With both these audiences in mind, Marcas Ó Conghaile (of ) and I sat down recently to discuss the spiritual and symbolic dimensions of this game. We explore the history of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), the local and amateur ethos of Gaelic games today, the symbolism of the Mayo colours and crest, and the power of local sporting associations to cultivate virtue and promote integration and solidarity.

Marcas has worked really hard to insert footage of speeches, celebrations, and homecomings, so even those unfamiliar with the events of the last week can come to appreciate something of the emotion involved. Enjoy, and do share your own reflections in the comments below the video!

Lassar gréne áne,

apstal Herenn hóge,

Pátraic co méit míle,

rop dítiu ar tróge.

The flame of a splendid sun,

the apostle of virginal Ireland,

may Patrick, with many thousands

be the shelter of our wretchedness.

Patrick is a special saint, not only for his foundational – if not solitary – missionary work in fifth-century Ireland, but also for the fact that two of his writings survive: the Confession and the Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus. Both works are very readable and, for this reader at least, very edifying.

As someone who researches early Irish Christianity, it’s always a strange experience to re-read these documents. I’m used to reading anonymous and pseudonymous works of uncertain provenance, distant by centuries from the events they describe. Separating fact from fiction in those writings can feel like struggling through a dark forest, but then, when you turn to Patrick, a bright clearing opens up: writings which, even the most skeptical scholars agree, were composed by Patrick himself

Both works are intensely personal. The Confession opens with the famous words, ‘Ego Patricius peccator rusticissimus et minimus omnium fidelium et contemptibilissimus apud plurimos’ (‘I am Patrick, a redneck sinner and the least of all the faithful, looked down on by many’). Throughout this work, Patrick doesn’t hesitate to relate his own experiences in prayer, and seeks to lay bare his motivation for mission, drawing on his foundational experience of escape from slavery:

But this I know for certain, that before I was brought low, I was like a stone lying deep in the mud. Then he who is powerful came and in his mercy pulled me out, and lifted me up and placed me on the very top of the wall. That is why I must shout aloud in return to the Lord for such great good deeds of his, here and now and forever (Confession 12).

Reading the Confession to encounter Patrick’s personality is well worth doing, but that’s not all the Confession offers. When read attentively, it also provides a real, if limited, window onto conversion-era Ireland.

It must be admitted from the outset, though, that Patrick fails to answer many questions that we might bring to the text: How did he present the message of the Gospel to those who had never heard it? How did he catechise those who were interested? How did he train clergy? How long did he stay in any one place? How did he celebrate the liturgy? With whom, exactly, did he collaborate? What institutions did he develop? How did he interact with the pre-existing beliefs and practices of the people he met?

None of these questions is answered in the Confession, but there are other questions we might ask, including some that have been asked too rarely in the past: What role did women play in Patrick’s mission, for example? On that topic, there’s rich pickings.

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Women as patrons

One of the reasons Patrick wrote his Confession was to respond to accusations made against him in his homeland of Britain. The question of finances, it seems, featured prominently. Patrick explains that he has to use considerable resources to ensure security as he travels from territory to territory:

At times I gave gifts to kings, over and above what I paid to their sons who travelled with me. Despite this, they took me and my companions prisoner, and very much wanted to kill me, but the time had not yet come […]. You know yourselves how much I expended on those who were the judges in those regions which I most frequently visited. I estimate that I gave out not less than the price of fifteen persons, so that you might benefit from me, and that I might benefit from you in God. I’m not sorry I did it, nor was it even enough for me – I still spend, and will spend more. The Lord is powerful, and he can grant me still to spend my very self for the sake of your souls (Confession 52-53).

This in itself is interesting enough, but even more interesting is Patrick’s account of fundraising:

I know that I am inexperienced in all things. But still, I have tried to keep a guard on myself and for the Christians and virgins of Christ and religious women [mulieres religiosae] who were giving me small gifts of their own accord. When they would throw some of their ornaments on the altar, I would give them back to them. They were hurt at me that I would do this. But it was because of the hope of the eternal gift, that I was careful in all things, in case unbelievers would trap me or my ministry of service for any reason. Nor did I want to give those who could not believe even the slightest reason for speaking against me or take my character away (Confession 49).

Throwing expensive jewellery into the sanctuary – God be with the days! The prominence of women in St Patrick’s account of the patronage of his mission has New Testament parallels, of course; think of Joanna and Susanna in Luke 8, Phoebe in Romans 16, and Lydia in Acts 16. There’s no reason to think it’s a fabrication on Patrick’s part, though. Rather, it’s the beginning of a tradition of patronage by Irish women of faith which had a long future ahead of it.

Consecrated women

The mention of ‘virgins of Christ’ in the above passage brings us to our next topic: St Patrick’s promotion of consecrated virginity, even at the earliest stage of evangelisation. In both the Confession and the Epistle Patrick delights in the abundance of celibate vocations, distinguishing between male and female varieties:

I cannot count the number of sons of the Irish and daughters of kings [reguli] who are monks [monachi] and virgins of Christ [virgines Christi] (Epistle 12).

Never before did [the Irish] know of God except to serve idols and unclean things. But now, they have become the people of the Lord, and are called children of God. The sons of the Irish and daughters of kings are seen to be monks and virgins of Christ (Confession 41).

When Patrick wants to give an example of such consecration, he chooses a (sadly unnamed) woman:

An example is this. There was a blessed Irish woman of noble birth, a most beautiful adult whom I baptised. She came to us a few days later for this reason. She told us that she had received word from a messenger of God, who advised her that she should become a virgin of Christ, and that she should come close to God. Thanks be to God, six days later, enthusiastically and well, she took on the life that all virgins of God do. Their fathers don’t like this, of course. These women suffer persecution and false accusations from their parents, and yet their number grows (Confession 42).

This woman was from the upper crust of Irish society, but Patrick refers even to enslaved Christian women who have chosen celibacy: ‘they bear even terror and threats, but the Lord gives grace to so many of the women who serve him. Even when it is forbidden, they bravely follow his example’ (Confession 42).

Later sources identify some of the consecrated women of this Irish apostolic age – women like Brigid, Ita, Monenna, and Attracta. It is not always easy to reconstruct the biographies and lifestyles of these women from the later sources that survive, but in some cases at least they seem to have been highly mobile, educated, and relatively independent. Their close association with the bishops who veil them is reminiscent of what we know about consecrated virgins – as distinct from female monastics – from elsewhere at this time.

A life of St Monenna, although late, likely preserves an accurate account of this form of life in the time of St Patrick. The story opens in the northeast of Ireland, with Patrick as a guest in the home of Monenna’s parents. She, along with many others in the family, accepts baptism, but Patrick identifies in her something special: ‘a burning holy desire’. He responds with ‘spiritual counsel – as far as she could receive it, or time would allow it’.

She receives the veil of virginity next to a well, and is taught by Patrick the value of consecrated virginity: it is ‘a source of life, a friend of healing, [and] sustainer of charity’.

Living at first with her parents, she receives instruction from a priest, and her intellectual gifts become clear. Disciples gather round her, and they make their way to the Aran Islands, to learn from St Ibar. Eventually this community returns north, to Killeavy, where the memory of St Monenna is venerated to this day.

We can’t, of course, have firm confidence in all the details of this story, but there’s nothing in it that’s inconsistent with Patrick’s own testimony. He was evidently interested in the spiritual life of women like Monenna, and understood clearly the value of their vocation in the life of the Church.

Victims of violence

Finally, women feature in St Patrick’s writings as particularly vulnerable to violence. The Epistle was written, in fact, in response to the murder and kidnapping of some newly baptised Christians by the nominally Christian Briton, Coroticus. Patrick savages Coroticus and his thugs, ‘fellow citizens of demons’. ‘They are blood-stained: blood-stained with the blood of innocent Christians, whose numbers I have given birth to in God and confirmed in Christ’ (Epistle 2). Patrick calls for them to be treated as pariahs by all British Christians until they return the Irish Christians they have kidnapped.

A careful reading of the Epistle suggests that those of the newly baptised who were kidnapped included both men and women – ‘[…] servos Dei et ancillas Christi baptizatas’ – but Patrick’s attention returns repeatedly to the women among them:

Where will Coroticus and his villainous rebels against Christ find themselves – those who divide out defenceless baptised women [mulierculae baptizatae] as prizes? (Epistle 19).

However late it may be, may they repent of acting so wrongly, the murder of the brethren of the Lord, and set free the baptised women prisoners [captivae baptizatae] whom they previously seized (Epistle 21).

Patrick’s Epistle, then, is not just a letter appealing for the safe return of enslaved Christians, it is an appeal for the safety of women known to Patrick. Their vulnerability he indicates by the diminutive, muliercula (‘little women’). He recognises the limits of his power – ‘What am I to do for you?’ – but he endeavours nevertheless to be, in the words of St Aengus, ‘a shelter of [their] wretchedness’.

Patrick’s compassion for these women is as palpable as his anger against Coroticus, but this compassion was not a once-off. All the evidence available suggests that Patrick took seriously the women he encountered in his decades-long mission, that he valued their spiritual instincts and celebrated their vocations. They responded, these countless, nameless women, by placing beaten gold on the altar of sacrifice

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Further reading

Christina Harrington, Women in a Celtic Church: Ireland, 450-1150 (2002)

Catherine Swift, ‘Soul sisters: two Irish holy women in their late antique context’ (2023)

Mary and Monasticism

There’s a litany from the eighth century, for example, which appeals to Christ by listing various groups of saints, each led by a particular saints: I appeal to you Christ, through all the married saints, especially Job; through all the widows, especially Mary Magdalene; and through all the consecrated virgins of the world world, ‘especially the Virgin Mary, your own mother’. St Aengus’ calendrical poem, has the same idea. In its concluding section it lists various categories of saints each with their leader: prophets led by Isaiah, patriarchs led by Abraham, the apostles led by Peter and Paul, the martyrs led by Stephen, and the ‘troop of holy virgins’ (‘drong noebuag’) gathered around Mary.

Just as the early Irish Christians naturally spoke of Jesus in light of his mother, addressing him as ‘Mary’s son’, so too they considered the life of nuns in a Marian light. They saw the women who gave themselves to lives of prayer in places like Kildare, Killeevy, and Killeedy, and considered them to be somehow like Mary.

One of the best examples of this way of thinking concerns St Brigid. It’s found in a genealogical text about her people, and it purports to be a prophecy concerning the future abbess of Kildare: ‘Bid ala-Maire mar-Choimded mathair’ (‘She will be another Mary, the mother of the great Lord’). This idea – Brigid as the Mary of Ireland, Muire na nGael – is consistently present in virtually all the early medieval writing about her. Again in the seventh century we find an abbot by the name of Ultan writing a hymn to Brigid and he simply takes this comparison for granted. Brigid is, he writes, ‘the branch with blossoms, the mother of Jesus’. He doesn’t even say she’s like the mother of Jesus, she simply is ‘the mother of Jesus’.

We see the same pattern in writing about St Ita of Killeedy in Limerick. Think of the poem that’s associated with her, in which Jesus is referred to as ‘Isucán’, ‘little Jesus’. In that poem Ita is depicted as having a spiritual experience in which she nurses the infant Jesus and holds him in her bosom, and encourages her fellow nuns to sing praises to him. She calls him ‘the son of the Hebrew girl’, and describes herself as his foster-mother. St Moninna or St Darerca of Killeavy is described in the same vein. In St Aengus’ poem she’s called ‘siur Maire máre’ (‘a sister of great Mary’). A little gloss in the manuscript explains that they were sisters in virginity.

Mary’s sisterhood, of course, involves the whole human race, but these texts highlight a special sisterhood with consecrated virgins. Communities of nuns are places of virginity and motherhood, places where Jesus is given birth, and welcomed, and nourished, in the prayer and works of mercy of the community.

All this means we can take at the stories told about the great female saints of Ireland, especially Brigid, as indirect evidence for what people at the time thought of Mary. If the universal ideal is that nuns are to be like Mary, then we should expect the actions and virtues highlighted in the biographies of nuns to be the actions and virtues people would expect of Mary.

Take, for example, St Brigid. We know she lived in a very hierarchical society, but we find her in her works of charity and miracles constantly reaching out to prioritise those on the margins, those with little position: people who are hungry, foreigners, children, lepers, oppressed workers, and so on. Brigid raises up the lowly, she fills the starving with good things, and it’s not difficult to establish a connection with Our Lady in that respect. Brigid is hospitable, too, and generous, big hearted, and good humoured, and I think we can imagine early Irish Christians discerning these virtues in the Virgin Mary too.

Was it just the women? No, there’s at least one monastery of men which described itself in Marian terms too. A seventh-century book of hymns from the great monastery of Bangor survives in Italy, and it includes an extraordinarily precious text: a song about the monastery of Bangor itself, yielding precious insight into the self-understanding of early Irish monks. The monastery is compared to a ship that’s safe on stormy seas, and a bride prepared for her wedding, but then things get very Marian: Bangor is a queen for Christ, clothed in the light of the sun; it is the Ark of the Covenant; it is a ‘virgin most fruitful, and yet an inviolate mother, joyous and trembling, prepared for the word of God’.

Now those concluding words offer a magnificent description of the vocation of monastery – to be a place where the Word of God is welcomed with particular attention and love – but the song is clearly drawing here on the image of Mary at the Annunciation. We don’t know about the other monasteries of Ireland, but the monks of Bangor certainly understood their life and vocation in light of the Mother of God.

Praying with Mary

For Catholic and Orthodox Christians, the idea of praying with Mary is perfectly natural. She is never the ultimate destination of our prayers, but intercedes for us with God. One of the ways of expressing this fact is to take up her words as our own, to come alongside her in prayer, above all by singing the Magnificat, Mary’s song of prophecy and praise.

In the great monastery of Tallaght, a foundation of the eighth-century reform movement known as the Céli Dé, it seems that the Magnificat took on particular significance. This is revealed in a ninth-century text which depicts an interaction between a new member of the community and a senior member:

A former layman was in company with a ‘son of life’. He said: “I do not understand your continual singing… the Canticle of Mary (i.e. the Magnificat).”

“That is not hard to explain, truly,” said the other. “It is fitting that the song which came from the head of the Virgin Mary, when she had conceived by the Holy Ghost at the angel’s announcement —that this should be set as a crown upon the chant which contains praise of God and lamentation addressed to Him.”

In Tallaght, then, the monks consciously took up the words of Mary and made of them the crown of their own daily praise and lamentation.

Mary and Social Justice

Finally, its worth considering Mary’s role in relation to groups of people who were particularly vulnerable. Throughout our period, Ireland was a dangerous place for many women and children and people who lacked wealth and social status. One who sought to do something about this is St Adomnán of Iona. In 697 he gathered in Birr many kings and warlords and clerics from around Ireland, and even some from Britain. At this synod he promulgated a new law: women and children were from now on to be protected during times of war. Non-combatants were off-limits to soldiers. This was quite novel, and the story that accompanies this law in later documents explains what inspired this new law. It was Adomnán’s mother, we’re told, who took him onto a battlefield, and showed him a mother with her infant, both cut down by the sword, breastmilk mingling with blood. Fourteen years later, Adomnán is pestered by an angel to do something about this, and we’re told explicitly that the Virgin Mary is behind this legislative project:

On Pentecost eve a holy angel of the Lord came to him, and again at Pentecost after a year, and seized a staff, and struck his side and said to him: “Go forth into Ireland, and make a law in it that women be not in any manner killed by men, through slaughter or any other death, either by poison, or in water, or in fire, or by any other beast, or in a pit, or by dogs, but that they shall die in their lawful bed. Thou shalt establish a law in Ireland and Britain for the sake of the mother of each one, because a mother has borne each one, and for the sake of Mary mother of Jesus Christ, through whom all are”.

So this law was to be enacted for the sake of mothers everywhere, and for the sake of Mary, since the life of everyone, the life of grace, comes to everyone through her. Mary was understood to have a motherly concern for all, especially, as we know from the Magnificat, a concern for the lowly.

Conclusion

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this two-part article, and it really is quite astonishing how rich a picture of Our Lady emerges when we join the dots available to us from Ireland in the first millennium. The Virgin Mary wasn’t at all a marginal figure in this context, any more than Christ was. When Christ was mentioned or contemplated, so was she. And when she was contemplated, Irish poets and preachers praised her with language that is deeply biblical but also far richer and fuller than we might have imagined.

In light of Mary the whole phenomenon of monastic life was understood, especially female monastic life. Since monastic life was more central to the life of the Church in early medieval Ireland than elsewhere, we might even say that the life of the Church here had a more intensely Marian dimension than elsewhere. And there are other reasons to affirm this claim: think of the Book of Kells with its early use of new Marian iconography; think of the poem of Blathmac addressed to Mary. There’s nothing like that in the rest of Europe at this time.

Finally, the Virgin Mary was not just a figure of piety in the early Irish Church, she was understood, like Brigid, to have a particular concern for the vulnerable, and a particular disdain for worldly hierarchies. She motivated at least some early Irish Christians to act for justice and to carry out works of mercy. At the Synod of Birr, the women of Ireland were made safer thanks to the their compassionate matrona: the Hebrew maiden, the daughter of Joachim, the queen of all virgins, our sister, bright-necked beautiful Mary.

Further reading

Jenny C. Bledsoe, ‘St Ita of Killeedy and Spiritual Motherhood in the Irish Hagiographical Tradition’ (2012)

Catherine Swift, ‘Soul sisters: two Irish holy women in their late antique context’ (2023)

Máirín Ní Dhonnchada, ‘Mary, Eve and the Church c.600–1800’ (2002)

Christina Harrington, Women in a Celtic Church: Ireland, 450-1150 (2002)

Elva Johnston, ‘Making St Brigit real in the early middle ages’ (2024)

Peter O’Dwyer OCarm, ‘Mary in Early Irish Tradition’ (1986)

Diarmuid Ó Laoghaire, ‘Muire i Litríocht na hÉireann’ (1954)

Thomas O’Loughlin (ed), Adomnán at Birr, AD 697: Essays in commemoration of the Law of the Innocents (2001).=

These questions are not all that easy to answer, mainly because we don’t have as many sources as we’d like, and the sources that we do have don’t tell us everything we’d like to know. To answer them we have to connect the dots we find in lives of the saints, poems, prayers, and laws, and cautiously to describe the picture that emerges.

Let’s begin with one obscure but illuminating example. There is only one Irish missal surviving from the first millennium, known today as the Stowe Missal. It’s mostly in Latin, of course, but it includes a little section in Old Irish about the symbolic meaning of different rites and gestures in the Mass. In that vernacular section we find a beautiful idea: ‘The Host is placed on the altar: a symbol of Christ's Body which has been set in the linen sheet of Mary's womb’.

The linen corporal on the altar is being compared here to the womb of Virgin Mary. This text was written in Irish, which probably indicates it was meant to be communicated to laypeople, so they would appreciate the spiritual significance of what was happening in the liturgy. Did everyone in Ireland at this time think of the corporal in this way? We simply don’t know. But we know that it was at least possible for early Irish Christians to make use of Marian imagery in their explication of the Eucharist.

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When you’re looking out for the ‘dots’ that enable us to characterise early Irish Marian devotion, you find them in all sots of interesting places. Recently I was reading through the Annals of Ulster and came across reference to a battle lost by Guaire, a king of Connacht in the year 649. After losing the battle – so the annals claim – this king recites a short poem giving thanks that even in defeat he has something to eat. Then he remembers other days, better days, when ‘Mary's son gave me seven cows’.

The idea of a defeated king turning to poetry in defeat is a lovely one, but what struck me in this passage was the use of the expression, ‘Mary’s son’, to refer to Jesus. In fact, this is a very common way for early Irish Christians – at least those who wrote texts that survive – to refer to Jesus. It’s found, for example, in a little poem written in the margin of a Greek-Latin manuscript of St Paul’s letters (c. 850). After noting the futility of unspiritual pilgrimages the poet issues a warning:

Mór báis mor baile

mór coll ceille mor mire

olais airchenn teicht do écaib

beith fo étoil maic maire.

Since going to death is certain, it is much folly, much frenzy, much loss of sense, much madness, to be under the displeasure of Mary's Son.

This matronymic features repeatedly too in a long calendrical poem composed by St Aengus of Tallaght in the early ninth century. In his tour through the liturgical year he occasionally describes feasts by means of this Marian circumlocution: ‘the great baptism of Mary’s son’, ‘the reception of Mary’s son in the Temple’, and so on. In the prologue of the poem St Aengus adopts this terminology in his critique of the pursuit of status: ‘Worldly power is a lie to everyone who makes their home in it. True power is this: great love for Mary’s son’ (‘serc mor do Macc Maire’).

The evidence of these texts suggest that early Irish Christians readily thought of Mary alongside Jesus; there’s no sense here in which she is a background character. In visual art too there is evidence for such prominence. Mary is found in Gospel scenes depicted on High Crosses, but she is also found in a non-narrative scene, seated or standing with her son in her arms. Indeed, Ireland is one of the earliest Western contexts in which the ‘Mother and Child’ scene is found in visual art, most famously in the Book of Kells (c. 800).

Jesus, it seems, was readily associated with his mother in the early Irish Christian imaginary, but what about Mary herself? How was she spoken of individually? In fact, the language early Irish authors use to describe her is astonishingly rich and exalted. Images and ideas associated with the ‘high Mariology’ of the later Middle Ages are often found in full bloom in Irish contexts centuries before they first appear in the European mainstream.

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In St Aengus’ poem, for example, the poet claims that all of Adam’s race ‘magnifies [Mary] with the host of angels’. When he mentions the feast of her birthday (September 8), he refers to her as ‘a strong diadem’ and ‘the holy mother of my prince’. He describes Christmas as the birth of Christ from white pure Mary’ (‘Maire banglain’). And, perhaps most interestingly, he calls Mary ‘our sister’ (‘siur’): Jesus is ‘the King whom our sister brought forth’.

The Virgin Mary is spoken of with similar veneration in Saltair na Rann, a long and delightful biblical poem written in the tenth century. The poem is a potted history of salvation, beginning with creation and ending with the last judgment. Just before the story of the annunciation and nativity is told, the poet pauses and heightens the drama of the moment by listing the holy women of the Old Testament and underlining the special love of God for each of them: Sarah, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel, Esther, Judith, and the mothers of the prophets. This community of godly women is the lens through which the poet invites us to understand Mary, whom he calls ‘the rod of the stem of Jesse’, ‘the gentle fair virgin’, ‘the daughter of Joachim’, and ‘the Hebrew girl’. ‘The King who created the bright world’, he says, ‘was nine months in the womb of the Hebrew girl’.

Another Irish-language poem, some two centuries older, is addressed to the Virgin, and recounts the course of her son’s life in an intimate conversation (I treated it briefly here). Its author, Blathmac, begins his work with an invitation: ‘Come to me, tender Mary, for the lamenting with you of your very dear one’. The idea of meditating on the life of Christ with Mary as spiritual partner - so familiar to those who pray the Rosary today - is fully formed in the mind of this eighth-century poet:

I call you with true words,

Mary, beautiful queen,

so that we, you and I, may hold conversation together

to pity your dear one.

So that I may keen the bright Christ

with you in the most heartfelt way,

o precious, shining, beautiful jewel,

o mother of the great Lord.

If I ruled as far as every sea,

people of the world according to dignity of wealth,

they would come with me and with you

so that they could keen your royal son (tr. S. Barrett).

Such highly developed Marian poetry was not limited, of course, to the Irish language. One of the earliest surviving Marian hymns in Latin was composed in the eighth century by an Irish monk, Cúchuimne of Iona. It was, according to its opening lines, designed to be sung daily and antiphonally:

Cantemus in omni die concinnantes uarie

conclamantes Deo dignum ymnum Sancte Marie.

Bis per chorum hinc et inde conlaudemus Mariam

ut uox pulset omnem aurem per laudem uicariam.

Let us sing every day, harmonising in turns, together proclaiming to God a hymn worthy of holy Mary. In two-fold chorus, from side to side, let us praise Mary, so that the voice strikes every ear with alternating praise (tr. T.O. Clancy and G. Márkus).

Cúchuimne goes on to describe Mary as the chosen mother of the Lord who helped raise up frail humanity. She is the purest of virgins. She bore in her womb the pearl of great price. At the end of the hymn he turns from veneration to intercession, asking the Virgin to intercede for us at the hour of death.

That practice, entrusting the moment of death to the care of the Virgin Mary, familiar to anyone who prays the Hail Mary, turns up elsewhere in early medieval Ireland too. There’s a devotional poem composed around the year 900 that includes the following extraordinary prayer:

O queen of all the virgins in the wide world, pray for me to your great good Son that I may be saved. That you might bring triumph from the world with numerous hosts, bring me to heaven swiftly by your grace. By your birth, by your glory, come to me; to the house of your great good Son lead me by the hand… I throw myself on your breast, on your knee, and on your cheek, on your soul, on your blood, on your flesh at all times. Under your protection may I find myself, may you be my guard always until I come to the King of the stars.

The same text goes on to compare Mary to the vessel that contained the manna, that is, the ark of the covenant. She is ‘the shrine in which was for a while the Son of the King of the stars’. She is a golden cup, the poet says, in which was found the wine which intoxicates and gladdens all of humanity. She is the paradise in which was found ‘the sweet tree of life’.

Does all this language seem like an obvious way for Christians to speak of Mary? If you’re a born-and-bred Catholic, or an Eastern Orthodox Christian, it might seem natural. If you’re a Protestant it might appear considerably more exotic. But to anyone familiar with the history of Marian devotion, it will be instantly clear that the language of these poems and prayers concerning Mary significantly pre-dates the period during which such discourse becomes mainstream in the West. The evidence suggests, then, that Ireland in the first millennium was not just a place in which the Virgin Mary was venerated, but was also a place of innovation and imagination in this regard.

In the second part of this article, I’ll consider the role played by the Virgin Mary in the early Irish understanding of monastic community and secular society. For now, though, why not scroll back up and take in once again the words of Blathmac, Aengus, Cúchuimne, and their anonymous contemporaries who showed their love for ‘the Hebrew girl’ in luxuriant language and daring devotion.

Further reading

Mary: A History of Devotion in Ireland, Peter O’Dwyer OCarm.

‘An Early Irish Poem of Invocation to Our Lady’, Brian Ó Cuív.

‘A study of the lexicon of the poems of Blathmac Son of Cú Brettan’ (2 volumes), Siobhan Barrett, PhD dissertation, available on maynoothuniversity.ie.

‘Representations of the Virgin Mary on Irish High Crosses: Icons, Narratives and Symbols of Power’, Hayley Humphrey, PhD dissertation, available on nuigalway.ie.

Suddenly the holy old man was grieved, and wept before the others. And after a little while he rejoiced, and was cheerful and merry. When the brothers asked him the cause of his sorrow and joy, he replied: “At this hour Saint Gregory was elected to the bishopric [presulatus] of Rome and he refused it, and wept. But an angel of the Lord came to him and convinced him to accept. Elated by the command of the angel, he accepted. Following the Apostle [Romans 12:15], I wept with the one weeping, and rejoiced with him too” (Vita Sancti Moluae, ed. C. Plummer).

So runs one of the more unusual anecdotes in the Vita Sancti Moluae, a work of hagiography very possibly composed in the seventh century (as argued here by Paul Byrne). At the end of the vita, we’re told that when Molua died ‘St Gregory, the Pope of Rome’ had a vision of angels singing, ‘Holy father Molua, we will not keep silent about your merits’. In between these two moments, Molua reportedly sent a disciple to Gregory with a copy of his monastery’s rule. The Pope praised Molua’s rule as ‘a hedge around your household as high as heaven’.

These stories show Molua and Gregory in a kind of spiritual twinship, like subatomic particles in quantum entanglement at a distance. The first of these anecdotes is almost certainly the earliest Irish reference to a papal election, and it’s no accident that it was Gregory the Great who gained this distinction. During his fourteen-year papacy (590-604) he earned widespread admiration for his integrity and intelligence at a time of crisis and decline, and he had a particularly important influence at the western fringes of Europe. It was he who established a Roman mission to the pagan Anglo-Saxons in England, for example, but his impact in Ireland was highly significant too.

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Gregory often complained about how busy he was dealing with various administrative and political challenges, but he somehow found time to study the Scriptures and to produce biblical commentaries and other spiritual works. The earliest evidence of Irish interest in these writings dates to the year 600, in a letter to the Pope sent by Columbanus, an Irish monk in France. The letter addresses, among other subjects, the opposition of continental bishops to the Irish dating of Easter, as well as the general immorality of these bishops, but towards the end of his polemic Columbanus thanks Gregory for sending him a copy of his new work, the Pastoral Rule (in a letter sent to the Bishop of Luni in November 594, Gregory mentions this gift: ‘Those bearing this letter should hand over a copy of our Pastoral Rule to the noble priest, Columbanus. You are not to keep it for yourself…’). Columbanus’ review of the work is most enthusiastic:

I have read your book containing the pastoral rule, brief in style, pregnant in doctrine, replete with sacred lore; I confess that the work is sweeter than honey to the needy; wherefore in my thirst I beg you for Christ’s sake to bestow on me your tracts, which, as I have heard, you have compiled with wonderful skill upon Ezekiel. I have read six books of Jerome on him; but he did not expound even half. But if you see fit, send me something from your lectures delivered in the city [i.e. in Rome], I mean the final expositions of the book; send too the Song of Songs from that passage in which it says, ‘I will go to the mountain of myrrh and to the hill of frankincense’, right up to the end; treat it, I pray, either with others’ comments or with your own in brief; and in order to expound all the obscurity of Zechariah, open up his secrets, so that in this a blind Westerner may render thanks to you (Columbanus, Letter 1, tr. G.S.M. Walker).

That’s quite the piece of fan mail! (I’ll be returning to Columbanus’ letters to Popes in more detail later in this series).

Columbanus never returned home, of course, but Gregory’s homilies on Ezekiel, and several other works, certainly made their way across the sea to Ireland. In the first half of the seventh century, a certain Laidcenn (d. 661), probably a monk of Molua’s own monastery in Clonfertmulloe, circulated his abbreviation of Gregory’s mammoth moral commentary on the Book of Job, a work which became popular throughout Europe.

Just a two-day walk northwest of Clonfertmulloe, across the Slieve Bloom mountains, was another ‘Meadow of Miracles’ – another ‘Clonfert’ – this one founded by St Brendan. It too was a centre of scholarship, as shown by a letter (almost certainly) composed by its in-house intellectual, Cummian, a contemporary of Laidcenn. It’s a truculent defence of the Roman dating of Easter, aimed at intransigent Irish scholars holding to their traditional date. Later in this series I’ll consider Cummian’s attitude to Rome and Roman authority, but here I’ll just note how he refers to Gregory:

I turned to the words of Pope Gregory, bishop of the city of Rome, accepted by all of us and given the name 'Golden Mouth' [os aureum], for although he wrote after everyone, nevertheless he is deservedly to be preferred to all (De controversia Paschali, tr. M. Walsh and D. Ó Corráin).

‘Gregory Goldenmouth’ is not a nickname found elsewhere in the Christian world, but in Ireland it continued to be used for many centuries, in both Latin and vernacular texts (in Irish it becomes a catchy rhyme: ‘Grigoir Belóir’).

In his letter, Cummian quotes from two of Gregory’s works: his homilies on Ezekiel and his commentary on Job. Fifty to a hundred years later a homily written mostly in the Irish language – the Cambrai Homily, one of the oldest pieces of Irish prose to survive – provides evidence for the Irish reception of another of his works: his homilies on the Gospels (this is the background, in fact, of the famous categorisation martyrdoms: red, white, and green). And in the mid-eighth century the Collectio Canonum Hibernensis, a major compilation of biblical, patristic, and canonical material, makes use of six of Gregory’s works: the Dialogues, the Pastoral Rule, the Letters, and the three works of biblical commentary already mentioned.

Gregory’s prolific textual output – all the more remarkable given his pastoral responsibilities – evidently found a very appreciative home among the Irish. So much so that later Irish tradition, in texts outside my period, went slightly crazy in attempting to establish connections between Gregory and Ireland: genealogical texts provide him with an ancestral line in the southwest of Ireland, and his remains are said to have been brought from Rome to their final resting place on the Aran Islands (not a claim to mention on your next trip to St Peter’s Basilica).

My favourite piece of Gregoriana from Ireland, though, is a little note in a ninth-century manuscript of Gregory’s homilies, written by an Irish scribe. In spite of all his pastoral and political responsibilities, Gregory found time to write, and in this anonymous scribe Gregory’s work ethic finds an Irish echo. In the lower margin, in his own language, the scribe noted, apropos of nothing:

I prefer writing this column to my portion of buttered bread.

Gregory the Great, this prolific Pope, didn’t just find enthusiastic readers among Irish intellectuals, but enthusiastic copyists too, and enthusiastic imitators of his scholarly diligence.

Further reading

P. Byrne, ‘Life of St Molua: date and authorship’, Peritia 24–25 (2013–2014), pp. 90–107.

M. Herbert, ‘The Representation of Gregory the Great in Irish Sources of the Pre-Viking Era’, in E. Mullins and D. Scully (eds), Listen, o Isles, unto me: studies in medieval word and image in honour of Jennifer O'Reilly, Cork, 2011, pp. 181–190.

P.P. Ó Néill, ‘The Background to the “Cambrai Homily”’, Ériu 32 (1981), pp. 137-147.

Blathmac himself is otherwise utterly unknown, and these copies of his poems are unique survivals; like the Beowulf poem, they would have been lost if this one fragile manuscript, NLI MS G 50, had not made it to modernity. The poems were edited and translated in 1964 by James Carney, and have been recently re-edited and translated in Siobhán Barrett’s 2017 PhD thesis (I follow her text below, except for a few tiny changes).

Both poems are addressed to the Virgin Mary, and they concern her son: his birth, his ministry, his death, his resurrection, and his return in glory. All of these great mysteries are treated with great care for orthodoxy – ‘this is no heretical tale’ (l. 745) – and in language that ranges from the intimate to the heroic. Mary is the poet’s conversation partner throughout:

I call you with true words,

Mary, beautiful queen,

so that we, you and I, may hold conversation [cobrae] together

to pity your dear one (ll. 573-576).

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Blathmac desires not only to talk with Mary, but to weep with her, and he wants such weeping to be ‘heartfelt’ (‘incride’; l. 578). Together, poet and mother contemplate the events of the son’s course, the poet’s compassion increasing by proximity to the mother’s perspective:

Come to me, tender Mary [tair cucum, a Maire boíd],

for the lamenting [coíniud] with you of your very dear one.

Woe is the going to the cross of your son,

he was a great emblem, he was a fine hero.

That I may beat along with you my two hands

over the capture of your fair son (ll. 1-6).

What follows this opening invocation is a detailed meditation on Christ in all his mysteries, with great emphasis on the generosity of Mary’s son, his innocence, and his beauty. Even as a child, we read, ‘he was more beautiful, more pleasant, bigger than other boys’. Blathmac repeatedly underlines the universal benevolence of Jesus:

He called to himself a stout band of people

whose warrior qualities were renowned.

Twelve apostles to whom he was abbot,

seventy two disciples.

Thereafter he began bright gleaming hospitality,

he was prosperous, he was good in lordship.

He used to preach to everyone his benefit,

he used to heal fully every ailment.

He kindled faith in every meadow land

which was fertile, which was inhabited.

He was a sea of springtide of kingship

to whom many thousands used to flock

He used to go about for the good of all,

he was affable, gentle in manner.

In the face of any affliction he did not inflict

satirising rejection or refusal of hospitality (ll. 105-120).

In his suffering this open-hearted charity becomes most vivid: on the cross he was ‘the champion of every person of the host of men and women’ (ll. 497-498), ‘the good shepherd… who has sold himself to the cross for his beautiful flock’ (ll. 826-829), ‘the bright fair lamb… who by his blood has taken away the sins of the whole world’ (ll. 830-832).

The benevolence of Jesus is not limited to humanity, of course. Blathmac understands that, as creator, with the Father and the Spirit, the Son Incarnate is intimately associated with all levels of creation:

This is my clear revelation:

your son is king of the heavens,

his is the sun whose garment is bright,

his is the shining moon.

He owns the extent that he marks out

of the seven heavens around God’s abode.

It is his hand that has arranged in them

the gaming board [fidchell] of beautiful constellations.

His is the earth to his will,

it is he who moves the sea.

He has endowed each of the two,

plants and sea-creatures.

He is the most lordly there is,

he is a hospitaller by virtue of possessions,

his is every flock that he sees,

his the wild beasts and the tame.

It is your son, whose fame is fair,

that owns every bird that spreads wings.

On wood, on land, on clear pool,

it is he who gives them joy (ll. 761-780).

With all these cosmic connections in mind, Blathmac associates the created elements with his own act of mourning. At the crucifixion of Jesus:

The sun hid its own light, it lamented its lord,

a sudden darkness went across the blue sky,

the great tempestuous ocean roared.

The whole world became dark,

the land shook under gloom.

At the death of noble Jesus

great rocks broke asunder.

[…]

A stream of blood gushed forth – too severe –

so that the bark of every tree became red.

There was gore on surfaces of the world,

in the treetops of every chief forest. It was fitting for God’s elements,

beautiful sea, blue sky, this earth,

that they should change their aspect

when lamenting their hero (ll. 241-248, 257-260).

Domestic animals, wild beasts, birds

have pitied the son of the living God,

and every beast that the ocean covers,

has mourned his wounding (ll. 513-516).

Blathmac is taking his cue from Matthew 27, of course, but he extends the image outward to the whole of creation. Likewise, he seeks to extend to his readers his own ‘conversation’ with Mary, drawing others into this nexus of compassion by means of the recitation of the poetic text:

Everyone for whom this [poem] is a vigil-prayer

at lying down and at rising,

for unblemished protection in the next world

like a breast-plate with helmet,

everyone, of every shape, who recites it,

fasting on Friday night, provided that it be with tears without fail,

Mary, may he not be destined for Hell (ll. 557-564).

‘Tears without fail’: this emotional response is clearly what Blathmac is aiming at in his poetry, and his poetic purpose has a theological underpinning. In the wake of the crucifixion, and until the renewal of creation, tears are an essential part of the spiritual life:

It would be natural that there should be until doom

upon every cheek at every single hour

a heavy tear of blood with a mouthful of gore,

lamenting the captive.

Alas the one who has come to love the son of the King of Heaven,

who has seen him lying in gore.

Even everyone who merely heard his fame,

it is incumbent upon them to lament him perpetually (ll. 525-532).

If I ruled as far as every sea,

people of the world according to dignity of wealth,

they would come with me and with you

so that they could lament your royal son.

For the beating of hands without joy,

with women, children, men,

that they might lament on every hill-top

the King who has created each single constellation (ll. 581-588).

Now, medievalists who have read this far might be tempted to scroll back up to double-check the date of the poem. A ‘planctus Mariae’ in the eighth century? A ‘Stabat Mater’, bien avant la lettre? All this ‘affective piety’ and compassionate focus on the sufferings of Christ, long before the supposed spiritual revolution of the twelfth century? This poem simply does not fit the standard chronology of the history of spiritual practices in the West, which makes its survival all the more valuable. It raises many fascinating questions, and it really deserves to be better known.

What about its contemporary reception? Did many in Blathmac’s time make his mournful words their own, weeping in the company of Mary? We simply don’t know, but its single surviving copy suggests that it wasn’t a bestseller. For my part, I read his poems every Holy Week. If you celebrate this sacred season, I hope Blathmac’s poems are a blessing to you too.

The message was quite clear, and I understood it perfectly well: Ireland was better before St Patrick.

I only realised recently, though, that the artists behind the parade were quite explicitly pro-pagan and anti-Patrick. Páraic Breathnach, one of the founding members of Macnas, described himself in a contemporary interview as coming ‘from the pagan past of Ireland’. His interviewer explains, ‘[Breathnach’s] kind of paganism is a celebration of pre-Christian values of respect for fellow human beings, love of nature, a celebration of instincts uncorrupted by alleged civilisation and imposed moralities’.

This extolling of pre-Christian Ireland might have been slightly edgy in the early ’90s, but it’s now a relatively common way of approaching, and appropriating, our past. A few examples: Brigid is widely appreciated, even among secular Irish commentators, but as a ‘goddess’ more than as a saint; sheela-na-gigs are reclaimed as symbols of ancient feminism; the Púca Festival invites people to celebrate ‘Samhain’ as ‘an ancient story about fire and accessing other worlds’; Manchán Magan writes about the Irish language as a mystical medium, ‘a gift to ourselves from the ancient past’; and the St Patrick’s Festival includes plays about Cú Chulainn and documentaries on the Hill of Uisneach, ‘resting place of the gods’.

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This vogue for reaching back to Ireland’s misty pagan past is perfectly understandable. In recent decades the Catholic faith has ceased to be something that unites the majority of Irish people, whereas references to ‘Celtic’ symbols and values are unlikely to be divisive, especially since they are vague enough to serve almost any purpose, and make few discernible moral claims. This use of the past is also, perhaps, an attempt to deal with the trauma of Church scandals and the subsequent disintegration, for many, of a Christian worldview. Along with yoga and mindfulness, some sort of connection with our ancient past is part of the contemporary spiritual menu.

There are two major weaknesses in all this, though. Firstly, the fact that we know almost nothing about the culture and values of pre-Christian Ireland. Respect for fellow human beings, love of nature, the celebration of instincts: it sounds lovely, but it’s all imagined. The meaning of ‘Celtic festivals’ like Imbolc and Samhain is often filled in with great detail by contemporary commentators, but again, it’s largely a matter of guesswork and imagination, combining modern folklore with medieval sources and Neolithic monuments, with little sense of history. Similarly, the notion – dogma in contemporary Ireland – that St Brigid is the Christian version of a pre-existing goddess is not at all substantiated by available sources. And as for sheela-na-gigs, far from being Celtic fertility symbols later suppressed by the Church, they are found almost exclusively on Church buildings, and the oldest of them date to the Norman period.

What about early Irish sagas? It’s often naively presumed that tales situated by their authors in pre-Christian Ireland are straightforward sources for pre-Christian practices and values. In fact, these sources are immensely complex, and often profoundly infused with an explicitly Christian worldview. When Páraic Breathnach was asked on RTE’s Cúrsaí Ealaíne, for example, whether the pagan Irish had a superior culture to later Christian culture he replied, ‘Bhí scéalta níos deise acu’ (‘Their stories were more beautiful’). But the truth is, we simply don’t have their stories. What survive are stories told in a thoroughly Christian context, which may include elements of an older oral tradition, but they are nevertheless stories told by Christians, as part of a deeply biblical culture. (Lebor gabála Érenn, for example, the literary basis for the St Patrick’s Day parade on the invasions of Ireland, is clearly informed at every level by the Scriptures and St Augustine).

This brings us to the second weakness in contemporary use of Ireland’s pagan past: it leads us to treat medieval Irish sources as mere intermediaries. If contemporary Ireland is grateful to early Irish monks for anything, it’s that they ‘preserved pre-Christian stories’. We take the texts they put together and use them as a ticket to fairyland, rather than pausing to consider the motives and methods of their medieval composers. In our attempts to see back into the pagan past, we end up looking over the heads of medieval Irish literati, and in doing so we really miss a trick.

Dr Elizabeth Boyle’s book, History and Salvation in Medieval Ireland, more than any other publication I know, bucks this trend by highlighting the textual richness of medieval Irish culture, and its complex, fascinating use of the Bible

Boyle, as she makes clear in the Acknowledgements, is not a believer, but she appreciates – as not all Celticists do – that the texts and manuscripts she studies are the product of a Bible-believing context, and she allows them to speak in all their richness, bringing out all the artful biblical allusions ignored by many other scholars. And, against the widespread tendency to approach the Irish past with little attention to historical detail, Boyle assiduously dates every text and manuscript she discusses. (All of this might sound intimidating to the general reader, but Boyle’s writing is lucid and accessible).

The book consists of five chapters, whose enticing titles are worth quoting in full: ‘In the Egypt of this our island: Reflections on Jewish history’, ‘Absalom, Absalom!: Rewriting the David story’, ‘More than honey to my mouth: The psalms’, ‘The green-grassed land of the Assyrians: Constructing the history of Babylon’, and ‘Twilight of the idols’.

The chapter on the Psalms on its own covers an immense range of fascinating literary texts and artefacts. Boyle points out at the outset just how omnipresent the Psalms were in medieval Irish culture: ‘It is reasonable to assert that the vast majority of literate people in medieval Ireland would have known the psalms by heart’ (p. 85). They were the base text for the teaching of writing and reading, as evidenced by the Springmount Bog wax tablets, dating to the sixth or early seventh century. Apart from these scratchings, medieval Ireland yields many other interesting Psalm-manuscripts, like the Milan Psalter, richly glossed in ninth-century Irish, and the Southampton Psalter, illustrated with images both of David (understood as author of the Psalms) and of Christ (understood as the Psalms’ prophetic referent).

Irish monks weren’t just copying Psalms, though, they were thinking carefully about their meaning, and doing such thinking in the company of Jerome, Isidore, Bede, Augustine, and others. One particularly fascinating example of such exegesis is the ‘Old Irish Treatise on the Psalter’, a vernacular question-and-answer commentary on the Psalms, dating to the ninth century. Its author memorably compares the Psalter to a city surrounded by a single wall but containing many individual buildings:

[The Psalter has] the form of one book without, and many psalms within, like some glorious building with many shrines, with various treasure-houses, with special keys to open each one of them’ (p. 93).

This Irish love for the Psalms is shown most charmingly in a Middle Irish poem in which the Psalter is figured as a woman, indeed a lover. The poet had grown up with this lover, meeting her at the age of seven (when Psalter study would have begun for clerical students), but now she is old, ‘wearied with toil and travel, grimed with dust, [but] wise still’ (p. 115). The poem concludes with a prayer that the King – i.e. God – might refresh the beauty of this monk and his beloved Psalms in heaven.

The other chapters yield similar gems, fascinating samples of biblically influenced Old and Middle Irish writing (all translated, sometimes for the first time): an eleventh-century Irish poem about the origin of idols, expanding on Wisdom 14:15; a short narrative about three junior clerics and their kitten; a twelfth-century poem about Ahaziah, Athaliah, Jehoash and all that messy business; descriptions of Babylon in a twelfth-century vernacular poem; didactic poems giving brief synopses of the reigns of kings of Israel and Judah; Middle Irish explanations of the origins of the Hebrew, Greek, and ogam alphabets; and 'Saltair na Rann', the long poem recounting salvation history, dating to about the year 1000.

My favourite text discussed by Boyle, though, is the retelling in Irish of the David vs Goliath story, clearly influenced by stories about the boyhood deeds of Cú Chulainn, with all the cheek and bravado that makes those stories so enjoyable (although, as Boyle points out, the Cú Chulainn stories were not merely 'native' constructions, but were likely influenced themselves by biblical narratives):

David son of Jesse; the best king who ever came into the world was the same David. It is he who made the three fifties to praise Christ; it is he who killed Goliath, champion of the Philistines, in the time of Saul, son of Kish, king of the people of God [ríg thúaithi Dé], of the children of Israel. Fighting against Goliath was challenging then, i.e. seven cubits his size, a crested helmet upon his head, an iron breastplate around him - five thousand ounces in it - bronze greaves around his legs, an iron sword in his hand. Each day he used to kill fifty men of the people of God in single combat. Jesse, then, the father of David, it is he who was a counsellor to Saul. Saul's stewards, then, were going to seek a champion against Goliath. At that time, David was a lad shepherding.

'Where are you going?' said David to the stewards.

'To seek warriors against the champion'.

'Would that you did not go there', said David. 'The truth of God or of men is not with you. If it was I who came, I would kill him before the men of the world'.

'This is what the son of Jesse said', said the steward to Saul.

'Silly boy', he said, 'and a fool. The reason I put him to my sheep was to save that boy from that challenge. Let someone go to him'. Nine men go to him.

'Come to speak with the king! If you do not come willingly, you will go by force'. With that, he cast the nine of them down and he ties them up. 'Come up with us and we'll be grateful'.

'I will go of my own accord', he said. He goes with them. 'Will you go', said Saul, 'against the champion?'

'I will go indeed', he said.

'What valorous deeds have you ever done?' said Saul.

'A great lion came to me', he said, 'one time in the desert. It took a sheep from the flock. I ran to it so that I went onto its back and so that I ripped its jaws apart as far as its throat'.

'A fine feat!' said Saul. 'How will you go against the champion?'

'With my sling and my crook'.

'A bad weapon against a champion', said his father.

David goes then against him in the ford [isin n-áth]. David puts a stone in his sling; he shot it into the air. The stone made its noise while going up. Goliath looks up. His helmet came away from his head; the stone struck his forehead so that it was in the middle of his skull. After that David plies the crook upon Goliath's head so that he made fragments of it [imrid íar sin in camóic for a chend co nderna brúar de]. That was David's first combat (pp. 56-58).

While the rest of Ireland looks past our medieval Irish writers to peer into Celtic twilight, Boyle pays these writers the attention they deserve, and what emerges is deeply interesting and substantial, and worthy of our study.

Like many academic books, History and Salvation in Medieval Ireland is surprisingly expensive: £145 in hardback, £39 on Kindle, and £43 in paperback. Whether or not you get your own copy, though, you should certainly borrow it from your local library. Anyone interested in the history of Ireland or the history of the Bible’s reception will read it with immense pleasure.

A version of this review appeared originally in Leaven Magazine.

Who could ever forget the moment in Genesis 45 when the adult Joseph, as yet unknown to his brothers, was moved by Judah’s description of Jacob’s love for his sons to such an extent that he broke down and wept so loudly ‘that the Egyptians heard it, and the household of Pharaoh heard it’ (Gen 45:2)? When he finally revealed himself – ‘I am Joseph’ – and made known his intention to save his sinful brothers, ‘he fell upon his brother Benjamin’s neck and wept; and Benjamin wept upon his neck. And he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them; and after that his brothers talked with him’ (Gen 45:14-15).

It’s a story that has ignited the imagination of every generation that read the Bible. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber is just the latest of many retellings of the story, like the Jewish Testament of Joseph, the early Christian novella Joseph and Asenath, and many medieval reworkings, in Latin and various vernacular languages. Most of these retellings follow the broad outlines of the account in Genesis, but apocryphal details are often included too, and each version usually has its own unique features.

Among the many retellings of the Joseph story is one particularly interesting poem written in Irish around the turn of the first millennium and found in a small number of manuscripts, one of which – known as ‘Rawlinson B 502’ – was probably made and used in the monastery of Glendalough in the twelfth century.

The poem, known as Saltair na Rann (‘The Psalter of Verses’), is over 9000 lines long, and takes its reader through the main lines of salvation history, from creation to judgment. It was edited by Whitley Stokes, and David Greene left behind another provisional edition and translation when he died in 1981 (available in several PDF files here). Joseph’s story makes up a substantial portion of the poem, some 600 lines.

The Joseph we meet in this Irish poem shines with all kinds of bright epithets: he is, of course, ‘the dreamer’ (‘aislingthech’), he is ‘son of Rachel’, ‘the noble son of Jacob’, ‘noble Joseph’ (‘Ioséph án’), ‘lovely, modest Joseph’ (‘Ioséph álainn imnár’), ‘precious stone’, ‘mouth of righteousness’. He speaks ‘with a clear voice’. And Potiphar’s wife, in seductive mood, addresses him as ‘fair Joseph the Canaanite’ (‘a Ioséph caem Cannanaig’).

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As in other retellings, the Irish poem adds details not found in the biblical account, lending further colour to an already vivid tale. Potiphar’s wife, for example, tries to trap Joseph – her servant – in her cellar, by inviting him to accompany her there to inspect her jewellery. There is added dialogue between this pair too. When Joseph rebuffs her advances, Potiphar’s wife tells him, essentially, that it’s his loss: ‘many men would be thankful for what I am offering you’. When she continues her blandishments, young Joseph replies with exquisite courtesy:

O woman, a blessing on your pure face [...], as long as I live I will not betray my lord.

In the biblical account, and in the Irish poem, Joseph is framed by his master’s wife, and ends up in prison. Genesis 40 tells us of his meeting with two other prisoners, Pharaoh’s chief butler and chief baker, and his correct interpretation of their dreams. Why, the reader of Scripture might wonder, were they in prison? Saltair na Rann answers the question with an imagined back-story: the two men had been paid huge amounts of ‘red gold’ by ‘the king of Africa’ to kill Pharaoh, his rival. They tried, but were unsuccessful, and so they end up in chains with the Canaanite dreamer.

When Joseph finds himself in the presence of Pharaoh, summoned to interpret a series of dreams that none of Pharaoh’s ‘druids’ could explain, the Irish poet has him engage in a spot of evangelisation. ‘Where are you from?’, the Pharaoh asks. Joseph replies:

I am from the north, from the land of Canaan, but that is not what gives me dignity; my father was a grandson of Abraham [...], and the fair world will one day be full of the God whom Abraham worshipped.

What about the brothers? Years later, when famine strikes, and Joseph’s clever stewardship as Pharaoh’s viceroy makes Egypt an island of plenty, the sons of Jacob make their way south. Saltair na Rann follows the biblical narrative at this point, with all its dramatic irony. It emphasises, though, the pitiful state of these brothers when they arrive in Egypt:

Weariness filled them, trouble seized them from their journeys away from home, without knowing the way, without guidance, without language in unknown lands [cen bérla i tírib aneóil].

Joseph – incognito – interrogates them, noting fiercely that they are wanderers ‘without chieftain’, ‘without a language as a means of explanation’, ‘without documents’, but he assures them at last that they will always have their needs attended to, ‘for the sake of the God of Abraham’.

Unlike the biblical story, the Irish poet has the sons of Jacob confess directly to Joseph – still incognito – the betrayal of their youngest brother. And then, the great reveal: ‘let there be a victorious ending to our meeting, pure great-grandsons of Abraham [...]: it was I whom you sold’.

Whoever composed this version of the Joseph story, and the larger poem in which it is found, not only knew but appreciated and enjoyed the narratives of the Bible, as well as the great narrative of salvation, enacted under the guiding hand of ‘the King of holy heaven’. The Saltair na Rann poet represents a highly literate, profoundly biblical culture, a culture whose riches are only beginning to be excavated by scholars.

It’s not an unusual suggestion, and it’s true, for example, that the classic St Patrick’s Day Parade is a fairly recent innovation, but many other elements of the modern celebration are a lot older than we might think.

March 17

The earliest surviving reference to March 17 as the feast of St Patrick occurs in a late 7th-century work by a certain Muirchú, who was based in Armagh, the centre of Patrician devotion. Muirchú assigns Patrick’s death to the ‘sixteenth day before the kalends of April’ (i.e. March 17), and adds that the feast of Patrick’s passing ‘in omnibus totius Hyberniae finibus omnibus annis celebratur’ (‘is celebrated annually in all the regions of the whole of Ireland’).

There could be an element of wishful thinking on the part of Armagh in this bold claim, and it’s possible that Patrick’s feast was not at that time universally observed throughout the island. Another work of the same period, however – Tirechán’s Collectanea – provides substantial evidence that devotion to Patrick was vigorous also in the west of Ireland, far from Armagh.

A century or so later the sense that Patrick is a national saint was underlined in a calendrical poem by St Aengus of Tallaght. His stanza regarding March 17 reads:

Lassar gréne áne,

apstal Hérenn hóge,

Pátraic co méit míle,

rop dítiu ar tróge.

The flame of a splendid sun,

the apostle of virginal Ireland,

may Patrick, with many thousands,

be the shelter of our wretchedness.

A Feast for the Diaspora

In our own time, St Patrick’s Day probably bears even greater significance for the Irish diaspora than for those living in Ireland. We’re all aware that 19th-century emigrants from Ireland took with them devotion to St Patrick ‘wherever green is worn’.

We find the same thing happening, however, among the earliest Irish emigrants to turn up in the historical record: monks who travelled to Europe in the early Middle Ages as missionaries, voluntary exiles, and teachers. From the early 8th century we have the evidence of the Calendar of St Willibrord, a liturgical calendar associated with the mission of Willibrord, the Irish-trained apostle to the Frisians. For the date of March 17 we find the entry, ‘[festum] sancti patricii episcopi in scotia’ ([the feast of] St Patrick the Bishop in Ireland’.

A grammatical textbook overflowing with notes in Old Irish, now preserved in St Gall, provides similar evidence for the 9th century. This manuscript was probably written in Ireland, and was brought to the Continent soon after its completion. Many of its marginal notes may have been added by Irish scholars-in-exile who used the textbook in their teaching, including one little note at the very top of a page that reads simply: ‘sanctus patricius’ (‘Saint Patrick’). Comparing this note with others like it, it seems likely that it was added to the book on March 17, as an act of devotion on Patrick’s feast day. Like Willibrord, this anonymous scholar was far from home, but he hadn’t forgotten the saints of Ireland.

In the same library we find a 9th-century calendar, not written by an Irish scribe but by a local monk of St Gall. St Patrick’s feast day on March 17 is clearly indicated in that calendar, showing the influence of the Irish diaspora on communities that were not ethnically Irish. Again, there are strong resonances here with contemporary celebrations of the feast in our time, especially in America, where ‘everybody’s Irish for St Patrick’s Day’.

Pilgrimage

Parades might be a modern development, but there’s long been some kind of peripatetic activity on St Patrick’s Day. The early 20^th-century Schools’ Folklore Collection refers to March 17 pilgrimages to holy wells across Ireland, and the numerous ‘Toberpatricks’ that dot the island are all likely to have witnessed such pilgrimages for many centuries. The longevity of these processions is difficult to ascertain, however.

Not so in the case of Croagh Patrick. We know of a March 17 pilgrimage ascending that mountain from at least the early 12^th century: in 1113 thirty pilgrims, including the religious superior of the monastery of Ardpatrick in Co. Limerick, perished at the summit during a lightning storm. The earliest archaeological remains of the church on the peak of Croagh Patrick date to several centuries earlier, and it’s likely that St Patrick’s Day pilgrimages there are at least as old as the church. It’s a long way from mountain-climbing to the majorettes and melodicas of modern parades, but there’s at least a modicum of continuity between them.

Feasting, for the day that’s in it…

Finally, St Patrick’s Day is associated today with a break in Lenten fasting, and this tradition too seems to have deep roots. The evidence here comes from a fascinating text, the Life of St Fintan of Rheinau. I hope to write more about the story of this slave-turned-hermit later in the near future, but for our purposes only a brief episode is relevant.

As a hermit associated with the great monastery of Rheinau (now in the Swiss canton of Zürich) Fintan was engaged in strict fasting. On St Patrick’s Day, though, it seems a relaxation of the fast was expected. Fintan was tempted to gluttony, however, as opposed to virtuous feasting. It was not, in his case, a matter of too many Maltesers or jelly beans; instead, he was tempted to eat an entire loaf of bread. He prayed to be relieved of this temptation, calling on St Patrick and the Lord for aid in his own native tongue, and he did indeed come through the crisis safely.

Fascinatingly, the monks of Rheinau preserved not only this story, but the words of Old Irish spoken during this crisis by St Fintan (although scribes struggled with the spelling, and provided an interlinear translation). In any case, this 9^th-century source shows that the association between St Patrick’s Day and overindulgence is no new thing.

So there we have it: St Patrick’s Day as a national celebration, beloved by the diaspora, and an opportunity for marching and for feasting. Not only are these elements of the feast decidedly not modern inventions, they were in fact well established by the end of the first millennium.

For the next four years, I’ll be engaged in doctoral research at the University of Galway, focussing on the interpretation of the Letters of St Paul in early medieval Ireland (and by medieval Irish scholars on the Continent). The texts and manuscripts I’ll be examining represent just one little strand of the larger tradition of Irish biblical commentary in the period, including commentary on the Gospels, on Genesis, and especially on the Psalms. That tradition in turn is part of a broader scholarly tradition which was greatly interested also in the study of language, literature, law, the natural world, and secular history.

Most of the Irish scholars who produced texts in this tradition are unknown to us by name, and we typically know little of their context, but many of them have at least one thing in common: their judgments on scholarly questions are extremely confident. Or, better, their scholarly judgments are expressed with extreme confidence.

An example of this intellectual boldness is found in a phrase used countless times in early Irish literature of all sorts: ‘ní hansae’ – or its Latin equivalent, ‘non difficile’ – meaning, ‘not difficult’. In early Irish texts of all kinds, a problem is typically presented with the formulaic introduction, ‘ceist’ (‘question’), and its resolution begins, ‘ní hansae…’

This generalised attitude of assurance finds supreme expression in Sedulius Scottus, an Irish luminary of ninth-century Europe. In a Christmas poem, written for Hartgar, bishop of Liège, Sedulius writes:

Tunc oriente magi venerunt dona ferentes,

Ad Christum properant tunc oriente magi.

Partibus occiduis Scotti veniuntque sophistae,

Sophica dona ferunt partibus occiduis.

Back then, Magi came from the East, bearing gifts for Christ.

Now from Western regions Irish scholars are coming, bearing their gifts of wisdom.

Whatever else we might say about this man, he was clearly not afflicted with an inferiority complex!

In Irish biblical exegesis this apparent need to manifest authority and assurance occasionally led exegetes to supply a superabundance of information, not all of it reliable. This is particularly the case when it comes to names. Irish biblical commentators had a particular passion for providing multiple names for biblical people and places, typically offering Hebrew, Greek, and Latin alternatives.

The Magi are an excellent example. What does the Gospel of Matthew tell us of these men from the East? It doesn’t tell us their names, or even their number, only that they followed a star to Jerusalem, and went onwards to Bethlehem where they worshipped the Christ-child and offered gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Now you might know these men as Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar. That’s the version of their names that wins out over the centuries. But in Ireland they were each known by three names. I’m working on an eighth-century Irish compilation of commentary on the whole Bible, and here’s what they’re called in that text (note the superscript lines in the image below, marking out words as non-Latin): in Hebrew, they are called Apellius, Arem, and Damascus (meaning ‘humble’, ‘faithful’, and ‘merciful’), and in Greek, Malgalath, Galgalath, and Saracin (meaning ‘messenger’, ‘vow’, and ‘grace’). Their ‘other names’, we’re told, are Melchio (‘the oldest of them, who offered gold to the king’), Aspar (‘who offered incense to the Lord’), and Patifarsa (‘who offered myrrh to the man’).

This all sounds wonderful, and reminiscent of Gandalf’s many names in The Lord of the Rings, but it is, of course, linguistic nonsense, as fantastical as anything Tolkien wrote.

Robert McNally SJ in this article piles up many other examples of Irish (or at least probably Irish) exegetes repeating these points and adding their own contradictory ‘information’. The very word ‘magus, we’re told, is translated ‘nerpon’ in Hebrew, and ‘phithon’ in Greek. The Magi came from the land of Havilath, mentioned in Genesis 2. They came from Persia. One came from Africa, another from Europe, and the third from Asia. They were astrologers. They were necromancers. They offered the three gifts together. They each offered a single gift.

We are even given information concerning their appearance. Sedulius Scottus, the self-described magus from the West, includes in his own commentary on Matthew descriptions of the three men’s tunics, sandals, cloaks, and facial hair. He was writing in Latin and on the Continent, but a version of his description is found in an Irish-language poem in the margins of an Armagh manuscript (British Library Harley MS 1802). Interestingly, it translates ‘magus’ with the Irish word ‘druí’ (‘druid’). Here’s how it describes the second of the three (translation by Eugene O’Curry):

Arenus, Fidelis, the munificent,

Galgalad the devout and fervent;

A red man was Caspar in his vesture,

A fair, blooming, beardless youth.

A crimson cloak round the comely champion,

A yellow frock without variety,

Grey and close-fitting sandals:

Frankincense unto God he freely presented.

How’s that for detail?

I’ve said that this passion for providing detailed background information is widespread among Irish biblical commentators, but there is one notable exception in the case of the Magi, utterly refreshing in its refusal to add colour to the simple Gospel account. The Liber Questionum in Euangeliis, composed by an Irish exegete around the year 725, offers this observation on Matthew 2:

The Magi are not numbered, since believers are multiplied beyond number. They are not named, since the names of infidelity are forgotten in the wake of faith (since the Magi had been impious heretics). It is not said by what food or clothing they are recognised, since the saints are not valued by their food or clothes, when they journey to the Lord. It is not said from what place they came, only ‘from the East’, since nobody comes to Christ unless he comes via the dawn of righteousness after the decline of vices.

Whoever this commentator was, and wherever he was writing, his straightforward acceptance of ignorance concerning the facts of this biblical narrative – and his repeated insistence on such ignorance – makes him a rare bird indeed among early medieval Irish scholars. He was willing to let the questions stand, without giving easy answers.

In the summer of 2023 I travelled to an abandoned island off the west coast of Ireland: Inishark. With a cameraman – Patrick Grant – I was visiting sites of Christian heritage in County Galway, and Inishark had caught my eye thanks to an article by archaeologist, Dr Ryan Lash: ‘Pebbles and Peregrinatio: The Taskscape of Medieval Devotion on Inishark Island, Ireland’.

In that article, Lash laid out the work he and his colleagues carried out on the island, at the beehive hut known as Clochán Leo, a site associated with an otherwise unknown saint. What they found as they dug were thousands upon thousands of rolled quartz pebbles, made smooth by the sea. They did not naturally belong at that elevated site, but were carried there, Lash argued, by pilgrims. Some of the pebbles were marked with little crosses. Based on their distribution in the ground, the archaeologists argued that this practice endured over several centuries. What probably lay behind this practice – even remotely – was the verse from the Book of Revelation given above. John’s apocalyptic vision on the Aegean island of Patmos became flesh in these Irish pilgrims to an island in the Atlantic.

This archaeological find illustrates what I’m aiming to do on this Substack. Think of all the hands that carried these pebbles, all the unknown pilgrims who made their way – in hope, in grief, in desperation – to Clochán Leo, breathing prayers which we know and prayers we have forgotten. Were it not for the work of the archaeologists, we would hardly have imagined these pilgrims making their way in prayer to wild Inishark.

I’m a doctoral student at the University of Galway, and I’ve been working for many years to gain the theological and philological skills needed to do a different kind of archaeology, digging into the sources of Irish Christianity in the first millennium, seeking out significant patterns and unexpected finds. I’m endlessly fascinated by the texts and manuscripts that survive from this period, and their capacity – if they’re read carefully – to help us to reconstruct the ideas and images that motivated the pilgrims, poets, scholars, and ascetics of that time and place. How did they pray? How did they interpret and teach the Scriptures? What songs did they sing? How did they experience the various stages of the life cycle, and the rhythms of the year? What did their churches look like? How did they understand the world around them? What debates did they engage in? How different was their Christianity from that of the continental mainstream, and from ours?

These questions are sometimes exceedingly difficult to resolve, and my answers to them will often be tentative and subject to correction. As I do my best to address these questions, I’ll be relying, of course, on the research of a great many other scholars at work in the field. Whatever your own interests and experience, I’m glad you’re here, and I look forward to learning with you.