Colum Cille

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Colum Cille, Columb Cille, Columcille, Colmcille, Collumcille, Colmkil, Calum Cille, etc. [L columba, dove; Ir. cill, church, cell]. Although there are thirty-two saints named Colum/Columba, the best-known is the patron saint of Scottish Gaelic Christianity, c.521–97; he is also the third most celebrated saint in Ireland, after St Patrick and St Brigid. Colum Cille has a fixed place on the calendar of saints, 9 June, but a number of legends have accrued to his name in both Scotland and Ireland. Born of the powerful Uí Néill kindred in Gartan, Co. Donegal, Colum Cille was descended from Niall Noígiallach [of the Nine Hostages]; his ancestor was Conall Gulban, who gave his name to the region, Donegal [Ir. Tír Conaill, Conall's land], as well as to Ben Bulben [corrupted from Beinn Ghulbain]. Through his mother, Eithne, he claimed descent from Cathair Mór, king of Leinster. He was baptized Crimthann but, according to one version, took the name Colum Cille through angelic intervention.

Although a less than pious youth, he took holy orders and studied at Moville and Clonard. While still a deacon, but not yet a priest, he studied classical Irish poetry under the chief poet of Leinster. After ordination he lived in seclusion at Glasnevin, which is now within the northern city limits of Dublin. After a plague devastated his community (c.544) he returned to his own region, founding a new community at Doire [Derry, Londonderry], known for many centuries in Irish as Doire Choluim Chille in his honour; this was to be but one of thirty-eight monasteries he would establish in Ireland alone. His monasteries are associated with the copying of manuscripts.

Why he left Ireland is uncertain. He may have been involved in a dispute over the copying of manuscripts, or the dispute may have been over the rights of sanctuary; for two years a war had raged of which he was thought to be the instigator. For whatever reason, Colum Cille led a group of followers to found a monastery at Iona (563), off the west coast of Mull, Strathclyde (until 1974, Argyllshire). The island, previously known simply as Í [isle], became Í-Choluim Chille, later anglo-latinized to Iona. In part he wished to minister to the Irish-speaking settlers of Dál Riada, as well as to evangelize the Picts. Among his converts was Bridei or Brude of the Great Glen, Scottish Highlands (until 1974, Inverness-shire).

Among the legends attached to his name is an early encounter with a Loch Ness monster; the open-jawed creature was thought to have submerged at his command. He is also thought to have killed the suileach, a many-eyed eponymous monster of Lough Swilly, Co. Donegal. Mongán went to heaven under Colum Cille's cowl. According to a prophecy attributed to Colum Cille, Ireland would be destroyed by the Broom of Fanait when the festival of St John the Baptist fell on a Friday, which it did in 1096—without catastrophe.

Colum Cille returned to Ireland twice after settling at Iona, in 575 to serve as an intermediary between Dál Riada and Irish princes, and in 585 to speak on behalf of the bardic order then threatened with extirpation. In 597 he died and was buried at Iona, and in 878 his bones were returned to Ireland. The Danes stole them in 1127 but later restored them, after which they were lost.

Colum Cille's earliest biographer was St Adamnán, who wrote a century after his subject's death. In the 20th century Colum Cille's career has been the subject of scholarly dispute, notably by W. D. Simpson, The Historical St. Columba (1927), who doubted the claim that the saint had been the apostle of northern Scotland. Two more recent studies are Ian Finlay, St. Columba (London, 1982) and Máire Herbert, Iona, Kells, and Derry (Oxford, New York, 1988). The mournful eulogy Amra Choluimb Chille [Colum-Cille, the Wonderful Person], is often thought to be the oldest surviving work of Irish literature; See Whitley Stokes, ‘The Bodleian Amra Choluimb Chille’, Revue Celtique, 20 (1899), 30–55, 132–83, 248–89, 400–37; and Vernam E. Hull, ‘Amra Choluim Chille’, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie, 28 (1961), 242–51; See also Fergus Kelly, ‘A Poem in Praise of Columb Cille’, Ériu, 24 (1973), 1–34. Robert Farren's poems This Man Was Ireland (New York, 1943) and The First Exile (London, 1944) both deal with Colum Cille.

St Columba's Day, 9 June, is celebrated in Scotland, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. The Scottish and English personal names Calum and Colin and the Irish personal name Colm are forms of Colum/Columba.

Colum Cille (c.521–597), founder of the monasteries of Iona, Derry, and Durrow, born into the Northern Uí Néill lineage of Cenél Conaill. The defining act of his life was his leaving Ireland to be a pilgrim of Christ in Britain, where he established himself with twelve followers at Iona in the territory of Scottish Dál Riata. By the 10th century stories were in circulation that he did this to expiate his role in the battle of Cúl Drebene in 561; it has been seen as a penance imposed by a synod held at Teltown in 562, but these explanations may have been spun out of allusive remarks in Adomnán's Life of the saint. While later poetic tradition portrayed Colum Cille as a permanent exile from Ireland, Adomnán shows that this was not so. Colum Cille was never cut off from Irish contacts, founding churches in Ireland after 563 and visiting his foundations on more than one occasion. His close kinship with the northern Uí Néill high king Áed mac Ainmerech may have helped Colum Cille at the meeting of the kings at Druim Cett, and he appears to have been closely connected also with Áedán mac Gabráin, king of Dál Riata. From his death he was immediately regarded as a saint and efforts were made in the 7th century to collect stories of him while memories remained. These served as one of the sources for Adomnán's Life of the saint, written in 697. An Irish poem in his praise, Amra Coluimb Chille, is thought to date from soon after his death and was studied in church schools in the 10th and 11th centuries. By this date Colum Cille was seen not only as an exile from his homeland but as specially a patron of Irish poets, and an abundant literature sprang up in verse about him or composed in his name. In the mid‐12th century a new Life was composed in Irish in the form of a homily at Derry, by that date the principal church in the Columban community. In the early 16th century Manus O'Donnell had Adomnán's Life translated into Irish, fusing this with a modern paraphrase of the Middle Irish homily and many other anecdotes and poems about the saint, to produce the fullest version of his legendary history.

Richard Sharpe