LIFE OF ST COLUMBA

Preface

A source of the first importance for the early history of Ireland and Scotland, Adomnán’s Life of St Columba is also the most engaging of the Lives of Celtic saints. It conveys a vivid sense of the holy man among the brethren of his community, often sitting in his little hut in Iona at the centre of the lives of all his monks. Adomnán wrote a century after Columba’s death, drawing on the collective memory of the community, on public declarations made in the presence of the abbot and elders over the years, and on stories recorded in writing. Most of his stories are told with circumstantial detail and most have a miracle as their point. Some are biblical miracles in which Columba imitates Christ; others are more like folk tales, occasionally quite out of keeping with a monastic context; and many are everyday miracles – events and impressions interpreted after the event as signs of Columba’s sanctity. External reality, superstition, and a theological understanding of the holy man in his relationship to God are so mixed that the Life has appealed to readers across the spectrum of Christian belief and outside it.

The text survives in a manuscript copied at Iona, probably while the author was still alive. The saint himself is presented as someone devoted to the copying of sacred books, and Adomnán gives instructions that each copy made of his work should be carefully compared with its exemplar. In this translation I tried to take such care, though I have been more concerned to express his meaning in English than to replicate his words or his sometimes contrived style. The Introduction sets the scene for Columba, for Adomnán and for the early monastery in Iona. The notes, more extensive than in previous translations, aim chiefly to explain to modern readers what Adomnán’s original audience knew, but I have not always resisted the temptation to add stories from later traditions at Derry and Iona.

The translation was based on the Latin text published in 1961 by Alan Orr Anderson and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson. In 1989 Dr Marjorie Anderson very kindly read over my draft translation and notes, while I read in typescript the introduction to her second edition, published in 1991. I am most grateful to her for this friendly sharing of our independent work and for the improvements she contributed to this book. Other friends and colleagues read the whole book at a later stage, and I am grateful again to Professor Robert Bartlett, Dr Clare Stancliffe, Dr Alan Thacker, and Professor Charles Thomas, for their advice and comments. Help in other ways was given by Noreen Gypson, Professor Pádraig Ó Riain, Dr Paul Russell, Cornelia Starks and the Ven. Yeshe Zangmo, and for this I thank them all.

Columba, Adomnán, and his Life are all rooted in the island of Iona, and I too have returned to stay there several times during the course of my work. Anyone who has looked over the Sound from Iona to Fionnphort will call the view to mind when reading Adomnán’s stories about visitors who shouted to attract the attention of the ferryman. Little has changed in that scene of sea and sky. Although we cannot now recover the appearance of the early monastery, Iona has a powerful sense of place, which permeates much of Adomnán’s Life; while through the Life one can recapture the atmosphere of Adomnán’s and Columba’s Iona.

23 September 1994