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Ireland and the Making
3.
THE FACTS OF His LIFE
of Britain
Hardly does Columcille appear to have been in his
grave before his friends and admirers began to set down
the facts of his life for the benefit of posterity. Even
in his life Dalian Forgaill, the poet laureate of Ireland,
wrote a poetic eulogy of his work at Drumceat, still with
us in its archaic form and heavily annotated. 1
Mura,
his companion, and Baithene, his intimate and immediate
successor, wrote memoirs of him. Cuimine,
seventh ab-
bot of lona (657-669) wrote a treatise on his virtues
which has been preserved. 2 The work of Adamnan, who
wrote c. 691-3, has been described as "the most complete
piece of such biography that all Europe can boast of,
not only at so early a period, but even through the whole
Middle Ages." 3 To this succeeded a life by John of TinlAmra
Choluim Chilli by Dalian Forgaill, ed. and transL by O'Beirne
Crowe, Dublin, 1871.
2 It is partly included in the third book of Adamnan's work, but has been
independently preserved.
8Pinkerton, Enquiry, Pref. Vol. 1 p. xlviii (Edinb. 1814). A copy of this
work of Adamnan, written by Dorbene, who was elected abbot of lona in
713, and who died in that year was discovered by Dr. Ferdinand Keller in
1854 at the bottom of an old chest in the public library of Schaffhausen. It
proved to be the identical MS., formerly at Reichenau, copied by the Irish
Jesuit Stephen White, and from his copy used by John Colgan for his Trias
Thaumaturga published in 1647, and the Bollandists in 1698, and to-day it
is the oldest MS. in Switzerland. It was edited in 1857, by Dr. William
Reeves with a perfection of scholarship and painstaking research, which puts
his work on a level with O'Donovan's edition of the "Annals of the Four
Masters." Reeves showed himself familiar not merely with the main stream
of Irish history, but with its numerous accessories and tributaries. In concentrating
his varied information and resources on any desired point and
presenting his material in vivid order, he writes with the accurate knowledge
almost of an eye-witness and contemporary and the Ireland of the sixth and
seventh century passes before us as though a world in which the modern
actors were still living. The original MS. has a colophon which ends thus:
"Whoever readeth these books on the virtues of St. Columba, let him pray
to the Lord for me Dorbene that after death I may possess eternal life."
The title page of Reeves' edition reads: "The life of St. Columba, Founder
of Hy. Written by Adamnan, ninth abbot, of that Monastery. The text printed
from a MS. of the eighth century: with the various readings of six other
manuscripts preserved in different parts of Europe. To which are added
copious notes and dissertations, illustrative of the early history of the
Columbian institutions in Ireland and Scotland." "The Historians of Scotland."
Vol. 6, reproduces the work of Reeves with an English translation of
the life. A new edition founded on that of Reeves, with a new translation,
by J. T. Fowler, appeared in 1894. "St. Columba of lona," by Lucy Menzies
(1920) has also some new features.
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