02 — The Exile to Iona
The hinge of Columba’s life: how a monk of the northern Uí Néill came to leave Ireland and settle on a small island off the western coast of Scotland, where he founded the monastery that would carry his name across the insular world. This section treats the famous and contested tradition that his departure was a penance for the blood shed at the battle of Cúl Dreimhne — itself, in the developed legend, the fruit of a “copyright” dispute over a psalter copied from Finnian — and sets that late story against the bare notice of Adomnán, who frames the crossing as a voluntary pilgrimage “for Christ.” It then follows the voyage of 563 and the founding of the monastery on Iona, weighing the disputed question of who granted him the island.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; apostle to the Picts)
The journey from Ireland to Iona is the most narratively charged moment in the whole Columban tradition, and also one of the most source-critically treacherous. By the later Middle Ages a single coherent story had crystallised: that Columba secretly copied a book belonging to his old teacher Finnian; that the high king Diarmait mac Cerbaill, asked to judge the dispute, ruled “to every cow its calf, to every book its copy” against him; that this grievance, compounded by Diarmait’s violation of Columba’s sanctuary, drove the saint to incite his Uí Néill kinsmen to war; that they won the battle of Cúl Dreimhne at terrible cost; and that, condemned by a synod for the blood spilled, Columba sailed into a self-imposed exile to win for Christ as many souls as had fallen in the fighting. It is a magnificent story. It is also, in nearly every particular beyond the bare fact of the battle, a later construction.
The discipline of this section is the discipline of the whole guide (see The Vita Columbae): to separate what the earliest sources actually attest from what the developed legend supplies, and to name the scholars — Richard Sharpe, Máire Herbert, Thomas Owen Clancy — who have shown where the seam lies. The battle of Cúl Dreimhne is historical; the Annals of Ulster record it under the year 561. The “copyright” origin, the synodal condemnation read as a penance, and the vow to win souls in recompense are not in Adomnán and surface only in much later Irish sources, above all the sixteenth-century Betha Colaim Chille of Manus O’Donnell. Adomnán, our earliest witness, knows that Columba was excommunicated by a synod at Tailtiu “for certain venial and quite excusable reasons,” and that he crossed to Britain in the forty-second year of his life “wishing to be a pilgrim for Christ” — but he does not tell the copyright story at all.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Battle of Cúl Dreimhne | The flagship source-critical study of the section: the legend of the secretly copied psalter (later identified with the Cathach), Diarmait’s “to every cow its calf, to every book its copy” judgment, the sanctuary grievance, the battle of c. 561, and the tradition of exile as penance — set against Adomnán’s bare notice of the synod of Tailtiu (VC 3.3) and assessed with both sides named. |
| The Founding of Iona, 563 | The voyage of 563 in the forty-second year of Columba’s life (VC Second Preface); the grant of the island of Í / Ioua to Columba, disputed between Conall mac Comgaill of Dál Riata and the Pictish king Bridei; the Irish kingdom of Scottish Dál Riata straddling the sea; the twelve companions; and the founding and early layout of the monastery — vallum, church, and cells — on the frontier between Dál Riata and Pictland. |
See Also
- The Young Monk Colum Cille — Columba’s formation, his Uí Néill royal kindred, and his Irish foundations before the exile
- Ireland of the Saints — the sixth-century Irish church and the world of the túatha and the kings that the battle belongs to
- Bridei and the Northern Picts — the mission that the island base at Iona made possible
- The Vita Columbae — the source-critical character of Adomnán’s Life, the controlling discipline of this section
- Celtic Monasticism and the Desert — peregrinatio pro Christo, the ascetic ideal of exile-for-Christ that Adomnán invokes
- Monasticism — the wider ascetic tradition Iona embodied in its insular form
References
- Adomnán of Iona. Life of St Columba. Trans. Richard Sharpe. London: Penguin, 1995. (The synod of Tailtiu and excommunication, VC 3.3; the crossing in the forty-second year “wishing to be a pilgrim for Christ,” Second Preface; the battle of Cúl Dreimhne, VC 1.7.)
- Anderson, Alan Orr, and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson, eds. Adomnán’s Life of Columba. Rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
- Herbert, Máire. Iona, Kells, and Derry: The History and Hagiography of the Monastic Familia of Columba. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
- Mac Airt, Seán, and Gearóid Mac Niocaill, eds. The Annals of Ulster (to A.D. 1131). Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1983. (Cúl Dreimhne, s.a. 561.)
- O’Donnell, Manus. Betha Colaim Chille / Life of Columcille. Compiled 1532. Ed. and trans. A. O’Kelleher and G. Schoepperle. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1918.
- Sharpe, Richard. “Introduction” and notes. In Adomnán of Iona: Life of St Columba. London: Penguin, 1995.