shore. How often I had wandered in these solitudes, to see the great
spout of water rise through the grass from the caverns beneath, forced
upward when tide and wind harried the sea-flocks from the north; or to
look across the ocean to the cliffs of Antrim, from the Carn cul Ri
Eirinn, the Cairn of the Hermit King of Ireland, about whom I had woven
many a romance.
I was tired, and fell asleep. Perhaps the Druid of a neighbouring mound,
or the lonely Irish King, or Colum himself (whose own Mound of the
Outlook was near), or one of his angels who ministered to him, watched,
and shepherded my dreams to the desired fold. At least I dreamed, and
thus:--
The skies to the west beyond the seas were not built of flushed clouds,
but of transparent flame. These flames rose in solemn stillness above a
vast forge, whose anvil was the shining breast of the sea. Three great
Spirits stood by it, and one lifted a soul out of the deep shadow that
was below; and one with his hands forged the soul of its dross and
welded it anew; and the third breathed upon it, so that it was winged
and beautiful. Suddenly the glory-cloud waned, and I saw the multitude
of the stars. Each star was the gate of a long, shining road. Many--a
countless number--travelled these roads. Far off I saw white walls,
built of the pale gold and ivory of sunrise. There again I saw the three
Spirits, standing and waiting. So these, I thought, were not the walls
of Heaven, but the Divine Forges.
That was my dream. When I awaked, the curlews were crying under the
stars.
When I reached the shadowy glebe, behind the manse by the sea, I saw the
preacher walking there by himself, and doubtless praying. I told him I
had seen the Divine Forges, and twice; and in crude, childish words told
how I had seen them.
"It is not a dream," he said.
I know now what he meant.
It would seem to be difficult for most of us to believe that what has
perished can be reborn. It is the same whether we look upon the dust of
ancient cities, broken peoples, nations that stand and wait, old
faiths, defeated dreams. It is so hard to believe that what has fallen
may arise. Yet we have perpetual symbols; the tree, that the winds of
Autumn ravage and the Spring restores; the trodden weed, that in April
awakes white and fragrant; the swallow, that in the south remembers the
north. We forget the ebbing wave that from the sea-depths comes again:
the Day, shod with sunrise while his head is crowned with stars.
Far-seeing was the vision of the old Gael, who prophesied that Iona
would never wholly cease to be "the lamp of faith," but would in the end
shine forth as gloriously as of yore, and that, after dark days, a new
hope would go hence into the world. But before that (and he prophesied
when the island was in its greatness)--
"Man tig so gu crich
Bithidh I mar a bha,
Gun a ghuth mannaich
Findh shalchar ba ..."
quaint old-world Erse words, which mean--
"Before this happens,
Iona will be as it was,
Without the voice of a monk,
Under the dung of cows."[2]
And truly enough the little island was for long given over to the
sea-wind, whose mournful chant even now fills the ruins where once the
monks sang matins and evensong; for generations, sheep and long-horned
shaggy kine found their silent pastures in the wilderness that of old
was "this our little seabounded Garden of Eden."
But now that Iona has been "as it was," the other and greater change may
yet be, may well have already come.
Strange, that to this day none knows with surety the derivation or
original significance of the name Iona. Many ingenious guesses have been
made, but of these some are obviously far-fetched, others are impossible
in Gaelic, and all but impossible to the mind of any Gael speaking his
ancient tongue. Nearly all these guesses concern the Iona of Columba:
few attempt the name of the sacred island of the Druids. Another people
once lived here with a forgotten faith; possibly before the Picts there
was yet another, who worshipped at strange altars and bowed down before
Shadow and Fear, the earliest of the gods.
The most improbable derivation is one that finds much acceptance. When
Columba and his few followers were sailing northward from the isle of
Oronsay, in quest, it is said, of this sacred island of the Druids,
suddenly one of the monks cried _sud i_ (_? siod e!_) "yonder it!" With
sudden exultation Columba exclaimed, _Mar sud bithe I, goir thear II_,
"Be it so, and let it be called I" (I or EE). We are not the wiser for
this obviously monkish invention. It accounts for a syllable only, and
seems like an effort to explain the use of _I_ (II, Y, Hy, Hee) for
"island" in place of the vernacular Innis, Inch, Eilean, etc. Except in
connection with Iona I doubt if _I_ for island is ever now used in
modern Gaelic. Icolmkill is familiar: the anglicised Gaelic of the Isle
of Colum of the Church. But it is doubtful if any now living has ever
heard a Gael speak of an island as _I_; I doubt if an instance could be
adduced. On the other hand, _I_ might well have been, and doubtless is,
used in written speech as a sign for Innis, as _'s_ is the common
writing of _agus_, and. As for the ancient word _Idh_ or _Iy_ I do not
know that its derivation has been ascertained, though certain Gaelic
linguists claim that _Idh_ and Innis are of the same root.
I do not know on what authority, but an anonymous Gaelic writer, in an
account of Iona in 1771, alludes to the probability that Christianity
was introduced there before St. Columba's advent, and that the island
was already dedicated to the Apostle St. John, "for it was originally
called _I'Eoin_, i.e. the Isle of John, whence Iona." _I'eoin_ certainly
is very close in sound, as a Gael would pronounce it, to Iona, and there
can be little doubt that the island had druids (whether Christian monks
also with or without) when Columba landed. Before Conall, King of Alba
(as he was called, though only Dalriadic King of Argyll), invited Colum
to Iona, to make that island his home and sanctuary, there were
certainly Christian monks on the island. Among them was the
half-mythical Odran or Oran, who is chronicled in the _Annals of the
Four Masters_ as having been a missionary priest, and as having died in
Iona fifteen years before Colum landed. Equally certainly there were
druids at this late date, though discredited of the Pictish king and his
people, for a Cymric priest of the old faith was at that time Ard-Druid.
This man Gwendollen, through his bard or second-druid Myrddin (Merlin),
deplored the persecution to which he was subject, in that now he and his
no longer dared to practise the sacred druidical rites "in raised
circles"--adding bitterly, "the grey stones themselves, even, they have
removed."
Again, Davies in his _Celtic Researches_ speaks of Colum as having on
his settlement in Iona burnt a heap of druidical books. It is at any
rate certain that druidical believers (helots perhaps) remained to
Colum's time, even if the last druidic priest had left. In the explicit
accounts which survive there is no word of any dispossession of the
druidic priests. It is more than likely that the Pictish king, who had
been converted to Christianity, and gave the island to Columba by
special grant, had either already seen Irish monks inhabit it, or at
least had withdrawn the lingering priests of the ancient faith of his
people. Neither Columba nor Adamnan nor any other early chronicler
speaks of Iona as held by the Druids when the little coracle with the
cross came into Port-na-Churaich.
Others have derived the name from _Aon_, an isthmus, but the objections
to this are that it is not applicable to the island, and perhaps never
was; and, again, the Gaelic pronunciation. Some have thought that the
word, when given as _I-Eoin_, was intended, not for the Isle of John,
but the Isle of Birds. Here, again, the objection is that there is no
reason why Iona should be called by a designation equally applicable to
every one of the numberless isles of the west. To the mountaineers of
Mull, however, the little low-lying seaward isle must have appeared the
haunt of the myriad sea-fowl of the Moyle; and if the name thus derives,
doubtless a Mull man gave it.
Again, it is said that Iona is a miswriting of _Ioua_, "the avowed
ancient name of the island." It is easy to see how the scribes who
copied older manuscripts might have made the mistake; and easy to
understand how, the mistake once become the habit, fanciful
interpretations were adduced to explain "Iona."
There is little reasonable doubt that _Ioua_ was the ancient Gaelic or
Pictish name of the island. I have frequently seen allusions to its
having been called Innis nan Dhruidnechean, or Dhruidhnean, the Isle of
the Druids: but that is not ancient Gaelic, and I do not think there is
any record of Iona being so called in any of the early manuscripts.
Doubtless it was a name given by the Shenachies or bardic story-tellers
of a later date, though of course it is quite possible that Iona was of
old commonly called the Isle of the Druids. In this connection I may put
on record that a few years ago I heard an old man of the western part of
the Long Island (Lewis), speak of the priests and ministers of to-day as
"druids"; and once, in either Coll or Tiree, I heard a man say, in
English, alluding to the Established minister, "Yes, yes, that will be
the way of it, for sure, for Mr. ---- is a wise druid." It might well
be, therefore, that in modern use the Isle of Druids signified only the
Isle of Priests. There is a little island of the Outer Hebrides called
Innis Chailleachan Dhubh--the isle of the black old women; and a legend
has grown up that witches once dwelt here and brewed storms and evil
spells. But the name is not an ancient name, and was given not so long
ago, because of a small sisterhood of black-cowled nuns who settled
there.
St. Adamnan, ninth Abbot of Iona, writing at the end of the seventh
century, invariably calls the island _Ioua_ or the _Iouan Island_.
Unless the hypothesis of the careless scribes be accepted, this should
be conclusive.
For myself I do not believe that there has been any slip of _n_ for _u_.
And I am confirmed in this opinion by the following circumstance. Three
years ago I was sailing on one of the sea-lochs of Argyll. My only
companion was the boatman, and incidentally I happened to speak of some
skerries (a group of sea-set rocks) off the Ross of Mull, similarly
named to rocks in the narrow kyle we were then passing; and learned with
surprise that my companion knew them well, and was not only an Iona man,
but had lived on the island till he was twenty. I asked him about his
people, and when he found that I knew them he became more confidential.
But he professed a strange ignorance of all concerning Iona. There was
an old Iona iorram, or boat-song, I was anxious to have: he had never
heard of it. Still more did I desire some rendering or even some lines
of an ancient chant of whose existence I knew, but had never heard
recited, even fragmentarily. He did not know of it: he "did not know
Gaelic," that is, he remembered only a little of it. Well, no, he
added, perhaps he did remember some, "but only just to talk to fishermen
an' the like."
Suddenly a squall came down out of the hills. The loch blackened. In a
moment a froth of angry foam drove in upon us, but the boat righted, and
we flew before the blast, as though an arrow shot by the wind. I noticed
a startling change in my companion. His blue eyes were wide and
luminous; his lips twitched; his hands trembled. Suddenly he stooped
slightly, laughed, cried some words I did not catch, and abruptly broke
into a fierce and strange sea-chant. It was no other than the old Iona
rann I had so vainly sought!
Some memory had awakened in the man, perhaps in part from what I had
said--with the old spell of the sea, the old cry of the wind.
Then he ceased abruptly, he relapsed, and with a sheepish exclamation
and awkward movement shrank beside me. Alas, I could recall only a few
lines; and I failed in every effort to persuade him to repeat the rann.
But I had heard enough to excite me, for again and again he had called
or alluded to Iona by its ancient pre-Columban name of Ioua, and once at
least I was sure, from the words, that the chant was also to Ioua the
Moon.
That night, however, he promised to tell me on the morrow all he could
remember of the old Ioua chant. On the morrow, alas, he had to leave
upon an unexpected business that could not be postponed, and before his
return, three days later, I was gone. I have not seen him again, but it
is to him I am indebted for the loan of an ancient manuscript map of
Iona, a copy of which I made and have by me still. It was an heirloom:
by his own account had been in his family, in Iona, for seven
generations, "an it's Himself knows how much more." He had been to the
island the summer before, because of his father's death, and had brought
this coarsely painted and rudely framed map away with him. He told me
too, that night, how the oldest folk on the island--"some three or four
o' them, anyway; them as has the Gaelic"--had the old Ioua chant in
their minds. As a boy he had heard it at many a winter _ceilidh_. "Ay,
ay, for sure, Iona was called Ioua in them old ancient days."
My friend also had a little book of his mother's which contained, in a
neat hand, copies of Gaelic songs, among them some of the old Islay and
Skye oar-chants of the _iorram_ kind. I recall an iorram that had
hardly a word in it, but was only a series of barbaric cries, sometimes
full of lament (_ho-ro-aroo-arone_, _ho-ro_, _ah-hone_, _ah-hone_!),
which was the Iona fisherman's song to entice seals to come near. I
remember, too, the opening of a "maighdean-mhara" or mermaid song, by a
little-known namesake of my own, a sister of Mary Macleod, "the sweet
singer of the Hebrides," because it had as a heading (perhaps put there
by the Iona scribe) some lines of Mary's that I liked well.
I quote from memory, but these were to the effect that, in his home,
what the Macleod loved, was playing at chess
_Agus fuaim air a chlarsaich
Gus e h'eachdraidh na dheigh sin
Greis air ursgeul na Feine_
[_and the music of the harp, and the telling of tales of the feats of
the Feinn_ (the Fingalians).] There are not many now, I fear, who could
find entertainment thus, or care to sit before the peat-fires.
On one other occasion I have heard the name Ioua used by a fisherman. I
was at Strachnr, on Loch Fyne, and was speaking to the skipper of a
boat's crew of Macleods from the Lews, when I was attracted by an old
man. He knew my Uist friend, then at Strachur, who told me more than one
strange legend of the Sliochd-nan-Ron, the seal-men. I met the old man
that night before the peat-glow, and while he was narrating a story of a
Princess of Spain who married the King of Ireland's son, he spoke
incidentally of their being wrecked on Iona, "that was then called Ioua,
ay, an' that for one hundred and two hundred and three hundred years and
thrice a hundred on the top o' that before it was Icolmkill."
I did not know him, but a friend told me that the late Mr. Cameron, the
minister of Brodick, in Arran, had the M.S. of an old Iona (or
Hebridean) iorram, in the refrain of which _Ioua_ was used throughout.
Neither do I think the name the island now bears has anything in common
with _Ioua_. In a word, I am sure that the derivations of Iona are
commonly fanciful, and that the word is simply Gaelic for the Isle of
Saints, and was so given it because of Columba and the abbots and monks
who succeeded him and his. In Gaelic, the letters _sh_ at the beginning
of a word are invariably mute; so that _I-shona_, the Isle of Saints,
would be pronounced _Iona_. I think that any lingering doubt I had
about the meaning of the name went when I got the old map of which I
have spoken, and found that in the left corner was written in large rude
letters _II-SHONA_.
How great a man was the Irish monk Crimthan, called Colum, the Dove:
Columcille, the Dove of the Church. One may read all that has been
written of him since the sixth century, and not reach the depths of his
nature. I doubt if any other than a Gael can understand him aright. More
than any Celt of whom history tells, he is the epitome of the Celt. In
war, Cuchullin himself was not more brave and resourceful. Finn, calling
his champions to the pursuit of Grania, or Oisin boasting of the Fianna
before Patrick, was not more arrogant, yet his tenderness could be as
his Master's was, and he could be as gentle as a young mother with her
child, and had a child's simplicity. He knew the continual restlessness
of his race. He was forty-two when he settled in Iona, and had led a
life of frequent and severe vicissitude, often a wanderer, sometimes
with blood against him and upon his head, once in extremity of danger,
an outlaw, excommunicated. But even in his haven of Iona he was not
content. He journeyed northward through the Pictish realms, a more
dangerous and obscure adventure then than to cross Africa to-day. He
sailed to "the Ethican island" as St. Adamnan calls Tiree, and made of
it a sanctuary, where prayer might rise as a continual smoke from quiet
homes. No fear of the savage clans of Skye--where a woman had once
reigned with so great a fame in war that even the foremost champion of
Ireland went to her in his youth to learn arms and
battle-wisdom--restrained him from facing the island Picts. Long before
Hakon the Dane fought the great seafight off Largs on the mainland,
Colum had built a church there. In the far Perthshire wilds, before
Macbeth slew Duncan the king, the strong abbot of Iona had founded a
monastery in that thanedom. At remote Inbhir Nis, the Inverness of
to-day, he overcame the King of the Picts and his sullen Druids, by his
daring, the fierce magnetism of his will, his dauntless resource. Once,
in a savage region, far north-eastward, towards the Scandinavian sea, he
was told that there his Cross would not long protect either wattled
church or monk's cell: on that spot he built the monastery of Deir, that
stood for a thousand years, and whose priceless manuscript is now one of
the treasures of Northumbria.
Columba was at once a saint, a warrior, a soldier of Christ, a great
abbot, a dauntless explorer, and militant Prince of the Church; and a
student, a man of great learning, a poet, an artist, a visionary, an
architect, administrator, law-maker, judge, arbiter. As a youth this
prince, for he was of royal blood, was so beautiful that he was likened
to an angel. In mature manhood, there was none to equal him in stature,
manly beauty, strength, and with a voice so deep and powerful that it
was like a bell and could be heard on occasion a mile away, and once,
indeed, at the court of King Bruidh, literally overbore and drowned a
concerted chorus of sullen druids. These had tried to outvoice him and
his monks, little knowing what a mighty force the sixty-fourth Psalm
could be in the throat of this terrible Culdee, who to them must have
seemed much more befitting his house-name, Crimthan (Wolf), than "the
Dove"!
This vocal duel was a characteristic device of the Druids. I recall one
notable instance long before Colum's time, though the _Leabhar na
H'Uidhre_ in which it is to be found was not compiled till A.D. 1000. In
the story of the love of Connla, son of Conn of the Hundred Battles, for
a woman of the other world, a druid asks her whence she has come, and
when she answers that it is from the lands of those who live a beautiful
and deathless life, he knows that she is a woman of the _Sidhe_. So he
chants against the fair woman till the spell of her voice is overcome,
and she goes away as a mist that falls on the shore, as a Hebridean poet
would say.[3]
Later, she comes again, and now invisible to all save Connla. Conn the
king hears her chanting to Connla that it is no such lofty place he
holds "amid short-lived mortals awaiting fearful death" that he need
dread to leave it, "the more as the ever-living ones invite thee to be
the ruler over Tethra (a Kingdom of Joy)." So once more the king calls
upon the Ard-Druid to dispel the woman by his incantations. For a moment
Connla wavers, but the Fairy Woman, with a music of mockery, sings to
him that Druidism is in ill-favour "over yonder," little loved and
little honoured "there," for, in effect, the nations of the Shee do not
need that idle dream. Connla's longing is more great to him than his
kingdom or the fires of home, and he goes with his leannanshee in a
boat, till those on the strand see him dimly and then no more in that
sundown glow, nor ever again. Columba, a poet and scholar familiar with
the old tables of his beloved Eire, probably did not forget on occasion
to turn this druidic tale against Druidism itself, repeating how, in its
own time, before the little bell of the tonsured folk was heard in
Ireland (so little a bell to be the tocsin of fallen gods and broken
nations), "Druidism is not loved, for little has it progressed to honour
on the great Righteous Strand."
For one thing of great Gaelic import, Columba has been given a singular
pre-eminence--not for his love of country, pride of race, passionate
loyalty to his clan, to every blood-claim and foster-claim, and
friendship-claim, though in all this he was the very archetype of the
clannish Gael--but because (so it is averred) he was the first of our
race of whom is recorded the systematic use of the strange gift of
spiritual foresight, "second-sight." It has been stated authoritatively
that he is the first of whom there is record as having possessed this
faculty; but that could only be averred by one ignorant of ancient
Gaelic literature. Even in Adamnan's chronicle, within some seventy
years after the death of Columba, there is record of others having this
faculty, apart from the perhaps more purely spiritual vision of his
mother Aithne, when an angel raimented her with the beauty of her unborn
son, or of his foster-father, the priest Cruithnechan, who saw the
singular light of the soul about his sleeping pupil, or of the abbot
Brendan who redeemed the saint from excommunication and perhaps death by
his vision of him advancing with a pillar of fire before him and an
angel on either side. (When, long years afterwards, Brendan died in
Ireland, Colum in Iona startled his monks by calling for an immediate
celebration of the Eucharist, because it had been revealed to him that
St. Brendan had gone to the heavenly fatherland yesternight: "Angels
came to meet his soul: I saw the whole earth illumined with their
glory.") Among others there is the story of Abbot Kenneth, who, sitting
at supper, rose so suddenly as to leave without his sandals, and at the
altar of his church prayed for Colum, at that moment in dire peril upon
the sea: the story of Ernan, who, fishing in the river Fenda, saw the
death of Colum in a symbol of flame: the story of Lugh mac Tailchan,
who, at Cloinfinchoil, beheld Iona (which he had never visited), and
above it a blaze of angels' wings, and Colum's soul. In the most ancient
tales there is frequent allusion to what we call second-sight. The
writers alluded to could not have heard of the warning of the dread
Mor-Rigan to Cuchullin before the fatal strife of the Tain-Bo-Cuailgne;
or Cuchullin's own pre-vision (among a score as striking) of the
hostings and gatherings on the fatal plain of Muirthemne; or the
Amazonian queen, Scathach's, fore-knowledge of the career and early
death of the champion of the Gaels:
"(At the last) great peril awaits thee ...
Alone against a vast herd:
Thirty years I reckon the length of thy years
(literally, the strength of thy valour);
Further than this I do not add;"