The fugitive MSS.—Gaelic a literary language for ages—Scotland’s first writer—St. Columba one of the rarer master-spirits—His peculiar qualities—Intellectual standpoint—Birth—Early life—A fateful incident—Sets sail for Pictland—Motive—Arrival in pagan Scotland—His missionary enterprise—Lights the lamp of literature—An ardent scholar, penman, and poet—The famous “Cathrach”—His Gaelic poems—Latin hymns—The Columban renaissance—Encouragement of bards and scholars—The Amra Choluimcille—Iona as an educational centre—European fame and influence.
Modern research and historical criticism have done much for Celtic literature. Not long ago the subject might be regarded as a tangled web of fact and fiction. Inquirers found it hard to thread their way through the unsifted mass of materials, to know the true from the fabulous, authentic history from myth and legend.
All the more because the original documents, like the graves of a household, were “severed far and wide by mount and stream and sea,” and for the most part inaccessible. It must be matter of astonishment to many to learn that very few of our older Celtic MSS.—MSS. written in these islands—have found a home in Scotland. They have long ago been transferred to the Continent, to France, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. So that to-day scores of these venerable relics are preserved in places as distant and far apart as Milan, St. Gall, Würzburg, Carlsruhe, Brussels, Turin, Vienna, Berne, Leyden, Nancy, Paris. Even the oldest MS. now existing that can be proved to have been written in Scotland, is kept not in Edinburgh or Glasgow, but in the public library of Schaffhausen in Switzerland.
One reason for this seems to have been that the Irish or Scots gave so many evangelists and professors in those early days to the Continent, men like Columbanus and St. Gall, and their followers; and another, when the books were in danger in the British Isles from the depredations of the Norsemen, they were removed for security to the monasteries and seats of learning presided over by these Celtic scholars.
The records thus available, here and there, carry us back over a period of well nigh 1500 years to the days of St. Patrick and St. Columba. As Cædmon was the pioneer of English literature, so is St. Patrick the first known litterateur of Ireland, and St. Columba the first of Scotland. From the time of the introduction of Christianity by these men, Celtic literature has a history, continuous and verifiable. Beyond their day all is uncertain and cloudy. Pagan Scotland lies in the dim background enveloped in haze. Sagas and myths and poems and romances it undoubtedly had in abundance, floating by oral tradition, but no written record. In almost every instance of its old-time lore, authorship is unknown. That by-past is the region of conjecture, and we can be as little certain of the origins as Greek scholars are of the genesis of the Iliad or of the Odyssey.
In this study, then, we go back to the march between Pagan and Christian times, and leaving behind at present the doubtful and uncertain, we shall endeavour to trace the dawn of letters in Scotland.
On that far horizon the first man we encounter with a pen and a passion for writing is the wonderful St. Columba. Across the ages his impressive figure still stands out massive and strong in the background of history. Among the men of fame—the rarer master-spirits who have helped to make Scotland what she is—Columcille stands earliest. Vividly and terribly in earnest himself, he stamped his religious convictions not only upon many districts of Ireland, but also upon heathen Alba.
He possessed just the qualities that were best fitted to give him an ascendancy over men in that rude age. Unlike most of the great evangelists of Christianity, he was of princely origin, descended both on his father’s and his mother’s side from illustrious Irish kings. This noble lineage, combined with the patronage of his own kinsman Conall, King of Dalriada—our modern Argyllshire—gave him an immense influence in an age when the tribes, even in matters of religion, followed their king or chief.
But Columcille was personally a born leader of men. Physically and intellectually he towered above his fellows. Of a tall and commanding appearance, powerful frame, broad face, close and curly hair, his grey eyes large and luminous, he looked the saint he was, joyful and radiant, with a love for everything beautiful in nature, animate and inanimate. Withal he had a loud and resonant voice, well adapted for impassioned speech. When preaching, tradition says that he could be easily understood across the Sound of Mull. And Adamnan assures us that when singing with his brethren in the church, the venerable man raised his voice so wonderfully that it was sometimes heard at the distance of 1000 paces, while from the “Old Irish Life” we learn that his reading carried even farther. A voice to soothe the savage breast with its plaintive sweetness, and yet of power and range sufficient to awe the pagan mind.
For this apostle of Scotland, despite his name, was no mere cooing dove. He could be very terrifying when roused. Of a hot and passionate temper, he was in reality a perfervid Celt; stern and even vindictive at times, he would fight his battles with the carnal weapons, if need be, just as readily as he would with the spiritual. Three battles at least, fierce and sanguinary, stand to his account in history, he their instigator, two of these even after he became Abbot of Iona.
Altogether a strange character to contemplate was this father and founder of monasteries, especially when viewed from our scientific age—the intellectual standpoint of his time was so wholly different from ours. He continually moved in a halo of miracles, prophecies, and angels, as real to him as physical laws and nerves and germs are to us. So credulous was he that he never seemed even to question the magical impostures of his opponents, the Druids. He is not represented as trying to expose their marvels, but rather as endeavouring to outrival them by greater miracles of his own. The one set he believed to be from the evil one, the other of God. For him the seen always merged in the unseen; the natural is construed in terms of the supernatural. Science, of course, had not then formulated laws or facts as we know them, and St. Columba was a child of his age, imbued with the same credulity as the contemporary heathen around him, and very much the same superstitions. He believed he could bless men or blight them by his intercessions, and sometimes in the exercise of this power he did not even hesitate to curse irreconcilables and consign them to future destruction.
On one occasion, exasperated with a thief of noble birth who had twice plundered the house of a man of humble condition, and mocked and laughed at the rebukes of the saint himself, the irate Columba—and this is a picture for an artist—followed him to the water’s edge, and wading up to the knees in the clear green sea-water, raised both his hands to heaven and solemnly invoked a curse on the man. Returning to the dry ground he sat down, and forthwith told his companions what the fate of the scamp would be. No maudlin saint was the imperious Columcille. Gentle, affectionate, and kind, yet a man to impress the wild Pictish tribes with awe and reverence.
Born at Gartan, Donegal, in the north of Ireland in 521, and brought up from youth in Christian principles, he was trained under the best masters, and apparently caught up in the wave of evangelisation that swept over Ireland from St. Patrick’s time. At any rate, when twenty-five years of age he founded the Church of Derry, and seven years later the Monastery of Durrow. Other establishments soon followed, springing up here and there under his initiative and fostering care, until when full forty years old an event occurred which in a manner changed the whole aspect of his career, and gave a new direction to his energies. This was the battle of Cooldrevna, of far-reaching import.
Two causes are usually assigned for the fight. St. Finnian of Moville, under whom the future abbot first studied, brought back with him from Rome a copy of the Psalms, supposed to be the first copy of St Jerome’s Vulgate that appeared in Ireland. This the master treasured, and wished to keep private and reserved. But Columcille, then an ardent student and rapid writer, sat up for nights together and surreptitiously transcribed the book for his own use. Hearing of this, Finnian claimed the copy, but in vain. His disciple refused to part with it, and the matter was referred to King Diarmad at Tara. This monarch, to whom no doubt a legal quarrel over a book was new, could find nothing in the Brehon Law to adjudicate the case by, except the practical adage, le gach boin a boinin (with every cow her calf), and being perhaps more disposed to favour Finnian, as of his own kin and jurisdiction, he, not unnaturally, adapted this precedent to the case in point, giving the judgment, “As with every cow her calf, so with every book its son.”
This decision is the first we know in the law of copyright. It gave dire offence to Columba, which was greatly heightened some time after by another regal affront. It happened at the Great Convention of Tara that a young prince, in utter violation of the law of sanctuary, slew the son of the king’s steward, and knowing the penalty to be certain death, fled for refuge to the northern princes, who placed him under the sheltering wing of their kinsman, the sacred Columba. Ignoring the saint’s authority, the king had the refugee promptly seized and put to death. This, it appears, exasperated the imperious Columcille to the last degree, and he immediately made his way north, and roused to arms the race of Hy-Neill, the northern branch against the southern. And with the King of Connaught, whose son had been slain, they marched their forces southward. A furious battle ensued at Cooldrevna, in the red ruin and carnage of which King Diarmad was defeated with the loss of 3000 men.
Two years after, the Hegira took place, when the saint fled or migrated on his great mission to Scotland—henceforth an exile from Erin.
Speculation has been rife as to the real motive that drove this intensely patriotic Irishman over the wave. Many would fain believe, in view of its epoch-making significance, that this momentous step was purely voluntary “for the love of Christ,” as the “Old Irish Life” puts it. Adamnan, while connecting it with the battle, also puts this construction upon it. “In the second year after the battle of Culdreimhne,” he says, “and in the 42nd year of his age, St. Columba resolving to emigrate for Christ sailed from Scotia (that is Ireland) to Britain.” Many other saints had wandered elsewhere on similar missions. But there is a persistent tradition that this unique missionary was banished by the Synod of the Saints in Ireland for the bloodshed he had caused; and that this sentence was confirmed by St. Molaise, whom the unhappy Columba consulted, and who advised him to seek as many souls in conversion among the heathen as there fell of men in battle. Some, on the other hand, construe his action as a voluntary penance, self-inflicted. Others find mainly a political motive in his removal to Dalriada, where he might be of immense service to his kinsmen in helping to avert the ever increasing and harassing incursions of the Picts. Certainly he became a bulwark to them.
Imbued with a high missionary zeal, there is no doubt that ultimately he went forth to the new spiritual campaign voluntarily, but, as in the case of most fateful careers, it is evident that circumstances wound him up to the task, the most conspicuous and compelling of which was Cooldrevna. That the parting from Erin was bitter, a very tearing of the heart, is matter of history. The verses, the records attributed to himself on this occasion, reveal the depths of his feelings. “How rapid the speed of my coracle and its stern turned toward Derry. I grieve at the errand over the proud seas, travelling to Alba of the Ravens. There is a grey eye that looks back upon Erin, it shall not see during life the men of Erin nor their wives. My vision over the brine I stretch from the ample oaken planks; large is the tear from my soft grey eye when I look back upon Erin. Upon Erin is my attention fixed, upon Loch Leven, upon Linè, upon the land the Ultonians own; upon smooth Munster, upon Meath.”
As Dr. Douglas Hyde has sympathetically observed, “Columcille is the first example in the saddened page of Irish history of the exiled Gael grieving for his native land and refusing to be comforted, and as such he has become the very type and embodiment of Irish fate and Irish character.”
A pity it is that history has not photographed the dramatic scene when the great monk, forty-two years old, tall and powerful, lands from his curach the “Liath Bhalaidh,” with twelve followers on the island of Hy, now the famous Iona. It was in 563 that he took possession of this future home, of which he had received a grant from the King of Dalriada, which was afterwards confirmed by King Brude. Modern Scotland had not yet emerged, being in early fragments. And it is important to note, for it has been very confusing to historians, that in Columba’s day Ireland was Scotia, from whence in earlier days the Scots had come, who then occupied Dalriada, or, as it is known to-day, Argyllshire. North and east were the Picts, possessing the body of Alba, as modern Scotland was then called; and in Strathclyde the Britons. Not till centuries after was the name of Scotia or Scotland finally transferred from Erin to Alba.
The Dalriadic Scots, though not destitute of a primitive civilisation, were rude and barbarous. Slavery and polygamy were common, blood feuds incessant. Women fought side by side with the men in battle, until first Columba and afterwards Adamnan obtained exemption for them. The heathen Picts were even more degraded, under the tyranny of a Druid regime, full of sorcery and superstition. No ray of Christianity seemed as yet to have penetrated their darkness.
Such were the wild and waste lands into which the devoted Columba threw himself as a deliverer. For two years he remained in Hy, organising his base, and, it is thought, learning the Pictish language, before setting out on his visit to “the powerful king of the Pictish nation.”
His missionary labours for the next thirty-two years, in collaboration with the devoted band of men who imbibed his spirit and adopted his methods, have caught the eye of the world.
But there is another aspect of his enterprise, far-reaching and magnificent, which has been largely overlooked and overshadowed by our one-sided veneration for his religious genius. And that is the significance of his literary work. It is not so generally known that the Apostle of Scotland was a patron of letters, intensely interested in literature, an ardent writer and disseminator of knowledge—one in fact who has left his literary mark on the ages, and who was the first to help to raise Scotland to the proud eminence in education which she occupies to-day.
As in the great awakening in Europe in the sixteenth century there were two movements, independent of each other and yet going on side by side—a revival of religion and a revival of learning, known as the Reformation and the Renaissance; so, in St. Columba’s enterprise two similar movements were fostered, not as separate and hostile to each other, but as mutually helpful and conjoined.
The abbot was from youth a great lover of books and an unwearied scribe. His standard biographer, Adamnan, says that he never could spend the space even of one hour without study, or prayer, or writing, or some other holy occupation, watching or fasting. This love of books continued in his case to the very end. Not till the day of his demise was the pen finally laid aside. On that day, after blessing the Monastery, he descended from the hill and sat in his hut transcribing the Psalter. But the vitality of that once deft hand and brain was now well-nigh spent, and answered feebly, like the diminishing flow of water from a spout. “Here,” cried the saint, at length, conscious of the impending change, “at the end of the page I must stop, and what follows let Baithene write.”
It was his love of literature that got him into trouble with St. Finnian, and in the “Calendar of Aengus” the story goes that he once visited a man, Longarad, noted for his collection of books. In anticipation of the visit, and mindful perhaps of Cooldrevna, the sai or saoidh (wise man) hid his treasures, whereupon Columba left “a word,” that is, a curse, on the books, so that when in after ages they had become unintelligible from various causes, this was deemed the full and sufficient reason. “May your books be of no use after you, since you have exercised inhospitality in withholding them.”
He composed a book of hymns for the office of every day in the week, and in the “Old Irish Life” he is credited with having written “three hundred gifted, lasting, illuminated noble books.” It is highly probable that those thus referred to were simply transcribed by him, for we have no evidence that he wrote any prose literature.
The three books still existing in Ireland which tradition and some high authorities regard as the work of his own hand are simply transcripts. They are certainly very ancient, even if they do not quite reach up to his day. Two of them are in Trinity College, Dublin, and the third in the Royal Irish Academy. The former, known as the Book of Durrow and the Book of Kells,[15] are copies of the Gospels in Latin, the one finished, the other not, but the Book of Kells, which is the unfinished one, contains on its blank pages copies of charters of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, connected with the endowment of the Institution. The other book referred to as in the Royal Irish Academy is the famous “Cathrach,” believed to be the identical copy of the Psalter that Columba made when he was a student. The skill displayed in the penmanship and decoration of these ancient MSS. is astonishing, and they have covers which are brilliant specimens of early Celtic art. The Book of Kells, in particular, is spoken of as “the unapproachable glory of Irish illumination.” In fact, the codex known as the “Four Masters” alleges that “it was the principal relic of the western world on account of its remarkable cover.”
Great interest attaches to the celebrated “Cathrach” or “Battler,” so called from the circumstance that a battle was fought on account of it. It continued an heirloom in the successive generations of the saint’s family, the O’Donnells, until a comparatively recent representative, exiled as a supporter of James II. carried it with him to the Continent in the beautiful shrine prepared for it at the end of the eleventh century. In early days it used to be carried three times round the army when Cinal Conaill went to battle, in the belief that if thus carried on the breast of a cleric free from mortal sin it would get them the victory.
In 1802 the precious relic was recovered from the Continent and opened. Within was found a decayed wooden box covering a mass of vellum stuck together and hardened into a single lump. By careful moistening treatment, the various leaves at length came asunder, and proved a real Psalter, written in Latin in a “neat but hurried hand.” Fifty-eight leaves remained, containing from the 31st to the 106th Psalm, and an examination of this text has shown that it is precisely a copy of the second revision of the Psalter from the Vulgate of St. Jerome, which strengthens the belief so long and tenaciously held, that this may have been the very book for which 3000 warriors fell.
From very early times Columba was spoken of as a poet. That he wrote verse and befriended the bards is attested by the oldest tradition and some of the most ancient records. Many Gaelic poems are attributed to him. “Thrice fifty noble lays,” says one poet—
Among his reputed Gaelic poems may be mentioned three that Colgan considered genuine, 250 years ago, and were printed by Dr. Reeves in his first edition of Adamnan’s Life of St. Columba: his “Farewell to Ara,” published in the Gaelic Miscellany of 1808; and another on his escape from King Diarmad, reproduced in the Miscellany of the Irish Archæological Society. There are three verses composed as a prayer at the battle of Cooldrevna, ascribed to him in the Chronicon Scotorum; and there is a collection of fifteen poems in the O’Clery MSS. at Brussels. But by far the largest collection is contained in an oblong MS. of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. This document embraces everything in the shape of poem or fragment anywhere believed as his, and that could be collected about the middle of the sixteenth century.
None of these are found in the oldest MSS., though not a few are apparently very ancient and beautiful, breathing the intensity of feeling and passion so characteristic of the Gael. Dr. Hyde is perhaps not far off the mark when he says that of the great number of Irish poems attributed to him, only a few—half a dozen at the most—are likely to be even partly genuine. It is very hard to say how much or how little is his. But this authority is inclined to agree with Dr. Healy, author of Ireland’s Schools and Scholars, that at least the three considered genuine by Colgan represent substantially poems that were really written by the saint. “They breathe his pious spirit,” says Healy, “his ardent love for nature, and his undying affection for his native land. Although retouched, perhaps, by a later hand, they savour so strongly of the true Columban spirit that we are disposed to reckon them amongst the genuine compositions of the saint.”
A few specimens are worth quoting, by way of illustrating Columba’s poetic genius:—
Were the tribute of all Alba mine, from its centre to its border, I would prefer the sight of one house in the middle of Derry. The reason I love Derry is for its quietness, for its purity and for the crowds of white angels from the one end to the other.... My Derry, my little oak-grove, my dwelling and my little cell, O eternal God in heaven above, woe be to him who violates it.
Ara was a little isle, like Iona, in the west of Ireland, where St. Enda lived, and was visited by the saints.
Farewell from me to Ara. It anguishes my heart not to be in the west among her waves, amid groups of the saints of heaven. It is far, alas! it is far, alas! I have been sent from Ara West out towards the population of Mona to visit the Albanachs. Ara Sun, oh Ara Sun, my affection lies buried in her in the west, it is the same to be beneath her pure soil as to be beneath the soil of Paul and Peter. Ara blessed, O Ara blessed, woe to him who is hostile to her, may he be given shortness of life and hell.
The next, so characteristic of the saint’s love of nature, is taken from the poem on Cormac’s visit—one of the three considered genuine:—
Of his Latin hymns only three remain. They are preserved in the Liber Hymnorum, a MS. probably of the end of the eleventh century, and are known as the “Altus,” “In te Christo,” and “Noli Pater.” No doubt exists as to the genuineness of the “Altus.” It is the most famous of the three, and is supposed to have been written after the battle of Cooldrevna. The poem takes its name from the first word, and each of its twenty-two stanzas begins in order with a letter of the alphabet, probably as a help to the memory. The stanzas are rudely constructed, with a kind of rhyme between every two lines. The poem has enjoyed a great reputation, and has been variously rendered into English. Perhaps the best translation is that of the Rev. Anthony Mitchell:—
Attention has been directed by Dr. Dowden, Bishop of Edinburgh, to the saint’s curious conceptions of the physical causes of clouds, and rain, and tides, in the stanza beginning with I:—
In the R stanza we have a picture of the judgment not unlike the “Dies Iræ”:—
What now are we to think of this new literature and the other productions, Latin and Gaelic, to which the monasteries of the period gave rise? Is the Columban renaissance really a decadence in comparison with what went before, the old unwritten inheritance? “Yes,” says Darmesteter, and if we accept the antiquity of the oral tradition, I think we must admit the truth of it. The sagas and historic tales, and the poetry that is mingled with them, are of far greater importance from a purely literary point of view. With a wild freedom of imagination and an old-time conception of life untouched by Christian thought, they breathe the spirit of pre-Christian ages, very much in the primitive manner of Homeric poetry; and being intensely human and heroic, they have a charm even for minds set to later ideals.
For example, in the Colloquy or Dialogue of the Ancients, it is recorded that St. Patrick himself felt a little uneasy at the delight with which he listened to the stories of the ancient Feinn, and in his over-scrupulous sanctity he feared it might be wrong to appreciate and enjoy so much, these worldly narratives. But when he consulted his two guardian angels they not only assured him that there was no harm in listening to the tales, but even desired him to get them written down in the words of ollamhs, “for,” said these wise counsellors, “it will be a rejoicing to numbers and to the good people to the end of time to listen to these stories.”
Yet for all this the Columban period was a renaissance. You cannot spring a new creed and new ideas upon a nation without a reawakening of thought and corresponding progress.
Over and above his own personal contributions to literature, Columba helped forward the cause of letters in two other ways, namely, by encouraging the bards and the scholars.
In his day the bards in Ireland had become an intolerable nuisance—idle, numerous, and insolent; in fact they had developed into a loafing class, who quartered themselves on the working-classes, on the chiefs and farmers. They went about the country in bands, carrying a silver pot, nicknamed by the people “the pot of Avarice.” Their tyranny was such that he who refused to contribute was mercilessly satirised and disgraced. Three attempts had been made to suppress them, but hitherto to no purpose. At length Aedh, the High King of Ireland, considering them to be too heavy a burden on the land, resolved to banish the whole profession. Summoning a great Convention of all Ireland to Drumceat in 590 to settle important national affairs, he made this one of the chief items. And the fate of the bardic institution would most certainly have been sealed had not Columcille averted it. With 140 followers he had crossed over to attend the Conference, and besides obtaining exemption from military service for the women, and independence and freedom from taxation for Dalriada, which was henceforth simply to help the parent kingdom in affairs of war, he also succeeded in moderating the fury of the chieftains against the bards. Their numbers were reduced and their prestige abated, but the profession was amply compensated for this by acquiring a new and recognised position in the State. No bards except those specially sanctioned were to pursue the poetic calling. But for the maintenance of these latter distinct public estates in land were set apart for the first time, in return for which they were obliged to give public instruction to all comers in the learning of the day, after the manner of university professors. The rate of reward for their poems was also legally fixed, so that from this time down to the seventeenth century the bardic colleges, as distinct from the ecclesiastical ones, taught poetry, law, and history, educating the lawyers, judges, and poets of the Irish nation.
In recognition of the service rendered them on this occasion the bards appeared before Columba in a body, with Dallan Forgaill, their chief, at their head, bringing the famous “Amra” or elegy which the latter had composed in his praise. This poem is in the Fenian dialect, so ancient and obscure as to be very baffling and almost unintelligible to scholars. It has come down to us heavily annotated with gloss and commentary in the eleventh century MS. (Leabhar Na h’Uidhre). So far as can be made out, it speaks of the saint in relation to the people as “their soul’s light, their learned one, their chief from right, who was God’s messenger, who dispelled fears from them, who used to explain the truth of words, a harp without a base chord, a perfect sage who believed in Christ; he was learned, he was chaste, he was charitable, he was an abounding benefit of guests, he was eager, he was noble, he was gentle, he was the physician of the heart of every age; he was to persons inscrutable, he was a shelter to the naked, he was a consolation to the poor, there went not from the world one who was more continual for a remembrance of the cross.”
But a recent writer, Dr. Strachan of Manchester, casts doubts upon the antiquity of its present form, thinking it belongs, as transcribed, to a later date.
The other way in which St. Columba helped forward the cause of letters was by encouraging the scholars. The monasteries became great schools of learning as well as missionary centres. In all the institutions he founded, ample provision was made for the multiplication of books. The knowledge of Hebrew and Greek was fostered among the monks as well as of Latin and Gaelic. To the monastic houses founded throughout Pictland by the Columban clergy the tribes sent their youth to be trained. And for several centuries, as Skene has observed, there was not a Pictish boy taught his letters but received his education from a Columban monk. In later times students from the Continent flocked to the more famous of the Celtic seats of learning in Ireland and Scotland, and we even hear of Iona sending professors to Cologne, Louvain, and Paris.
There is no evidence that the northern Picts had a knowledge of letters before Columba taught them. There is even doubt as to what language these tribes spoke. Yet in 710 A.D., a little more than a hundred years after his death, a knowledge of letters was common in Pictland. With reference to subsequent ecclesiastical changes, it is known that King Naitan sent a proclamation “by public command throughout all the provinces of the Picts to be transcribed, learned, and observed.” This we have on the authority of Bede, a statement which shows that learning must have made considerable progress among the people even at that early date. So that in this respect we may very well endorse the opinion of Professor Mackinnon, when he says that “we have not yet perhaps fully realised the part which the School of Iona had in shaping the destinies of the Scottish nation.” When in Scotland we discuss the past history of our national education, the figure of John Knox invariably rises before us as prime inaugurator of the first real system, but the great Abbot of Iona was at it 1000 years before him.
Shaping the destinies of the Scottish nation; ay, and might we not add of literature? For a further striking claim has been repeatedly put forward on behalf of the Celtic poets in the Columban period, namely this, that they taught Europe to rhyme. And this claim has been made not so much by partisans as by some of the foremost European scholars, including Zeuss and Nigra, who have remarked and pointed out that the Latin verses of Columcille and other early saints, either rhyme or have a strong tendency to rhyme. Referring to the advance towards final assonance in later times made by the English in their Latin poems, Zeuss says, “We must believe that this form was introduced among them by the Irish, as were the arts of writing and of painting and of ornamenting manuscripts, since they themselves, in common with the other Germanic nations, made use in their poetry of nothing but alliteration.” It is only some 500 years after Columba that we find rhyme beginning to appear in English literature.
The other foreign writer of note, C. Nigra, with equal emphasis asserts that “final assonance or rhyme can have been derived only from the laws of Celtic phonology.” Meanwhile this must be regarded as a moot point. For other eminent scholars, Thurneysen and Windisch, have professed their opinion that it may be traced to the Latin. But “this at least is clear,” observes Dr. Hyde, who has gone very carefully into the matter, “that already in the seventh century the Irish not only rhymed, but made intricate Deibhidh and other rhyming metres, when for centuries after this period the Germanic nations could only alliterate.”
It is our proud boast as an English-speaking people that we can go back as far as Cædmon to the beginnings of our literature; yet how few British subjects realise that Gaelic was a literary language long before then in the hands of men like St. Patrick, St. Columba, and Dallan Forgaill, and that there are Latin MSS. still extant associated with Columba and the School of Iona which are almost as old as the very oldest existing codex of the Bible.
It is worth our while to think of this, and of the remarkable man who, in the obscurity of his island home, recognised the value and permanence of his own work, giving utterance to a sentiment which the ages have amply verified: “Small and mean though this place is, yet it shall be held in great and unusual honour, not only by Scotic kings and people, but also by the rulers of foreign and barbarous nations, and by their subjects; the saints also even of other churches shall regard it with no common reverence.” And it is so. Systems and dynasties have since fallen, yet the fame of Iona still stands secure, and continues to attract the saint and the foreigner.