Of all the saints of Ireland, whose names are recorded in the native
Martyrologies, probably there were none who made so deep an impression
upon the minds of their fellow-countrymen as did Ciaran[1] of
Clonmacnois. He stands, perhaps, second only to Brigit of Kildare
in this respect; for Patrick was a foreigner, and Colum Cille
accomplished his work and exercised his influence outside the shores
of Ireland.
Doubtless much of the importance of Ciaran is reflected back from
the outstanding importance of his great foundation--the monastic
university, as it is fair to call it, of _Cluain maccu Nois_ (in an
English setting spelt "Clonmacnois"), on the shore of the Shannon. But
this cannot be the whole explanation of the esteem in which he
was held; it must be at least partly due to the memory of his own
character and personality.
Such a conclusion is indicated if we examine critically the _Lives_ of
this saint, translations of which are given in the present volume, and
compare them with the lives of other Irish saints. In studying all
these documents we must bear in mind that none of them are, in any
modern sense of the word, biographies. A biography, in the proper
definition of the term, gives an ordered account of the life of its
subject, with dates, and endeavours to trace the influences which
shaped his character and his career, and the manner in which he
himself influenced his surroundings. The so-called lives of saints are
properly to be regarded as _homilies_. They were composed to be read
to assemblies of the Faithful, as sermons for the festivals of the
saints with whom they deal; and their purpose was to edify the hearers
by presenting catalogues of the virtues of their subjects, and,
especially, of their thaumaturgic powers. Thus they do not possess
the unity of ordered and well-designed biographies; they consist
of disconnected anecdotes, describing how this event or that gave
occasion for a miraculous display.
It follows that to the historian in search of unvarnished records
of actual fact these documents are useless, without most drastic
criticism. They were compiled long after the time of their subjects,
from tales, doubtless at first, and probably for a considerable time,
transmitted by oral tradition. It would be natural that there should
be much cross-borrowing, tales told about one saint being adapted to
others as well, until they became stock incidents. It would also be
nothing more than natural that many elements in the Lives should
be survivals from more ancient mythologies, having their roots in
pre-Christian beliefs. Nevertheless, none of these writings are devoid
of value as pictures of life and manners; and even in descriptions of
incredible and pointless miracles precious scraps of folk-lore are
often embedded. In most, if not in all, cases, the incidents recorded
in the Lives are to be criticised as genuine traditions, whatever
their literal historicity may be; few, if any, are conscious
inventions or impostures.[2]
In the Lives of Ciaran there are many conventional incidents of this
kind, which reappear in the lives of other saints. In the Annotations
in the present edition a few such parallels are quoted; though no
attempt is made to give an exhaustive list, the compilation of which
would occupy more time and space than its scientific value would
warrant. But there are certain other incidents of a more individual
type, and it is these which make the Lives of Ciaran especially
remarkable. They may well be genuine reminiscences of the real life,
or at least of the real character of the man himself. Thus, there are
a number of coincidences, clearly undesigned (noted below, p. 104)
consistently pointing to a pre-Celtic parentage for the saint. Again,
the saint's mother is represented as a strong personality, with a
decided strain of "thrawnness" in her composition; while the saint
himself is shown to us as distinguished by a beautiful unselfishness.
This, it must be confessed, is very far from being a common character
of the Irish saints, as they are represented to us by the native
hagiologists; and in any case the character-drawing of the average
Irish saint's life is so rudimentary, that when we are thus enabled to
detect well-defined traits, we are quite justified in accepting them
as based on the tradition of the actual personality of the saint. In
other words, so deep was the impression which the man made upon his
contemporaries during his short life, that his _memorabilia_ seem to
be, on the whole, of a more definitely historic nature than are those
of other Irish saints.
There is, however, a disturbing element which must be kept in mind in
criticising the Lives of Ciaran. He was the son of a carpenter, and he
was said to have died at the age of thirty-three. It is quite clear
that these coincidences with the facts of the earthly parentage and
death of Christ were observed by the homilists--indeed the author of
the Irish Life says as much, at the end of his work. They provoked a
natural and perhaps wholly unconscious desire to draw other parallels;
and if we may use a convenient German technical term, there is
a traceable _Tendenz_ in this direction, as is indicated in the
Annotations on later pages. It is not to be supposed that even these
apparently imitative incidents are (not to mince matters) mere
pious frauds; they may well have come into existence in the
folk-consciousness automatically, before they received their present
literary form. But such a development could hardly have centred in an
unworthy subject; there must have been a well-established tradition
of a _Christ-likeness_ of character in the man, for such parallels in
detail to have taken shape.[3]
The homiletic purpose of these documents is most clearly shown in the
Irish Life. This was written to be preached as a sermon on the saint's
festival ["this day _to-day_," § 1], at Clonmacnois ["he came _to this
town_," § 34: "a fragment of the cask remained _here_ till recently,"
§ 36: "_here_ are the relics of Ciaran," § 41. Similarly the First
Latin Life, § 35, calls the saint "_Our_ most holy patron"]. The
actual date of the Irish sermon is less easy to fix; the language
has been modernised step by step in the process of transmission from
manuscript to manuscript, but originally it may have been written
about the eleventh century, though incorporating fragments of earlier
material. The passage just quoted, saying that a certain relic had
remained _till recently_, may possibly indicate that the homily had
been delivered shortly after one of the many burnings and plunderings
which the monastery suffered; in such a calamity the relic might have
perished. The prophecy put into Ciaran's mouth, that "there would be
great persecution of his city from evil men in the end of the world"
[Irish Life, § 38] seems to relate to such an event: it is very
suggestive that exactly the same exprestion "great persecution from
evil men" (_ingrem mór ó droch-daoinibh_) is used in the _Chronicon
Scotorum_ of certain raids on the monastery which took place in the
year A.D. 1091; and that on the strength of an old prophecy there was
a belief in Ireland that the world was destined to come to an end in
the year 1096, as we learn from the _Annals of the Four Masters_ under
that date.[4] It must, however, be remembered that a date determined
for a single incident does not necessarily date the whole compilation
containing it.
The text of the First Latin Life (here called for convenience of
reference LA) is found in an early fifteenth-century MS. in Marsh's
Library, Dublin. It has been edited, without translation, by the Rev.
C. Plummer in his most valuable _Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae_ (Oxford,
1910) vol. i, pp. 200-216. The translation given in this volume has
been made from Plummer's edition, which I have collated with the
original MS.[5]
The text of the Second Latin Life (LB) is contained in two MSS. in the
Bodleian Library (Rawl. B 485 and Rawl. B 505, here called R1 and R2).
Of these R2 is a direct copy of R1, as has been proved by Plummer, in
his description of these manuscripts.[6] As to their date, there is
no agreement; the estimate for R1 ranges from the first half of the
thirteenth to the fourteenth century, R2 being necessarily somewhat
later. The Life of Ciaran contained in these MSS. has been used
by Plummer in editing LA, and extracts from it are printed in his
footnotes. It has not, however, been previously printed in its
entirety, and a transcript made by myself is therefore added here, in
an Appendix.
The text of the Third Latin Life (LC) is contained in the well-known
Brussels MS., called _Codex Salmaticensis_ from its former sojourn
at Salamanca. It is of the fourteenth century. This was the only
continuous authority at the disposal of the compiler of the Bollandist
life of our saint; he speaks of it in the most contemptuous terms. The
life of Ciaran in this manuscript is a mere fragment, evidently copied
from an imperfect exemplar; there seems to have been a chasm in
the middle, and there is a lacuna at the end, which the scribe
has endeavoured to conceal by adding the words "Finit, Amen." The
translation here given has been prepared from the edition of the
Salamanca MS. by de Smedt and de Backer, cols. 155-160.
The Irish Life (here denoted VG, i.e. _Vita Goedelica_) was edited by
Whitley Stokes from the late fifteenth-century MS. called the _Book of
Lismore._[7] The numerous errors in the Lismore text may be to some
extent corrected by collation with another Brussels MS., written in
the seventeenth century by Micheál ó Cléirigh. Stokes has indicated
the more important readings of the Brussels MS. in his edition. The
scribe of the Lismore Text was conscious of the defects of his copy:
for in a note appended to the Life of our saint, he says, "It is not I
who am responsible for the meaningless words in this _Life_, but the
bad manuscript"--_i.e._ the imperfect exemplar of which he was making
a transcript.
There were other Lives of the saint in existence, apparently no longer
extant. Of these, one was in the hands of the hagiographer Sollerius:
for in his edition of the _Martyrologium_ of Usuardus (Antwerp, 1714,
p. 523) he says, _Querani, Kirani, uel Kiriani uitam MS. habemus.
uariaque ad eam annotata, quae suo tempore digerentur_. This promise
he does not appear to have fulfilled; the Bollandist compiler, as we
have just noticed, had no materials but the imperfect Salamanca Life,
and was forced to fill its many gaps as best he could, by diligently
collecting references to Ciaran in the lives of other saints. Another
Life of the saint seems to be referred to in the _Martyrology of
Donegal_; under the 10th May that compilation quotes a certain "Life
of Ciaran of Cluain" (_i.e._ Clonmacnois) as the authority for a
statement to the effect that "the order of Comgall [of Bangor, Co.
Down] was one of the eight orders that were in Ireland." It would
be irrelevant to discuss here the meaning of this statement; its
importance for us lies in the fact that the sentence is not found in
any of the extant Lives, so that some other text, now unknown, must be
in question.
Ciaran of Clonmacnois was not the only saint of that name. Besides his
well-known namesake of Saighir (Seir-Kieran, King's Co.), there were
a few lesser stars called Ciaran, and there is danger of confusion
between them. The name reappears in Cornwall, with the regular
Brythonic change of Q to P, in the form Pieran or Pirran. This Pieran
is wrongly identified by Skene[8] with our saint; a single glance at
the abstract of the Life of St. Pieran given by Sir T.D. Hardy[9]
will show how mistaken this identification is. A similar confusion is
probably at the base of the curious statement in Adam King's _Scottish
Kalendar of Saints_, that Queranus was an "abot in Scotl[=a]d under
king Ethus, [anno] 876" and of Camerarius' description of him as
"abbas Foilensis in Scotia."[10]
The four documents of which translations are printed in this book
relate almost, though not quite, the same series of incidents. There
is a sufficient divergence between them, both in selection and in
order, as well as in the minor details, to make the determination of
their mutual relationship a difficult problem. We must regard all
four as independent compositions, though based on a common group of
sources, which, in the first instance, were doubtless disjointed
_memorabilia_, preserved by oral tradition in Clonmacnois. These would
in time gradually become fitted into the four obvious phases of the
saint's actual life--his boyhood, his schooldays, his wanderings, and
his final settlement at Clonmacnois. It is not difficult to form a
plausible theory as to how the systematisation took place, and also
as to how the slight variants between different versions of the same
story arose. The composition of hymns to the founder and patron would
surely be a favourite literary exercise in Clonmacnois. In such hymns
the different incidents would be told and re-told, the details varying
with the knowledge and the metrical skill of the versifiers. There are
excerpts from such hymns, in Irish, scattered through VG: and LB ends
with a _pasticcio_ of similar fragments in Latin. As a number of
different metres are employed, both in the Irish and in the Latin
extracts, there must have been at least as many independent
compositions drawn upon by the compilers of the prose Lives: and it is
noteworthy that there are occasionally discrepancies in detail between
the verse fragments and their present prose setting. Most probably the
prose Lives were based directly on the hymns; one preacher would use
one hymn as his chief authority, another would use another, and
thus the petty differences between them would become fixed, perhaps
exaggerated as the prose writer filled in details for which the
exigencies of verse allowed no scope. It is probably impossible to
carry the history of the tradition further.
In order to facilitate comparison between the four documents, I have
divided them into _incidents_, and have provided titles to each. These
titles are so chosen that they may be used for every presentation of
the incident, however the details may vary. The titles are numbered
with _Roman_ numerals, whilst the successive incidents within each
of the Lives are numbered consecutively with _Arabic_ numerals. The
_Harmony of the Four Lives_, which follows this Introduction, will
make cross-reference easy.
No modern biography, no edition of the ancient homiletic Lives, of
Ciaran could be considered complete without a history of Clonmacnois,
through which being dead he yet spake to his countrymen for a thousand
years. It was the editor's intention to include such a history in the
present volume; and this part of the projected work was drafted. But
as it progressed, and as the indispensable material increased in bulk,
it became evident that it would be impossible to do justice to the
subject within the narrow limits of a volume of the present series. A
slight or superficial history of Clonmacnois would be worse than none,
as it would block the way for the fuller treatment which the subject
well deserves. The materials collected for this part of the work
have therefore been reserved for the present: it is hoped that their
publication will not be long delayed.
[Footnote 1: The name is pronounced as a dissyllable, something like
_Kyee-raun_, with a stress on the second syllable.]
[Footnote 2: The Bollandists long ago remarked as the special
characteristics of Irish Saints' Lives, their doubtful historicity,
their late date, and their continual repetition of stock incidents.
(_At priusquam id agam, lectorem duo uniuersim monitum uelim; primum
est, quod Hibernorum sanctorum acta passim dubia sint fidei, et
a scriptoribus minime accuratis ac aetate longe posterioribus
conscripta; alterum est, quod in iisdem frequens occurrat rerum
simillimarum narratio, quas uariis sanctis adscribunt, ita ut nescias
cui tuto adscribi possint._--Acta Sanctorum, September, vol. iii, p.
372).]
[Footnote 3: Even the date of Ciaran's death may have been
manipulated, in order to make his age conform to the age of Christ.
As we shall see below, traditions vary.]
[Footnote 4: The end of the
world is not actually mentioned in the Annals, but the expected plague
referred to was undoubtedly the apparition of the mysterious _Roth
Ramhach_, or "oar-wheel," an instrument of vengeance that was to
herald the end of all things. For the references to this prophecy see
O'Curry's _Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History_ (index, _sub
voce_ "Roth Ramhach"), and the present writer's _Study of the Remains
and Traditions of Tara_ (Proceedings Royal Irish Academy, vol. xxxiv,
sect. C, p. 231 ff.).]
[Footnote 5: The following corrections may be noticed. Page 201 of
printed text, line 7, _for_ Et cum _read_ Cumque. Same page, line 24,
_for_ factum _read_ factam (_sic_). Page 202, line 6, _after_ vitulum
_add_ ilico canis famelicus iruit (_sic_) in uitulum. Same page, line
25, _after_ fregit _add_ et fracto capite effussoque cerebro canis
periit. Same page, line 33, _after_ narrabant _add_ hoc. Same page,
lines 35, 38, _for_ vaccam _read_ vacam. Page 203, line 35, _for_
Angeli _read_ Angli. Same page, line 39, _insert_ et _after_ generis.
Page 204, line 7, Innsythe appears to be written in the MS. as one
word. Same line, _insert_ uidit _before_ zabulum. Same page, line 18,
_after_ flumen _add_ et ibi mersum est. Page 205, line 32, _read_ est
ostensum. Page 206, line 18, _after_ libri _add_ ad locum. Same page,
line 32, _after_ manducans _add_ in illa die. Same page, line 38,
_read_ Kyaranus. Same page, line 40, _read_ Maelgharbh. Page 207, line
13, _after_ recepit _add_ ipse. Page 208, line 16, _for_ complebit
_read_ implebit. Page 209, line 23, _delete_ et _after_ clamor; and
in the next line _for_ impediebant _read_ -bat. Page 211, line 14,
_insert_ in _before_ istis. Same page, line 16, _read_ loco isto.
Same page, line 40, _read_ edifficio. Page 212, line 2, _read_
edifficiorum. Page 213, line 10, _after_ ignem _insert_ nostrum. Same
page, line 21, _for_ ipsi _read_ ipsum. Same page, line 37, _after_
paciencie _insert_ nostre. Page 214, footnote 3, note that the first
"uas" is struck out. Same page, footnote 7, the first "sanctus" is
expuncted.]
[Footnote 6: _Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie_, vol. v, p. 429.]
[Footnote 7: _Lives of Saints from the Book of Lismore_, Oxford, 1890,
pp. 117-134.]
[Footnote 8: _Four Ancient Books of Wales_, i, 124.]
[Footnote 9: _Descriptive Catalogue of Materials for the History of
Great Britain,_ vol. i, p. 102.]
[Footnote 10: Forbes. _Kalendars_, s. v. Queranus; Bollandist _Acta_.]
* * * * *