The Attributed Poems

Columba (Colum Cille, c. 521–597) belongs to the foundational period of Irish literary culture, and from an early date he was remembered not only as a saint and an abbot but as a poet and a patron of poets. Two bodies of verse stand at the centre of this memory: the Amra Choluimb Chille, the Old Irish elegy traditionally composed by Dallán Forgaill at or shortly after the saint’s death and one of the earliest datable pieces of vernacular Irish poetry; and the corpus of Latin and Irish poems ascribed to Columba himself — above all the great abecedarian Latin hymn Altus Prosator, and a body of vernacular “exile poems” in which a later tradition gave him a voice for his longing for Ireland. This file sets out what these poems are, what claim each has to early-Iona or Columban origin, and where modern scholarship — centrally Clancy and Márkus — judges the attributions to be secure, plausible, or untenable.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; apostle to the Picts)

The Saint Remembered as a Poet

In the literary tradition of medieval Ireland Columba is the patron and exemplar of learned poetry. The connection is not incidental to his cult but woven into it: he is the saint who, when the bardic order was threatened with suppression, is said to have risen to its defence, and he is the saint to whom the early Gaelic world ascribed some of its most ambitious religious verse. The historical kernel and the legendary accretion are not easy to separate, and the proper task here is to distinguish what can be said with confidence — that Columba was reverenced very early as a learned man and a friend of poets — from the much larger body of verse that a later tradition placed in his mouth.

That Columba was a man of letters is the consistent testimony of his earliest biographer. Adomnán’s Vita Sancti Columbae (c. 697) shows him copying books, composing, and surrounded by the apparatus of a Latin scriptorium; it is in Adomnán that we find the famous picture of the saint copying a psalter on the last day of his life (Adomnán, Vita Sancti Columbae 3.23; trans. Sharpe 1995). The intellectual culture of his community is treated in its own place (see Manuscripts and Learning); what concerns us here is the specifically poetic memory — the tradition that Columba himself wrote verse, and the great elegy written in his honour.

The Amra Choluimb Chille

The Amra Choluimb Chille — the title means roughly the “Eulogy” or “Wonders of Colum Cille” — is an Old Irish elegy for the saint, and it is among the very earliest pieces of datable vernacular poetry to survive from Ireland. The tradition attributes it to Dallán Forgaill, the chief poet (ollam) of Ireland, who is said to have composed it at or shortly after Columba’s death in 597 (Stokes, ed./trans., Amra Choluimb Chille, Revue Celtique 20, 1899; Clancy & Márkus 1995). If the traditional attribution and dating hold even approximately, the Amra is a document of the first importance: a praise-poem for the founder of Iona composed within living memory of him, by the foremost poet of the Gaelic world, in the Irish language at a moment when almost nothing else survives in that language.

The poem itself is notoriously difficult. It is written in a dense, archaic, allusive idiom — the heightened, deliberately obscure diction of the high bardic style — and it can scarcely be read at all without the apparatus that the medieval tradition built up around it. In its transmitted form the Amra comes wrapped in a substantial prose preface and a thick body of interlinear and marginal glosses, which explain the difficult words, expand the allusions, and supply the legendary frame (Stokes 1899; Clancy & Márkus 1995). This frame is itself a major source for the legends of Columba: it is largely in the preface to the Amra that the story of the saint’s intervention on behalf of the poets at the Convention of Druim Cett is elaborated. The preface and glosses are demonstrably later than the poem they accompany — the work of medieval scholars reading and re-reading an inherited and half-understood text — and they must be weighed separately from the verse core.

[Disputed: the date and authorship of the *Amra Choluimb Chille*. The medieval tradition and Stokes's edition (Stokes 1899) present the poem as the work of Dallán Forgaill composed at the time of Columba's death (597); Clancy & Márkus (1995), assessing the linguistic evidence, regard a very early date and origin close to Columba's death as defensible for the verse core, which would make it one of the oldest pieces of Irish vernacular poetry, while treating the elaborate prose preface and glosses as substantially later accretions. The personal authorship by Dallán is part of the received tradition and cannot be independently confirmed.]

The Amra‘s value as evidence is twofold. First, it is testimony to Columba’s enormous prestige: that the ollam of Ireland should compose his elegy, and that the poem should be copied, glossed, and studied for centuries, shows the place the saint had won in the learned memory of the Gael. Second, and through its preface above all, it is the principal literary vehicle for the tradition that Columba was the protector of the poets.

Columba and the Poets: The Convention of Druim Cett

The tradition that Columba saved the bardic order from suppression attaches to the Convention of Druim Cett, a great assembly of Irish and Dál Riatan notables conventionally dated to around 575. Adomnán knows the convention and twice refers to Columba’s presence and dealings there (Adomnán, Vita Sancti Columbae 1.10, 1.49; trans. Sharpe 1995). The full legend — that the filid, the professional poets, had become so numerous, so burdensome, and so given to extortionate satire that there was a movement to expel or suppress them, and that Columba interceded to save the order on condition of its reform — is developed not so much in Adomnán as in the later tradition, including the matter that gathers around the Amra itself (Clancy & Márkus 1995; Herbert 1988).

The historical content of the Druim Cett tradition is debated, and the convention’s actual business (chiefly the status of Dál Riata) is a matter for the political history. What matters here is the literary significance of the legend: in the memory of the Gaelic poets, Columba is the saint to whom they owed their survival as an order, the holy man who stood between the filid and those who would have done away with them. This is why the saint and the poetic tradition are so deeply intertwined — and why a body of verse came in time to be ascribed to him. The protector of the poets was, fittingly, remembered as a poet.

The Altus Prosator

The most celebrated of the poems ascribed to Columba personally is the Altus Prosator — “The High Creator,” from its opening words. It is a long Latin hymn of the Creation, the fall of the angels, the ordering of the cosmos, and the Last Judgement, composed as an abecedarian poem: its stanzas open in turn with the successive letters of the Latin alphabet, A through Z, a structural device of great antiquity in Christian Latin hymnody (Clancy & Márkus 1995). It is a work of real power and learning, dense with scriptural and apocryphal cosmology, and it has a secure place in the Irish hymn tradition: it is preserved in the Liber Hymnorum, the medieval Irish collection of hymns, where it carries the ascription to Columba and an account of the circumstances of its composition (Clancy & Márkus 1995).

The Altus Prosator is the strongest case among the poems attributed to Columba for genuine early-Iona origin, and Clancy and Márkus treat it as such — a poem that may well belong to the Columban milieu of the late sixth or seventh century and is in any case very old. But its attribution to Columba personally is another matter, and here the prudent verdict is caution. The language and metrics are consistent with an early date; the ascription is early and serious; yet there is no means of demonstrating that the historical Columba composed it rather than a poet of his community or of the generations immediately after him.

[Disputed: the authorship of the *Altus Prosator*. The poem is traditionally ascribed to Columba (so the *Liber Hymnorum* and the received Irish tradition) and is plausibly of early-Iona origin; Clancy & Márkus (1995) assess it among the poems with a real claim to origin in the early Columban milieu and treat it as at the least very ancient, while holding that personal authorship by Columba himself is not securely demonstrable. The honest position is that the *Altus Prosator* is an early and possibly Columban-milieu hymn whose attribution to the saint's own hand cannot be proved.]

Two shorter Latin hymns, Adiutor laborantium and Noli pater, are likewise associated with Columba in the tradition and are examined by Clancy and Márkus among the early Iona poems; like the Altus Prosator they have a claim to antiquity but no certain link to the saint’s own composition (Clancy & Márkus 1995).

The Vernacular “Exile Poems”

Quite distinct in character, and far weaker in their claim to authenticity, is a body of Irish vernacular poems in which Columba speaks in the first person of his exile from Ireland and his longing to return. The best known is the poem beginning Fil súil nglais — “There is a grey eye” — in which the speaker looks back from Iona across the sea toward the Ireland he will never see again, the “grey eye” turning ever toward the lost homeland (Clancy & Márkus 1995). Others in the same vein — laments for Derry and the oak-groves, praises of Ireland’s plains, expressions of the pain of peregrinatio — circulate under the rubric “Columcille fecit” (“Columba made this”) and were long received as the saint’s own elegies for his country.

These poems are moving, and they have shaped the popular image of Columba as the homesick exile more than any other texts. But on the question of authorship modern scholarship is clear and largely unanimous: the vernacular exile poems are, in the main, later compositions placed in Columba’s mouth, not his own work. Their language is Middle Irish, centuries younger than the saint; they belong to the long tradition of putting verse into the mouths of revered figures, and they reflect a developed cult and a developed literary genre of the exile’s lament rather than the autograph voice of the sixth-century founder (Clancy & Márkus 1995; Herbert 1988). The theme of peregrinatio — exile for Christ — that they so beautifully express is genuinely Columban in the broad sense (it is the motive Adomnán and the tradition assign to his departure from Ireland); but the specific poems are the tradition’s gift to him, not his gift to the tradition.

[Disputed: the authorship of the vernacular "exile poems" (*Fil súil nglais* and the "Columcille fecit" laments). The received tradition voices these as Columba's own laments for Ireland composed in his exile; Clancy & Márkus (1995) and Herbert (1988) judge them to be largely later Middle Irish compositions attributed to the saint — products of a developed cult and a literary genre of the exile-lament — rather than his autograph work. They are authentic expressions of the Columban *peregrinatio* tradition but not, on the linguistic evidence, the saint's own verse.]

Clancy and Márkus, and the State of the Question

The indispensable modern study is Thomas Owen Clancy and Gilbert Márkus, Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery (Edinburgh University Press, 1995), which edits, translates, and critically assesses the poems with the best claim to early-Iona origin — among them the Amra, the Altus Prosator, and the shorter Latin hymns — and sorts them by the strength of their claim to antiquity and to Columban-milieu authorship (Clancy & Márkus 1995). Their method is exactly the source-critical sifting this collection follows: they neither accept the traditional ascriptions wholesale nor dismiss them, but weigh the linguistic, metrical, and manuscript evidence poem by poem. The result is a layered picture — a small core of very early verse (the Amra, and the early Latin hymns of which the Altus Prosator is the chief) that may genuinely reach back to Columba’s own community, surrounded by a much larger and later body of vernacular poetry that the cult composed in his name.

For the Orthodox reader the distinction matters in the same way it does for any saint’s dossier. The Church venerates Columba as a holy man, a monastic father, and an apostle to the Picts; that veneration does not depend on his having written any particular poem. Where the tradition has put words of penitence, exile, and praise of the Creator into his mouth, those words may be received as the Church’s own meditation on the saint and on the cost of leaving all for Christ — held as the tradition’s testimony, in the same way Adomnán’s wonders are held (see Prophecy and the Second Sight; on receiving a hagiographic dossier, The Shape of the Cult). The Altus Prosator, whoever first wrote it, is a genuine monument of the early Insular Church’s vision of God the High Creator; the exile poems are a genuine monument of how that Church remembered and loved its founder. To know which is which is not to diminish either, but to read each for what it truly is.

References

Clancy, Thomas Owen, and Gilbert Márkus. Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995. (Central study: edition, translation, and source-critical assessment of the early Iona poems — the Amra Choluimb Chille, the Altus Prosator, Adiutor laborantium, Noli pater, and the vernacular poems; the basis for the judgements on the Altus Prosator’s early-Iona but not securely personal authorship and on the later, Middle Irish character of the vernacular “exile poems.”)
Stokes, Whitley, ed. and trans. “The Bodleian Amra Choluimb Chille.” Revue Celtique 20 (1899). (Edition and translation of the Amra Choluimb Chille with its prose preface and glosses; the traditional ascription to Dallán Forgaill and the Druim Cett material.)
Adomnán of Iona. Life of St Columba (Vita Sancti Columbae). Trans. Richard Sharpe. London: Penguin, 1995. (Cited by book and chapter; VC 1.10 and 1.49 for Columba at the Convention of Druim Cett; VC 3.23 for the saint copying a psalter at his death.)
Anderson, Alan Orr, and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson, eds. and trans. Adomnán’s Life of Columba. Rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. (Critical edition and translation of the Vita Columbae.)
Herbert, Máire. Iona, Kells, and Derry: The History and Hagiography of the Monastic Familia of Columba. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. (On the Columban familia, the development of the cult, the Druim Cett tradition, and the later character of the vernacular Columban poetry.)