The Latin Irish Lives of Ciaran | Page 3

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