Can any of the celticists on the list supply more information
about this miracle of Ultans - or its source? for that matter,
any good modern studies of norse:irish relations during the
viking period would be appreciated.
> * Ultan, bishop (657)
> - while feeding children with his right hand, he put Nordic
> invaders to flight with his left hand; an early Irish writer said of
> him: 'Had it been the right hand that noble Ultan raised against
them,
> no foreigner would ever have come into the land of Erin'
I think the identification of the invaders as Nordic would have to be
late, as Ultán died in the mid-7th-century. The commentary to the
Félire Óengusso provides the fullest account of this
heroic feat (London, 1905: 200-1), in which the saint himself says if
he had raised his right hand no foreigner (gall) would ever invade
Ireland. Ultán was a major player in the early Irish church and is
said to have collected much lore about both Brigid and Patrick. Kim
McCone, in a refinement of the work of Mario Esposito, has persuasively
argued that Ultán's lost account was one of the sources used by the
anonymous author of Brigid's Vita Prima. Tírechán,
one of Patrick's earliest biographers, was Ultán's student and may have
acquired much of his information from him.
You might be interested in the essay by Alfred P. Smyth, "The effect of
Scandinavian raiders on the English and Irish churches: a preliminary
reassessment," in Brendan Smith, ed. Britain and Ireland,
900-1300 (Cambridge, 1999): 1-38. He's arguing against
several scholars who have treated the subject, so it should provide a
useful bibliography, though you might not care for his characterization
of the Norse.
> * Ida of Herzfeld, widow (825)
> - to remind herself of her all-too-human destiny, she had a stone
> coffin made for herself, which she would fill daily with food before
> distributing it to the poor
How usual or unusual would a STONE coffin be at this time (either
Idas own time, or that of the hagiographer - if he is known)
A legend told about Darerca/Moninne describes the bed "made from stone
in the style of a sepulcher" which the saint used on the rare occasions
that she succumbed to sleep and which she left as a relic for one of
her monasteries in Ireland; it was then used to test the virginity of
the women who wished to enter her community. According to Esposito,
this legend was written in a 13th-century English court hand; this tale
is not told in her extant Lives.
Maeve
