Relics and the Flight from the Vikings

St Columba died on Iona in 597 and was buried on the island he had founded; for two centuries his shrine made Iona the head of the Columban familia and one of the holiest places in the Insular world. Then came the Vikings: the raids that began in 795 and recurred — the slaughter of sixty-eight monks at Martyrs’ Bay in 806 — forced the community to a decision that reshaped the cult, splitting the familia and removing the founder’s relics and treasures to safety. This file traces that history: the deathbed scene as Adomnán constructs it, the burial on Iona, the Viking catastrophe, the founding of Kells in Ireland (c. 807) and the later translation of relics to Dunkeld in Scotland (c. 849), the division of the relics between the two kingdoms, and the surviving relic-objects — the Brecbennach and the Cathach — that carry the cult down into the later Middle Ages.

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

The Death on Iona (597)

The single narrative on which the Church’s memory of Columba’s death rests is the climactic chapter of Adomnán’s Life — the last chapter of the third book, de angelicis apparitionibus (Adomnán, Vita Sancti Columbae 3.23; trans. Sharpe 1995). Everything that is said of how the saint died is said on Adomnán’s authority, and the death-scene is, as the companion files set out, among the most carefully constructed in early medieval hagiography; it must be read first as the testimony of the Columban community to the holy death of its founder, pinned to its source, and not as an independently adjudicated chronicle of his last hours (METHODOLOGY §3.5; see The Shape of the Cult).

What Adomnán reports is this. In the week before his death Columba, while resting, is shown by an angel that his end is near; he foretells the day of his passing to his attendant Diarmait and asks that it be kept secret until the time comes (VC 3.23; Sharpe 1995). On his last day he is carried in a cart to bless the monastery’s barn and its stores, then goes up the little hill above the monastery, blesses the place and prophesies its future honour. As he rests by the roadside on the way back, the old white pack-horse that had served the monastery comes to him, lays its head against his breast, and — Adomnán says — weeps, as if foreknowing its master’s departure; Columba, rather than driving the beast off, blesses the mourning animal (VC 3.23; trans. Sharpe 1995). He returns to his hut to resume copying the psalter, and stops at the verse “they that seek the Lord shall want no manner of thing that is good” (Ps. 33[34]:10), saying that Baíthéne, his successor, may write what follows — the dying scribe laying down his pen at a word of providence.

Then comes the death itself. At the sounding of the midnight bell for the night office Columba rises and hastens ahead of the others into the church, and there, before the altar, he sinks down. Diarmait, following in the dark, finds the dying abbot; he raises Columba’s hand for him so that the saint may bless the assembling brethren even as his voice fails, and Columba dies there at the altar, his face serene as of one who sees the angels coming to meet him (VC 3.23; trans. Sharpe 1995). Adomnán adds that on that night holy men in Ireland — among them a saint at prayer who saw the whole island ablaze with heavenly light — beheld Iona filled with the radiance of angels, the visionary sign that crowns the third book’s whole theme (VC 3.23; Sharpe 1995). The dying at the altar, at the hour of the night office, with the hand raised in blessing, makes the saint’s death an act of worship and of governance: the abbot blessing his community with his last strength. The date is conventionally reckoned to 597, though the Annals of Ulster enter Columba’s obit under 595 (see Ireland of the Saints on the dating of the obit).

The Burial and the Shrine

Columba was buried on Iona, in the monastery he had founded thirty-four years before, and there his tomb became the cult’s centre (Sharpe 1995, Introduction; Herbert 1988). For the next two centuries the grave of the founder anchored the whole Columban familia — the federation of houses across Ireland and the Irish Sea that looked to Iona as their head and to Columba as their father (see The Familia of Columba). The relics of the saint were the familia‘s most precious possession: the bones were enshrined, and there developed in time the practice — attested for the seventh century by Adomnán’s own abbacy — of elevating and circulating relics of Columba. The promulgation of the Cáin Adomnáin, the Law of the Innocents, at the synod of Birr in 697 was itself the occasion for such a circulation of the founder’s relics, by which the familia’s standing was asserted across the Gaelic world (Herbert 1988; Sharpe 1995, Introduction; on the Life as part of the same campaign, The Vita Columbae).

The reliquary in which the bones were kept seems, on the model of other Irish saints’ shrines, to have been a portable house-shaped scrín of wood and decorated metal — the kind of object that could be carried in procession, taken on circuit to gather dues and oaths, and, in extremity, picked up and removed. That portability would prove decisive. When the Viking storm broke, the relics of Columba were not fixed monuments to be defended in place but treasures that could be carried to safety — and carried they were.

The Viking Catastrophe (795–825)

The end of the eighth century brought to the coasts and islands of the Insular world a violence of a kind they had not known. The Scandinavian raids that the annals begin to record in the 790s fell with particular ferocity on the wealthy, undefended, sea-girt monasteries — and Iona, lying open to the western sea-lanes, rich in metalwork and books and the offerings of two centuries of pilgrims, was among the most exposed targets in the British Isles. The Annals of Ulster track the assaults with grim economy.

Iona was first burned by the heathens in 795 (Annals of Ulster, s.a. 795). It was struck again in 802, when the monastery was burned by the Vikings (Annals of Ulster, s.a. 802). And in 806 came the worst of all: the killing of the familia of Iona by the heathens, sixty-eight men slain (Annals of Ulster, s.a. 806; Herbert 1988). This slaughter is the event memorialised in the place-name Martyrs’ Bay (Gaelic Port nam Mairtear) on Iona, by tradition the site where the monks were cut down — the killing of the sixty-eight remembered as a martyrdom of the community (Herbert 1988; Clancy and Márkus 1995). Within a single generation Iona had been burned three times and its monastic family massacred, and the heathen ships kept coming: the annals continue to register raids and killings in the following years (Annals of Ulster, s.aa. 806, 825; Herbert 1988).

The killing of 806 and the relentless return of the raiders forced a strategic decision that would change the shape of the cult forever. The community could not be defended where it stood. To preserve the familia, its leadership, its relics, and its treasures, the only course was to remove the head of the federation — and the body of the founder — out of the Vikings’ reach. The decision was taken to split the community and to carry its most precious possessions inland, to safety in Ireland (Herbert 1988).

The Founding of Kells (c. 807)

The refuge chosen was in the Irish midlands, far from the sea: Kells (Irish Cenannas), in modern Co. Meath, where land was acquired and a new monastery built to serve as the inland head of the Columban familia. The Annals of Ulster record the building of the new monastery of Iona at Kells in this period — the construction of Kells as a deliberate foundation to house the familia’s leadership — and the abbot Cellach is associated with the move; by 814 the work was such that the abbacy could be governed from the Irish foundation (Annals of Ulster, s.aa. 807, 814; Herbert 1988). The conventional date for the founding is c. 807.

The significance of Kells is exactly that it became a new head of the federation. For two centuries Iona had been the unquestioned centre, but the Viking threat made an island monastery untenable as the seat of the comarba, the heir of Columba. Kells, secure in the interior of Ireland and close to the heartland of the Uí Néill — Columba’s own royal kindred — now took on that role, and the centre of gravity of the Columban world shifted decisively from Scotland to Ireland (Herbert 1988). Iona was not abandoned: a community remained on the holy island, and the cult of the grave continued there. But the leadership, and a major portion of the relics and treasures, were now in Ireland, and the familia had acquired a double centre. It is to this Irish foundation that the Book of Kells owes its name and its medieval home, whether or not the manuscript was itself made on Iona and carried over with the rest of the treasure (see Manuscripts and Learning on the Book of Kells and the dispute over where it was made).

The Translation to Dunkeld (c. 849) and the Division of the Relics

The Scottish side of the story is bound up with the rise of a new kingdom. In the middle of the ninth century the Gaelic kingdom of Dál Riata and the Pictish kingdom were being fused, under Cináed mac Ailpín (Kenneth mac Alpin), into the kingdom that would become the kingdom of the Scots — Alba. A king building a new realm needed a patron saint to sanctify it, and Columba, the apostle of the northern Picts and the founder of the holiest house in the land, was the obvious and the necessary choice (Herbert 1988; Clancy, on the making of Alba). To make Columba the patron of his kingdom, Cináed needed the saint present in the heart of his territory — and so relics of Columba were translated from the threatened west to a new church at Dunkeld in Perthshire, in the interior of the emerging kingdom, a foundation associated with Cináed and dated conventionally to c. 849 (Herbert 1988; the Scottish chronicle and annalistic notices of the translation of Columba’s relics). The Irish annals likewise register, around this same mid-century moment, a carrying of relics of Columba — some into Ireland for safe-keeping, and the translation that brought a portion to the church in Pictland (Annals of Ulster and the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba, on the mid-ninth-century translations; Herbert 1988).

The result was that the relics of Columba came to be divided between the two kingdoms — a portion kept in Ireland with the familia’s new head at Kells, and a portion translated to Dunkeld in Scotland to serve the cult of the founder as patron of the Scots. The division was a direct consequence of the Viking emergency: a single shrine on an exposed island was a single point of catastrophic loss, but relics distributed between two secure inland centres could not be destroyed at one stroke. The exact mechanics of that distribution, however, are not securely recoverable from the sources we have.

[Disputed: the relics were divided — some translated to Dunkeld in Scotland c. 849, some kept in Ireland; the exact distribution and the completeness of any single set are reconstructed from terse annal entries and remain uncertain — Herbert 1988]

What can be said with confidence is the frame: that the Viking raids forced the removal of the relics from Iona; that Kells became the Irish head of the familia from c. 807; that relics of Columba were translated to Dunkeld in the orbit of Cináed mac Ailpín around 849; and that from this point the cult ran on two tracks, an Irish one centred on Kells and a Scottish one centred on Dunkeld, each holding relics of the founder (Herbert 1988). The annals on which all of this rests are brief obit-and-event notices, not narratives, and they do not tell us how the bones were apportioned, whether either translation moved the whole body or a part, or how complete any one set of relics was. The reconstruction is the best the evidence allows, and it is offered as such.

The Later History of the Iona Shrine

Iona itself was never wholly forsaken. Through the ninth and tenth centuries the island remained a holy place and a place of burial, and the cult of Columba’s grave persisted there even as the familia’s leadership sat at Kells and the royal cult flourished at Dunkeld (Herbert 1988; Clancy and Márkus 1995). But the Viking centuries left their mark: the annals continue to record killings on the island — most infamously the slaying of the abbot Blathmac and his monks in 825, who, by the account of the Frankish poet Walafrid Strabo, were martyred by Norsemen for refusing to reveal where the precious shrine of Columba had been hidden (Annals of Ulster, s.a. 825; Walafrid Strabo, Vita Blathmaic; Herbert 1988). The Blathmac story, whatever its hagiographic colouring, turns on exactly the logic of this whole chapter: the shrine had been concealed precisely because it was the thing the raiders most wanted, and a monk died rather than surrender it.

In the later Middle Ages Iona’s monastic life was refounded on a new footing. Around the year 1200 a Benedictine abbey and an Augustinian nunnery were established on the island under the patronage of the Lords of the Isles, replacing the old Columban community with a house of the continental Benedictine order — the medieval abbey whose ruins, much restored, stand on Iona today (the standard archaeological and historical accounts of medieval Iona). The Reformation brought the dissolution of that abbey in the sixteenth century, and the cult of relics, like the monastic life, was suppressed; the later modern history of the island belongs to the companion file (see Legacy and Sources).

The Brecbennach (the “Monymusk Reliquary”)

Among the relic-objects associated with Columba, none is more storied than the Brecbennach — by tradition a portable reliquary of the saint, granted by the crown to the abbey of Arbroath and carried as a battle-palladium of the Scots. The Brecbennach is recorded in medieval Scottish documents as a relic with attached lands and a custodian, and it has long been identified with a small, house-shaped, eighth-century reliquary of wood, bronze, and silver now in the National Museum of Scotland and known, from the estate where it was kept, as the Monymusk Reliquary — by the traditional account the very shrine borne before the Scottish army at Bannockburn in 1314, where Columba’s relic was credited with helping to secure the victory of Robert Bruce (the medieval Arbroath records of the Brecbennach; the traditional Bannockburn association). The object embodies the late-medieval afterlife of Columba’s cult: the apostle of the Picts become a war-saint of the Scottish kingdom, his relic carried into battle as the O’Donnells carried the Cathach in Ireland.

But the identification must be handled with the care the methodology of this collection requires, because both links in the chain — the reliquary’s identity and its presence at the battle — have come under scholarly and curatorial doubt.

[Disputed: traditionally identified as the Brecbennach of Columba carried at Bannockburn; the identification of the surviving Monymusk Reliquary with the Brecbennach is now questioned by scholars/curators]

The Brecbennach of Columba is securely attested as a medieval relic with lands and a keeper; what is now doubted is whether the surviving Monymusk Reliquary is that object, and whether either was at Bannockburn. The reliquary is genuinely an early Insular shrine of about the eighth century, of exactly the kind in which a saint’s relic would have been kept, and the traditional association with Columba and with the 1314 battle is of long standing; but the equation of the surviving object with the documented Brecbennach, and the Bannockburn presence, are now treated by curators and historians as a tradition rather than an established fact. As with the Cathach, the right course is to report the tradition, name it as the cult’s claim, and not assert the identification as proven.

The Cathach: The Surviving Relic-Book

The one object that unites the scribal glory of Iona with the relic-cult of its founder is the Cathach (Irish Cathach, “the Battler”), a psalter that is the oldest surviving Irish manuscript and, by long tradition, the very copy of the Psalms written by Columba’s own hand. The book passed into the keeping of the O’Donnells — Columba’s own kindred, the Cenél Conaill — who enclosed it in an ornamented metal book-shrine (a cumdach) and carried it around their host in battle as a sacred palladium, believing it secured them victory: from that use it took its name, the Cathach, “the Battler” (Herbert 1988; and see Manuscripts and Learning, where the manuscript and the disputed ascription to Columba’s hand are treated in full). The Cathach is the surviving counterpart, in Ireland, of what the Brecbennach was in Scotland: a relic of the founder borne into battle by those who claimed him — and, unlike the bones translated to Kells and Dunkeld and long since lost, an object that endures, the tangible relic-book of the saint.

References

Adomnán of Iona. Life of St Columba. Trans. Richard Sharpe. London: Penguin Classics, 1995. (Translation with introduction and notes; the death-narrative at Vita Sancti Columbae 3.23 — the angel, the secret foretold to Diarmait, the blessing of the monastery, the weeping white horse, the unfinished psalter at Ps. 33[34]:10, the death at the altar at the night office, and the angelic light over Iona; the seventh-century elevation of relics and the Law of the Innocents.)
Anderson, Alan Orr, and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson, eds. and trans. Adomnán’s Life of Columba. Rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. (The standard critical edition; the text of VC 3.23 and the dating of Columba’s death and obit.)
Herbert, Máire. Iona, Kells, and Derry: The History and Hagiography of the Monastic Familia of Columba. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. (Central study: the burial and shrine on Iona; the Viking raids of 795, 802, and the killing of the familia in 806; the founding of Kells c. 807 as the new head of the familia; the translation of relics to Dunkeld c. 849 and the making of Columba into patron of the Scots; the division of the relics between Ireland and Scotland and its reconstruction from the annals; the Cathach, the O’Donnells, and the relic-cult.)
The Annals of Ulster. Ed. and trans. Seán Mac Airt and Gearóid Mac Niocaill. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1983. (The terse contemporary notices: the burning of Iona in 795; the burning of 802; the killing of the sixty-eight in 806; the building of Kells (807, 814); the slaying of Blathmac in 825; the mid-ninth-century translation of Columba’s relics.)
Clancy, Thomas Owen, and Gilbert Márkus. Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995. (Iona as a community of memory; Martyrs’ Bay and the killing of the monks; the island’s continuing holiness through the Viking age.)
Clancy, Thomas Owen. (On the making of the kingdom of Alba and the role of Columba’s cult and Dunkeld in the ideology of the emerging kingdom of the Scots; in the wider scholarship on early medieval Scotland.)
Walafrid Strabo. Vita Blathmaic (Life of Blathmac). (The ninth-century Carolingian poetic account of the martyrdom of Blathmac and his monks on Iona in 825, who died rather than surrender the hidden shrine of Columba.)