package of spiritual beliefs. It was around this time that St Columba came to prominence on both sides of the Irish Sea, as a key player in political as well as in ecclesiastical affairs. In life he achieved much as a holy man of great energy and charisma. In death he was venerated as the patron saint of numerous churches in Britain and Ireland, some of which claimed him – rightly or wrongly – as their founder. Today he is primarily associated with the tiny Scottish isle of Iona, the site of his most famous monastery, but his story begins in Ireland, the country of his birth. In medieval times, many Irish churches claimed to have been founded by him, even when their true origins belong to much later periods. Some claims are, nevertheless, likely to be genuine, as we shall see in the following chapters.

The main aim of this book is to tell the story of Columba as both living man and venerated saint. It is not, however, a straightforward biography. While there is no doubt that Columba existed, and that we know more about him than about any of his contemporaries, a complete biographical portrait is beyond reach. This is because the sources of information are not themselves biographical by any modern definition of the term. What they offer instead is an idealised picture of a renowned holy man whose eligibility for sainthood was evident as much to his companions in life as to later generations of followers. More is said on this topic in Chapter 1, but here we can briefly mention the most valuable of the early sources: Vita Sancti Columbae, the Life of St Columba, written by Abbot Adomnán of Iona. Adomnán was himself elevated to sainthood in recognition of his achievements and was one of the great churchmen of his age. He wrote the Vita at the end of the seventh century, about a hundred years after Columba’s death. He is not only our main source of information on Columba’s life and career, but also played a major role in promoting the cult of Columba the saint. In the following pages it will become evident that parts of the present study are as much about Adomnán as about Columba himself.

Three broad themes form the principal threads of this book. One is the story of Columba from his birth in Ireland c.521 to his death on Iona in 597. This constitutes the biographical element and is the main topic of Chapters 2 to 6. It runs parallel with a second thread, a study of Adomnán in his role as author of Vita Sancti Columbae. The third thread is the posthumous cult of Columba that arose in the wake of his death. A visible manifestation of this cult was the growth of a federation or paruchia of churches and monasteries acknowledging the spiritual leadership of his successors in the abbacy of Iona. Chapters 7 and 8 trace the story of this federation from its origins in the saint’s lifetime to its decline in the twelfth century. The human elements of the paruchia – the monks, nuns and lay people who dwelt at the various sites within it – comprised the Columban familia or ‘family’. Their story, too, will be told in this book. A look at modern perceptions of Columba forms the basis of the final chapter which serves as an epilogue to his life and achievements.

Most of the ‘history’ mentioned in this book took place in the early medieval period, a span of roughly seven hundred years from c.400 to c.1100. It was a time of profound changes across the British Isles, not the least of which was the triumph of Christianity over paganism. Other significant developments were political rather than spiritual and included the rise of new ‘ethnic’ identities and the disappearance of old ones. Thus, in the first half of the book, we encounter the native Picts of ancient Scotland, but they play no part in the narrative after we pass the beginning of the tenth century. The disappearance of a recognisable Pictish identity coincides with, and was to some extent a direct result of, the birth of Alba, a kingdom that eventually became the great medieval realm of Scotland. Alba’s principal language was Gaelic, the main language of Ireland and the native speech of both Columba and Adomnán. Gaelic had long been spoken by the people we usually call ‘Scots’ whose ancestral territory comprised much of Argyll and many Hebridean isles as well as parts of northern Ireland. The Picts originally spoke a different language, a tongue related more closely to Welsh, until they too adopted Gaelic when they merged with the Scots in the ninth century. Both Irish and Scottish Gaelic, together with Welsh and Pictish, belong to the Celtic group of languages. The origins of all four lie in the indigenous tongues of the British Isles that were spoken in prehistoric, pre-Roman times. These Celtic languages are thus quite distinct from English, which was introduced to Britain by Angles, Saxons and other Germanic immigrants in the fourth and fifth centuries. The various groups of ‘Anglo-Saxons’ eventually conquered nearly all the southern half of Britain, assimilating or expelling the native Britons and establishing kingdoms of their own. By c.1000 the individual Anglo-Saxon realms had been replaced by a single, unified kingdom which we now call England.

Columba’s story begins long before the terms ‘England’ and ‘Scotland’ entered the vocabulary of political geography. He lived in an age when Britain and Ireland were divided among numerous small kingdoms whose rulers frequently engaged in warfare with one another. As we shall see, he was born into a prominent noble family and was himself a direct descendant of kings. His ancestry placed him in the highest tier of Irish society, a status that gave him certain advantages in dealings with powerful people. It is worth keeping this in mind when we begin to look for the ‘real’ Columba, the historical figure behind the saintly image drawn so eloquently by Adomnán. The real Columba was both aristocrat and abbot, an heir of kings as well as a virtuous man of God. This dual aspect of his character – the prince and the priest – will become apparent in the following pages.

CHAPTER 1

The Sources

Vita Columbae

Our main source of information on Columba was produced a hundred years after his death. Its author, Adomnán, was one of the foremost ecclesiastical figures of the early medieval period. He succeeded to the abbacy of Iona in 679 and oversaw the monastery until his passing in 704. A man of great learning, he had already written De Locis Sanctis, a major study of the Holy Places, before turning his scholarly attention to Iona’s founder. His book about Columba was written in the closing years of the seventh century, at a time when stories and legends of the monastery’s beginnings were circulating among the brethren. Some of these existed in written form, but most were oral tales passed down through generations of monks. From this large body of tradition Adomnán selected the raw data for his best-known literary work: Vita Sancti Columbae, ‘Life of Saint Columba’ (hereafter Vita Columbae).

The Vita is rightly regarded as a rich storehouse of information on Columba and his times. It is not a work of biography in the modern sense. Its main purpose was not to present a factual narrative of Columba’s life and career, but rather to explain why he deserved the mantle of sainthood, and why his followers were right to revere him a hundred years after his death. Additional objectives of the Vita included the promotion of Iona as the premier religious centre of the Gaelic world and as the mother-church of a federation of satellite monasteries in Ireland and Britain. The book also gave its author an opportunity to disseminate his views on a number of issues that were important in his own era. Indeed, only by recognising Adomnán’s motives in writing the Vita can we begin to understand what he says about Columba and his reasons for saying it. This is a crucial point, and one that needs to be kept in mind by any modern reader. None of us should approach Vita Columbae without a measure of caution. To fully appreciate its contents we need to understand not only why Adomnán wrote it, but for whom it was written and what the first generation of readers – his contemporaries on Iona and elsewhere – expected to find in its pages.

Vita Columbae belongs to a literary genre called ‘hagiography’, this being an umbrella term for biographical writings about saints. The word derives from Greek hagios, ‘holy’, which, when used in a Christian context, can also mean ‘saint’. Adomnán was familiar with this genre long before making his own contribution to it. His extensive study of religious texts had brought him into contact with the best examples of Continental hagiography, such as the fourth-century Latin vita or ‘Life’ of Saint Martin of Tours by Sulpicius Severus. Copies of this and other influential vitae were housed in the great monastic libraries of Western Christendom, including those at major sites in Britain and Ireland. Adomnán no doubt became acquainted with many of these works in his youth, during his clerical education, and clearly had detailed knowledge of them when he commenced his Life of Columba. He used the earlier vitae as templates for his book, knowing that their influence on the structure of his narrative would be recognised and appreciated by his readers. By drawing on techniques employed by esteemed Christian writers of the past, Adomnán was not so much seeking to boost his own literary credentials as demonstrating that Columba deserved the literary treatment bestowed upon Martin and other famous saints.1

All hagiographers in early medieval times were members of the clergy. So, too, were the overwhelming majority of their readers. In an era when literacy was the preserve of ecclesiastical personnel and of a few members of the secular elite, the intended audience for the Life of a saint was highly exclusive. Vita Columbae was written primarily for the brethren of Iona and for the wider community of holy men and women in the Columban family of churches. These folk were accustomed to reading and studying religious texts as part of their daily routine. Many were accomplished scholars and teachers, or expert copyists of manuscripts, or well-known authorities on aspects of Christian doctrine. They were interested in history, just as we are today, but their interpretation of past events differed from ours. To a monk or nun in early medieval times, history was not so much a record of human progress as clear evidence of the unfolding of God’s Will. Proof that this was the case could be found in the Bible, where the events of the Old Testament hinted at what was to come in the New. History, then, was not simply a record of the past, but a guide to the future. More specifically, it provided lessons from bygone times that enabled folk in the present to be better-equipped for troubles that might lie ahead. This was the sort of message that a medieval hagiographer was expected to offer in the pages of a vita. Thus, while Adomnán’s readers wanted to learn about Columba’s career as a holy man in the sixth century, they also hoped to gain useful insights into their own lives. They wanted the book to have contemporary relevance. What this means for today’s historian is that VitaColumbae is as much a primary source for Adomnán’s time as for Columba’s.2

The structure of Vita Columbae

Four vitae, in particular, had a profound influence on Adomnán. One, the Life of St Martin by Sulpicius Severus, has already been mentioned. The others were the Life of St Antony, written in Greek by Athanasius of Alexandria, the Life of St Germanus by Constantius of Lyon and the Life of St Benedict, the latter incorporated by Pope Gregory the Great in his Dialogues. Traces of all four are discernible in Vita Columbae, with the influence of Sulpicius and Gregory being especially evident.3 The most obvious similarity between the vitae of Columba, Martin and Benedict is their tripartite structure, a feature not uncommon in hagiography. Although its origins lie in Classical Greek biographical writing, this threefold division had special appeal to Christian authors, not least because it enabled them to reflect the Holy Trinity in the arrangement of their narratives. By dividing his work into three sections or ‘books’, Adomnán replicated an arrangement employed by Sulpicius in the fifth century and used with good effect by Gregory in the sixth.4 Likewise, Adomnán borrowed the idea of two prefaces from Sulpicius, who had in turn borrowed the same from the vita of Antony by Athanasius. This particular device did not originate with Athanasius, who wrote only one preface, but with a Latin translation of Vita Antonii by Evagrius of Antioch who added a preface of his own to an existing one.5 Adomnán’s familiarity with the Evagrius edition is confirmed by his word-for-word borrowing from it, especially in the account of Columba’s final days. He saw little need to acknowledge this and other literary debts, knowing that the influence of earlier hagiographers would be recognised by his monastic readers. Far from being derided as plagiarism, as they would surely be today, these deliberate and obvious imitations would have met with the approval of his peers.

The first preface of Vita Columbae is too brief to give a detailed introduction to the overall structure, but the second is more illuminating. Here, Adomnán tells us that the first section of the work contains Columba’s ‘prophetic revelations’, the second ‘divine miracles worked through him’, while the third describes ‘angelic apparitions and certain phenomena of heavenly light’. Scholars have noted the close parallel with the second preface of Sulpicius, which likewise gives a synopsis of the three-part division. In his own second preface, Adomnán included themes and portions of text borrowed from the Life of Martin. His assurance that ‘no one should think I would write anything false about this remarkable man [Columba], nor even anything doubtful or uncertain’ is an echo of words used by Sulpicius.6 Similarly, near the end of the second preface, Adomnán relates that Columba ‘could not let even an hour pass without giving himself to praying or reading or writing or some other task’, again paraphrasing a comment originally attached by Sulpicius to Martin.7

One aspect of Vita Columbae that clearly sets it apart from modern biographical writing is a jumbled chronology. Episodes in Columba’s life are not described in the order in which they happened. Instead, the reader is carried backwards and forwards across the saint’s career. Adomnán makes no apology for rejecting a strict linear timeline in favour of a less rigid, thematic approach. In the first chapter of Book One, he informs his readers that the ensuing prophecies of Columba are to be presented praepostero ordine, ‘out of their proper order’.8 A prime example is the story of Columba’s pregnant mother Eithne being visited by an angel who announced that her unborn son had a great destiny. Although we might have expected such a tale to appear near the beginning of a saintly vita, we do not encounter it until fairly late in Book Three. This does not mean that Vita Columbae has a random or haphazard structure. On the contrary, Adomnán had already indicated, via the second preface, that he preferred to group what he regarded as the key events of Columba’s life, the saintly miracles, by category rather than by chronology. His choice of categories – prophecies, miracles of power and apparitions of angels or of heavenly light – finds its closest parallel in Gregory’s Dialogues, where miracles associated with St Benedict are grouped in an almost identical way.9 Not every miraculous event fitted neatly into Adomnán’s threefold arrangement. Some fitted into more than one category, an issue of which he himself was fully aware.10 In Book Two, for instance, supposedly a collection of Columba’s miracles of power, he placed the story of a monk called Librán. Although largely concerned with prophecy and therefore appearing to belong more correctly with the theme of Book One, this particular tale conformed to Adomnán’s ideas about certain prophecies providing evidence of miraculous power. We therefore encounter it in Book Two.11

Book Three demonstrates how Columba, a person selected by God for a special destiny, became doubly worthy of sainthood through good deeds and unselfish living. The key miraculous theme here is the appearance of angels and heavenly light, usually via dreams or visions, to various individuals including the saint himself. These apparitions served an important hagiographical purpose in confirming Columba’s special connection with the Divine, a point emphasised by Adomnán when he stressed that such things were revealed as clear, complete visions to Columba alone. Other folk, being not specially chosen by God, saw only part of an apparition rather than the whole.12 The visions of angels seen by Columba usually came at the moment of a person’s death when the celestial emissaries arrived to carry away the soul of the deceased. Angelic visions received by other people include the one mentioned above, in which an angel appeared to Eithne while she was pregnant with Columba, together with instances where angels were seen walking alongside the saint. The moment of Columba’s own death, when his ascension to Heaven was accompanied by an ethereal host, was also claimed to have been witnessed by contemporaries.

Adomnán’s sources

Vita Columbae is now more than thirteen centuries old. It is a uniquely valuable work and we should consider ourselves fortunate that it has survived into our time. Not only has no Columba-related hagiography of similar quality been preserved, it is likely that nothing comparable to Adomnán’s text was ever written. He was, in any case, the ideal person to take on such a task. His intellectual and literary talents gave him the necessary qualifications to write a Life worthy of Iona’s founder, while his high reputation in lands far beyond the monastery guaranteed that his work would be well received. He realised, nonetheless, that his authorship alone was not enough to ensure widespread acceptance and approval. Unconfirmed, uncorroborated testimony is always vulnerable to challenge or doubt. This was true even in early medieval times when belief in saintly miracles and other supernatural phenomena was normal. Adomnán knew this, of course, and was careful to acknowledge that any statement of alleged ‘fact’ requires supporting testimony and citation of a reliable source. His diligence in crediting his sources is admirable. He remains, nonetheless, a hagiographer rather than a historian. In the context of his chosen genre he was a master of his craft.13

There is no bibliography in Vita Columbae, no footnotes or endnotes referring the reader to written sources consulted and verified by the author. If Adomnán had chosen to pepper his text with a modern citation system, we would be confronted today by numerous instances of ‘pers. comm.’ but few bibliographical references. He states that his information came chiefly from the oral testimony of experti, ‘learned men’, seniores, ‘elders’, and other individuals whom he describes as ‘trustworthy men who knew the facts’. In many cases, an informant reported to Adomnán what had been told by an older contemporary who had in turn heard a story about Columba from some long-dead witness of a miracle. Although Adomnán occasionally describes how such information reached him through several stages of transmission, it hardly needs stating that his referencing method would be regarded by modern historians as wholly insufficient. Old traditions passed via word of mouth to a medieval author are, of course, impossible to verify, regardless of whether or not the author identified his informants by name. Needless to say, Adomnán and his peers took a different view. It was enough for them to know that a particular story had been ‘handed down to us by learned men’.14

We thus come to an important difference between ancient and modern readers of hagiography. Today, we are instinctively sceptical of any medieval author who regarded old tales of supernatural events as reliable evidence. Such scepticism was far less common in Adomnán’s time. He and his contemporaries inhabited a world where the boundaries between natural and supernatural occurrences were blurred, a world in which unexplained happenings were commonly attributed to Otherworld powers. Among Christian communities the greatest of these powers was God, whose potency had no limit. Equally limitless was the power manifested by God in the special human beings whom He chose for a Divine purpose. It was believed that such individuals were capable of achieving whatever God wished them to achieve and, by definition, their powers were limited only by whatever boundaries God chose to apply. With an unwavering belief in such principles, Adomnán had no reason to doubt that everything he had been told about Columba’s miraculous powers was true.15 To doubt the existence of such powers was to challenge God’s authority. The ease with which some modern readers of the Vita dismiss as superstitious nonsense its carefully crafted miracle-stories would have profoundly bemused and distressed its author.

Although the bulk of Adomnán’s information about Columba was supplied by oral tradition he does indicate that some of it came ‘from what I could find already in writing’.16 He does not say what these written sources were. There can be little doubt that they included transcriptions of stories that were otherwise orally preserved. Indeed, Adomnán refers to one story, an account of a celestial vision seen by an elderly priest at the moment of Columba’s death, that he encountered in both written and spoken forms. It was reported at first-hand to Fergnae, an Irish hermit, who in turn relayed it to monks from Iona. Many years later, when these same brethren were in their twilight years, they described the miracle to Adomnán. ‘This vision,’ he explained, ‘we have found recorded in writing, and we have also learned it from some of those old men to whom Fergnae himself had told the story, and who repeated it without hesitation.’17 It is unlikely to have been an isolated case. In fact, there is much to commend the suggestion that oral traditions about Columba were committed to writing as part of a systematic programme of documentation initiated within a generation of his death.18 This is not to imply that Adomnán’s written sources were more reliable than unwritten ones. Oral tradition circulating among the monks of Iona in the seventh century is likely to have preserved fairly accurate recollections of the founder alongside fictional or exaggerated reports of his deeds. Nevertheless, those stories in Vita Columbae that contain specific details about persons and places were probably written down while eyewitnesses still lived or soon after their passing. Total reliance on verbal transmission of detailed historical and geographical data, such as lineages and place-names, would have been viewed as unwise. Much of what was known about Columba, then, was probably written down on Iona at quite an early stage and preserved for the education of future generations of monks.

Among the literary sources that certainly existed in Adomnán’s time was a collection of miracle-stories written by Abbot Cumméne who died on Iona in 669. This has not survived, but we know of its existence because the scribe of the oldest known manuscript of Adomnán’s work referred to it. At the end of a passage dealing with Columba’s anointing of the warrior-king Áedán mac Gabráin, Adomnán mentions that the saint ‘prophesied the future of Áedán’s sons and grandsons and great-grandsons’. Although Adomnán says nothing more about this prophecy, the scribe of the oldest manuscript appended a brief description prefaced by the following words:

Cumméne the White in the book which he wrote on the miraculous powers of St Columba gives this account of St Columba’s prophecy about Áedán and his descendants and his kingdom.19

Cumméne succeeded to the abbacy of Iona in 657, having probably been a resident of the monastery for many years. Like Columba, he belonged to the Cenél Conaill kindred of northern Ireland, as did many of Iona’s early abbots. He may have arrived on Iona during the thirty-year abbacy of his uncle Ségéne (died 652). Indeed, it seems likely that this was the case, and that the book on Columba’s miracles was written during this period. Historians now see Cumméne’s book as the product of a formal programme of information-gathering implemented and supervised by Ségéne.20 The latter seems to have been eager to collect the kind of oral traditions mentioned above, including eyewitness testimonies by people who had met Columba in life. We may be seeing glimpses of his project in Adomnán’s narrative. In one passage, for instance, we learn of a monk called Silnan who not only witnessed one of Columba’s miracles but played an active part in it. Adomnán asserts the truth of the story by adding that Silnan recounted it ‘in the presence of Abbot Ségéne and other elders’.21 In another passage, Adomnán tells of a young Irish boy called Ernéne who received Columba’s blessing and upon whom the saint laid a prophecy. In later years, after becoming a famous priest in his own right, Ernéne related the tale to Ségéne and other senior monks. One of the latter was Failbe, a future abbot of Iona and Adomnán’s immediate predecessor. A third example of Ségéne’s desire to collect stories of the founder appears in Adomnán’s opening chapter, where we learn of a miracle witnessed by the Northumbrian king Oswald on the eve of a great battle in 634. Oswald was a devotee of Columba and claimed that the saint had appeared to him in a vision, prophesying victory and a happy reign. As with the tale of Ernéne, Adomnán heard this tale from Failbe who ‘swore that he had heard the story of the vision from the lips of King Oswald himself as he was relating it to Abbot Ségéne’.22 What these episodes appear to show is a systematic effort by Ségéne to collect direct verbal testimony from people who had witnessed or experienced the effects of Columba’s God-given powers. Failbe seems to have played a key role in this exercise, perhaps as note-taker, while Cumméne may have been given the task of compiling the stories into a definitive compendium.

How much use Adomnán made of Cumméne’s book of miracles is hard to discern. There can be no doubt that he used it as a source, but he did not simply ‘cut and paste’ its contents into his own text. We know, for instance, that he omitted Cumméne’s description of Columba’s prophecy about the descendants of King Áedán. Moreover, it is clear that Adomnán acquired stories that were perhaps unknown to Ségéne and Cumméne and their contemporaries, an example being eyewitness testimony of a fiery pillar that rose into the sky on the night of Columba’s death. This was witnessed by Ernéne moccu Fir Roide, a monk at the Irish monastery of Drumhome in Donegal, who recounted it in old age to a young Adomnán, almost certainly before the latter came to Iona.23 The likely absence of any record of this event among the traditions gathered by Ségéne and Cumméne would not have been regarded as an oversight on their part. On the contrary, a new tale providing further proof of Columba’s power would have been welcomed on Iona – as long as the source was reputable. Additional material of this sort was simply added to the existing corpus of data that confirmed Columba as a man selected by God for a special destiny. It is even possible that Adomnán regarded Cumméne’s account as inadequate proof of Columba’s powers and saw a need to ‘beef up’ the saint’s image with new data that he himself acquired in Ireland. He may also have felt that Cumméne’s approach to miracles did not compare favourably with how the hagiographers of other saints were handling this crucial topic.24

Cumméne’s book was not intended solely as a record of Columba’s holiness. Like Adomnán, Cumméne used stories with sixth-century settings to convey information relating to his own time. Of this we can be certain, even though only a tiny fragment of Cumméne’s text survives. The fragment is actually a good example of how a fairly conventional story of Columba’s prophetic abilities could become a vehicle for comment on seventh-century affairs. As it relates to the complex web of contemporary Irish politics we shall examine it more closely in Chapter 3. The manuscript containing this tiny surviving portion of Cumméne’s book is discussed in the next section.

Manuscripts and editions of Vita Columbae

The early medieval history of Britain and Ireland rarely comes to us as testimony written by people who lived in that era. It is usually encountered indirectly, via several stages of transmission, invariably in much-altered form. This makes it all the more valuable that the two oldest surviving manuscripts of Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, ‘The Ecclesiastical History of the English People’, a work completed by the Venerable Bede at Jarrow in Northumbria, were written within a dozen years of the author’s death in 735.25 One of these was formerly, but erroneously, believed to contain his signature. We can, in fact, be sure that neither of these manuscripts was seen by Bede. Remarkably, in the case of Adomnán’s Vita Columbae, our oldest manuscript may have been perused and handled by Adomnán himself. This volume is kept today in the public library at Schaffhausen, a town in northern Switzerland close to the border with Germany. Its scribe wrote the following words on the last page:

Whoever reads these books of the virtues of St Columba, let him pray to the Lord for me, Dorbbéne, that after death I may possess eternal life.

Historians have identified Dorbbéne as a cleric of that name who became abbot of Iona in the early eighth century. His tenure of the abbacy was brief, lasting barely five months until his death in September 713.26 Little is known of him, although later traditions linked his ancestry to Cenél Conaill, the Irish royal kindred to which Columba, Ségéne, Cumméne and Adomnán all belonged. Whether Dorbbéne transcribed a copy of Vita Columbae during his brief period as abbot, or at an earlier point in his career, we are unable to say. It nonetheless remains a tantalising possibility that the manuscript we now possess was written before 704, in the scriptorium on Iona, and that it was inspected there by Adomnán.27

The manuscript’s subsequent history makes quite an interesting tale. At some point it left Iona, perhaps in the early ninth century when the Columban community established a major new monastery at Kells in Ireland. It may have been kept thereafter at the Kells library, or at another Irish monastery, but we cannot be certain of this. What we do know is that the manuscript eventually came to the great abbey of Reichenau, a Benedictine foundation on Lake Constance in southern Germany. Reichenau was established in 724 under Frankish patronage and quickly gained renown as a centre of learning. Like a number of other Frankish monasteries it became a home for Irish monks who came as students and pilgrims. One of these travellers brought Dorbbéne’s copy of Vita Columbae and gave it to the monastic library. Although we do not know when this happened, a plausible context is the 840s, during the abbacy of Walahfrid Strabo, when the Reichenau library acquired many books. Walahfrid had a special interest in Iona, having written a short vita of St Blathmac who was martyred on the island by Vikings in 825. Dorbbéne’s book was still at Reichenau eight hundred years later, in 1621, when it was borrowed and transcribed by Father Stephen White, an Irish Jesuit and antiquarian scholar. From White’s copy others were made, including one which formed the basis of the first printed edition of Vita Columbae in 1647. Although the Dorbbéne manuscript probably came back to Reichenau after White had finished with it, its return was not permanent and, in the following century, it was discovered in the public library at Schaffhausen. For this reason it was not transferred to the state library of Baden at Karlsruhe with other literary treasures from Reichenau after the abbey’s dissolution in the early 1800s. The present whereabouts of White’s personal copy, transcribed by his own hand, are unknown. It may or may not have been among his possessions when he came back to Ireland in 1634.

All the standard modern editions of Vita Columbae have been produced from first-hand perusal of Dorbbéne’s manuscript. Until sixty years ago, the most authoritative of these was produced in 1857 by the Irish cleric and antiquarian scholar William Reeves (1815–1892). This was superseded in 1961 by a magisterial edition by Alan Orr Anderson and his wife Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson. Prior to Stephen White’s discovery of Dorbbéne’s text, the Vita was known only from manuscripts of much later provenance, the earliest being a copy transcribed at Durham in the late twelfth century. From the same period or a little later comes a manuscript formerly held in the Cottonian collection at London’s Ashburnham House which was tragically engulfed by fire in 1731. This volume was severely burned but is now held in the British Library alongside other survivors of the conflagration. Also at the British Library is a much later manuscript of c.1500. Neither this nor its Cottonian or Durham predecessors contain a version of Vita Columbae derived from Dorbbéne’s. Detailed analysis shows that they were transcribed instead from another copy of the Vita, the text of which was slightly different. It is possible that this variant text was the one written for King Alexander I of Scotland in the first quarter of the twelfth century and mentioned in the damaged Cottonian copy. Sadly, it is now lost.28

Throughout the present study the Latin quotations from Vita Columbae are taken from the Anderson edition of 1961 with reference to a revision produced by Marjorie Anderson thirty years later. English translations of individual extracts are generally those of Richard Sharpe in the Penguin Classics edition of 1995, but, in a few instances, the Andersons’ own translation has been preferred. The introductory material and notes provided by both Professor Sharpe and the Andersons are indispensable as sources of biographical data on Columba and Adomnán. Also useful in this regard is the older Latin edition by William Reeves (1857) and J. T. Fowler’s revision of it (1894), together with the annotated extracts (in English) presented by Alan Orr Anderson in his magisterial Early Sources of Scottish History of 1922.

Amra Coluim Chille

Around the time of Columba’s death, a poem was composed in commemoration of his life and deeds. This eulogy was similar to others circulating in contemporary Ireland, all belonging to a genre of ‘praise poetry’ which had parallels in Britain and elsewhere. Amra Coluim Chille, ‘The Eulogy of Columcille’, is reputedly the work of Dallán Forgaill, the chief bard of Ireland, whose death occurred one year after the saint’s own passing.29 Most Irish eulogies of the time were composed in praise of warlords and other members of the aristocratic elite, and the Amra is no exception. It highlights Columba’s membership of the Cenél Conaill of northern Ireland, a branch of the powerful Uí Néill group of royal families. From its verses we gain a glimpse of his origins and early career in Ireland, but only tantalising hints of his later activities in Britain. This is unsurprising, given that a eulogising poet’s prime objective was not to offer biographical information but rather to highlight praiseworthy aspects of his subject’s character. If Columba had been a mighty warlord, his courage and military skill would have formed the core of Dallán’s poem and his victories would have been listed. In keeping with this format, the Amra concentrates on the saint’s strengths – spiritual and intellectual rather than martial and physical – by praising his humility and asceticism and by noting his triumphs as scholar, teacher and missionary instead of a list of battles. Like the great warrior-princes of the Uí Néill, his own kin, Columba is described in the poem as a ‘champion’, his chosen battlefield being the Christian’s perpetual struggle against sin and temptation.30 On a literary level, then, Amra Coluim Chille appears to blend traditional Celtic praise-poetry about secular deeds with hagiography about religious ones. On a cultural level it combines themes such as ancestry and nobility, both of which were important in ancient Irish society, with overtly Christian ideas such as ascetism and scholarship. What sets the Amra apart from conventional hagiography is its avoidance of miracle-stories and other supernatural references. The resulting picture of Columba shows a real person who achieved his goals through virtues inherent in him from birth. It portrays him as a praiseworthy Irish nobleman who had no need of special powers conferred by God.

Despite offering minimal biographical data, the Amra remains an important text. Its claim, as stated in a preface, to be the authentic work of Dallán Forgaill makes it potentially our oldest source of information on Columba. It was highly regarded in early medieval Ireland and had become, by c.900, a popular text for students and scholars in Irish monasteries. It is likely that many copies were in circulation before the beginning of the eleventh century, when the preface was added. The copies that survive today are almost like workbooks, the original verses broken into sections annotated with scholarly notes. Other, later verses about Columba were included in the preface, but these add nothing to our picture of the historical figure. Their chief interest is in showing how a large body of poetry and folklore grew around him in the centuries after his death.

Our oldest copy of the Amra dates from c.1100, roughly a hundred years after the preface was added to the original poem. It forms part of Lebor na hUidre, ‘Book of the Dun Cow’, itself the oldest surviving text written in Irish Gaelic. The Lebor is an important manuscript, the contents of which include, among many other literary treasures, the earliest known version of the famous heroic tale Táin Bó Cúailnge, ‘The Cattle Raid of Cooley’. Copies of the Amra are preserved in a further eight manuscripts, one of which is another compilation of ancient Irish texts written at the end of the twelfth century or at the beginning of the thirteenth.31 All nine versions of Amra Coluim Chille have been studied, edited, and in some cases translated into Modern Irish or English, thus making them accessible to today’s scholars. Nevertheless, any hope of unearthing useful data about Columba’s life from the fragmented verses and obscure annotations is tempered by the knowledge that we are not dealing here with an unaltered source from c.600. If Adomnán’s Vita has to be used cautiously, then a similar warning applies to the Amra in whichever version we choose to consult it.

The Iona Chronicle

As well as written versions of stories about Columba, the monks of Iona also maintained a record of notable or ‘newsworthy’ events. Historians usually refer to this long-vanished text as the Iona Chronicle. It took the form of a set of annals in which significant happenings affecting the monastery or of interest to its personnel were recorded in a year-by-year format. Although the original text in which they were written has not survived, these annals were eventually incorporated into other chronicles maintained by monasteries in Ireland which, in turn, were copied and preserved. Of the surviving texts the two principal collections are the Annals of Ulster and the Annals of Tigernach, both of which are regarded as preserving material originally written on Iona. By rigorously examining these annals historians have been able to deduce that the Iona Chronicle was maintained on the island from c.650 to c.740, with a possibility that the earlier date should be pushed back towards 600.32 It began as a journal of important events in the life of the monastery before becoming a record of secular as well as religious events further afield. Thus, in addition to making entries for the deeds and obituaries of abbots and bishops, the monks also noted battles, sieges, royal deaths and natural disasters. Some non-ecclesiastical entries refer to people and places in Ireland or Britain, while others describe faraway events, news of which must have reached the Columban community via its extensive contacts in the wider world. It is likely, for instance, that the Chronicle provided Adomnán with information on a volcanic eruption in Italy, an event mentioned in Vita Columbae. In addition, the Chronicle’s year-by-year entries would have enabled him to construct a chronological framework for his narrative.

The manuscripts containing the Irish annals are late, the oldest being the Annals of Innisfallen which survive in a copy written c.1100. Both the Annals of Ulster and the Annals of Tigernach, our main repositories for data from the Iona Chronicle, are preserved in much later manuscripts of, respectively, the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries. Their relationship to one another is complex, for they do not give identical information. Because the differences in content are most marked in the period before the tenth century, it is sometimes difficult to know which collection is accurately reporting an event originally noted in the Iona Chronicle. In some cases, both sets of annals report the same event in a broadly similar way, but, in other cases, their treatment is very different. To compound the problem, we sometimes find an event reported in one but completely absent from the other. Given the various problems – late manuscripts, inconsistent reporting and uncertain reliability – we must approach the Annals of Ulster, the Annals of Tigernach and the other Irish annals with careful steps.33

The Irish Life

The O’Donnell clan of Tyrconnell in north-west Ireland were the descendants of Cenél Conaill, the ancient royal kindred to which Columba himself belonged. In the early sixteenth century, the clan’s most prominent leader was Manus O’Donnell, a dynamic figure whose prowess in war ran alongside interests in literature and history. Manus embarked on a major project to gather stories about Columba from every part of Ireland, his aim being to produce a definitive compendium of information on the saint whom he and his countrymen called Columcille. The resulting work was completed in 1532 and given the title Betha Coluim Chille, ‘Life of Columcille’. Unlike Adomnán’s Vita Columbae, it was written in Irish Gaelic, ‘Old Irish’, rather than in Latin. It was not so much a work of hagiography as a synthesis of various types of data drawn from a broad range of sources. Manus himself is credited with blending and reworking this material into a single narrative, but he probably commissioned professional scribes to write it. Although his editing skills are to be admired, the finished text of the Betha was not so seamless as to prevent easy identification of its sources. Among the latter was an older Gaelic vita, known today as the Irish Life, a work of somewhat later composition than Adomnán’s work and partly derived from it. The identity of its original author is unknown.

The Irish Life is a homily or sermon intended for reading aloud. Its primary audience may have been the Columban paruchia of churches and monasteries, especially those in Ireland.34 It differs from Vita Columbae by closely following a linear chronology which traces the saint’s life from birth to death. In other respects the two works are of similar character. Each, for instance, is essentially a collection of miracle-stories presented by a competent hagiographer. At times, their respective narratives cover the same ground, yet they are not identical. Many passages in the Irish Life were clearly derived from Adomnán’s text, often with additional information not provided by him, but others were not. Thus, while Adomnán devotes few words to Columba’s childhood, the author of the Irish Life provides a much fuller account of these years, supplementing his narrative with details about the saint’s education and early travels. The two works also differ slightly in their geographical emphasis, with a greater number of Ireland-based stories appearing in the Irish Life. Episodes occurring in Britain were of lesser interest to the author and, in some cases, receive scant attention from his pen.35 His focus on Ireland was not due merely to his being a native of the country, for Adomnán also originated there. It stemmed rather from a desire to show Columba travelling from place to place, establishing churches and monasteries in various Irish kingdoms, and so laying the foundations of the great paruchia of later times. How many of these settlements were really founded by Columba was a secondary concern. Many, as we shall see, did not appear until long after the sixth century. Such considerations would not have troubled the author of the Irish Life. He achieved his primary purpose in giving the Columban federation in Ireland clear written testimony that it was an ecclesiastical network of the greatest antiquity.36

Historians have long puzzled over the date of the Irish Life. Some regard it as a work of the eleventh or twelfth century, while others date it as early as the ninth.37 The oldest surviving copy is found in Leabhar Breac, ‘Speckled Book’, a fifteenth-century manuscript now preserved in the Royal Irish Academy. Linguistic features indicate that the original Life belongs to a much earlier period than the compilation of Leabhar Breac, while the narrative itself provides further clues. One possible indicator of date is that the manuscript describes certain Irish churches as sites actually visited by Columba. The monastery at Kells, which eventually succeeded Iona as the headquarters of the Columban federation, appears in this context.38 As we know from other sources that Kells did not become part of the federation until c.804, Columba’s alleged visit there almost certainly never took place. The story of the visit is surely a fiction devised in the ninth century to make the connection between Kells and Columba seem more ancient than it really was. In literary terms the story shows that the composition of the Irish Life cannot be dated earlier than 800. We have good reason to date it much later, to the middle years of the twelfth century, when Derry replaced Kells as the primary centre of the Columban familia. Justification for assigning this later date comes from a reference in the Life to the Gospel of Martin, a precious totem supposedly retrieved by Columba from the tomb of St Martin at Tours in Frankish Gaul. This was one of the most famous religious artefacts in Ireland and a priceless possession of the Derry monks. After the headship of the federation moved there from Kells around 1150, the Gospel became a key relic associated with the symbolic rank of comarba, ‘successor’, of Columba. The abbots of Derry, as the new holders of this revered title, were also the guardians of the famous Gospel. Any tale describing a visit to Martin’s shrine at Tours must have been concocted in this period, to strengthen the bond between Columba and his Derry-based comarba. If so, then the Irish Life as a whole may belong to this period. It was most likely produced between 1150 and 1200, at Derry, whence came the copy used by Manus O’Donnell in his compilation of Betha Coluim Chille.39

Additional texts

Other sources of information on Columba include a ‘Life’ written at the Frankish monastery of St Gallen in present-day Switzerland. This is essentially an abridged version of Adomnán’s Vita Columbae and seems to be derived from Dorbbéne’s copy. It survives in a manuscript of the ninth century and in a number of later copies, but adds nothing new to Adomnán’s portrait of Columba.40 Rather more intriguing are entries for Columba in the old Irish calendars, the most useful of which is Félire Óengusso, ‘Martyrology of Óengus’, a chronological sequence of verses marking the death-dates of famous saints. Although the earliest surviving copy is in a manuscript of c.1410, close analysis shows the original text to be a composition of some six hundred years earlier.41 Columba is said to have died on 9 June 597 and the Martyrology’s corresponding entry has several items of biographical information not given by Adomnán. The reputed author was Óengus, a monk at the monastery of Tallaght near Dublin. If the attribution is correct, Óengus may also have had a hand in the composition of a similar work produced at the same scriptorium and known today as the Martyrology of Tallaght. Both martyrologies are potentially useful sources for our picture of Columba, but they require cautious handling.

Inevitably, given his stature as a renowned holy man, Columba often appears in hagiography relating to other saints. Little of this material is reliable, partly because it survives in manuscripts of late date or of uncertain provenance. A few vitae of saints who were genuine contemporaries of Columba can be considered, however, in our search for useful biographical information. These tend to be much shorter, less eloquently written and less accurate in matters of history than Vita Columbae. Some incorporate outlandish elements drawn from a common storehouse of hagiographical themes and motifs. Others seem eager to describe encounters between saints who almost certainly never met in life. A small number of these minor vitae are cited periodically in the present study and, in one or two instances, their testimony is cautiously accepted as more or less reliable.

Our most useful source outside the texts produced on Iona is Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, a work already mentioned in the context of the date of Vita Columbae. A large amount of modern scholarship continues to be devoted to this highly respected work. Bede had much to say about Columba and Adomnán, and about Iona’s role as a major centre of faith and learning. As far as we know, he never saw a copy of Vita Columbae, but did, in all likelihood, meet its author in person. An encounter between the two probably took place when Adomnán visited the monastery at Jarrow where Bede spent almost his entire life. Bede had enormous respect for Adomnán, but, at the same time, regarded him as a representative of what some present-day observers refer to as ‘Celtic Christianity’. Bede’s disdain for certain religious customs practised by ‘Celtic’ clergy in Britain and Ireland runs like a thread through the Ecclesiastical History and means that his account of Columba is not objective. His biased views and strong opinions should always be borne in mind by anyone who consults his writings.

Archaeology: Excavations on Iona