Adamnan

Adamnan, Columba's biographer, was born about 625, of the race of Hy-Neill, in that part of Ulster which now forms the county of Donegal. Educated at the monastic seminary of Clonard, in his 28th year he joined the Columban brotherhood of Iona, of which, in 679, he was chosen abbot, the ninth in succession to his great kinsman, the founder. In 686 he paid a visit to his friend and pupil, Aldfrid, king of Northumbria, to procure the release of some Irish captives; and during this visit, and another one two years later, he was converted to the Roman views as to the holding of Easter and the shape of the tonsure. Those views he endeavoured to inculcate in Iona, and also in Ireland, which he twice revisited, in 692 and 697; but he failed, at least in Iona, and it is said that mortification at the failure caused his death, which befell on 23d September 704, the day of his translation in old Irish and Scottish calendars. He left behind him a Latin treatise 'On the Holy Places' of Palestine and other countries, dictated, he says, by Arculfus, a Frankish bishop, who, returning from a pilgrimage, had been wrecked on the Western Isles. It is valuable as one of our earliest descriptions of Palestine; and three editions of it were published between 1619 and 1734. Adamnan's Vision, a professed account of his visit to heaven and hell, is preserved in an Irish MS. of the 12th century, and, with an English translation, was printed in 1870. Whether it was really by Adamnan is open to doubt; but a work that is certainly his, a work of surpassing interest, is the Vita Sancti Columbae, his Life of Columba. Along with miracles and many stories palpably incredible, this book reveals a great deal of distinct and minute matter concerning the remarkable community to which both the author and his hero belonged. The standard edition, from an 8th century codex found at Schaffhausen in 1845, was edited by Dr Reeves in 1857 for the Bannatyne Club (q.v.), and the Irish Archaeological Society, which (with trans.) forms the sixth vol. (1874) of Scottish Historians. Most of our knowledge about the early Scoto-Irish Church is comprised in that volume. Another edition of the life is that by Dr Fowler (Oxford 1895).