The literature of the Celts : its history and romance / by Magnus Maclean.

  • Magnus MacLean
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The literature of the Celts : its history and romance / by Magnus Maclean. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    81/424 page 61
    into oblivion, and the book in the heart of the troubled area survives them all and emerges at length, as if from the debris, to reassert that “ there lived a man.” Adamnan, ninth Abbot of Iona, wrote the original in the years 691 to 693—that is, ten or twelve years before his death, which occurred in 704. In the second preface—for there are two—he tells us that it is the substance of the narratives learned from his predecessors, and is founded either on written authorities anterior to his own time or on what he heard himself from ancient men then living. And we know that he was sufficiently near the fountainhead, both in time and place, to be able to draw from authentic sources ; for he wrote just a century after St. Columba’s death, and at the urgent request of his brethren. In his boyhood he had frequent opportunities of conversing with those who had seen and known the saint, and he was surrounded in the monastery and in the island with all the halo of association and piety in which the memory of his hero was enshrined. n he written material he could rely on was not meagre even at so early a date. There was the narrative of Cummene the Fair, seventh abbot of Iona, and thus one of his own immediate predecessors. His account Adamnan transferred entire and almost verbatim into the third book of his own work. It was really a tract entitled De virtutibus sancti Columbce. In addition to this he had at least one other Latin memoir and various Gaelic poems in praise of the saint, such as the “Amra” of Dalian Forgaill, and those of Baithene Mor, and perhaps of St. Mura. In another of his books (De Locis Sanctis) the author informs us how he generally set about composing his literary efforts. He wrote the first draft on waxen tablets, revised and corrected it, and then from the text so prepared, a clean copy was neatly written out on parchment. Dorbene the Scribhnidh may have copied the Life in Adamnan’s own time ; if not quite so early, then shortly after his death. And whatever became of Adamnan’s original, Dorbene’s copy appears to have remained in the
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image