Columcille (St. Columba)

Columcille, or St. Columba, was born in 521 into a northern Irish royal kindred and became one of the great founders of early Irish monasticism, with churches at Derry and Durrow and, from 563, the island monastery of Iona off the Scottish coast. He died at Iona in 597.

Many poems of exile and homesickness were later ascribed to him. George Sigerson, in Bards of the Gael and Gall (1907), gives three under his name: the laments “Remembering Erinn” and “Delights in Erinn”, and the short stave “The Fall of the Book-Satchels”, which he places at the news of the death of the scholar Longarad. They are given here in Sigerson’s English versions.