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CHAPTER XI
COLUMCILLE AND BRETHREN AT IONA
I. The Moving World of Ireland and Britain. 2. Ritual and Cere-
monial. 3. Literary Work and Other Occupations. 4. Columcille
and His Friendships.
i. THE MOVING WORLD OF IRELAND AND BRITAIN
IN turning over the pages of Adamnan, we have
brought home to us one of the precious functions
which literature serves. Had we no Roman litera-
ture, the material monuments of Rome would be almost
as meaningless to us as the Pyramids and the Sphinx.
Had we no Grecian literature, the marvels of Greek archi-
tecture would tell us a story as broken almost as the
cryptograms conned by archeologists from Babylonian
mounds. Had we no pagan Irish literature, the Europe
of the Celt, the Galatian and the Gaul would be as dead
to us as an Egyptian mummy; its monuments would be
as insoluble as the sentinel stones of Stonehenge and
Carnac ; and old wives' foreign tales would take the place
of the authentic witness of antiquity. Had we no medieval
Irish literature, medieval Ireland would be as incom-
municable as medieval America. But the living litera-
ture of ancient and early medieval Ireland is more copious
and authoritative than the literature of all the rest of west-
ern Europe put together,
and of its medieval monuments
there is hardly any work more informative and interesting
than Adamnan's biography of Columcille. Regret is
sometimes exprest that Adamnan did not write in Irish
rather than in Latin; that he wrote the history of an