Érlam.The Patron-Saint of an Irish Church

Abstract

Abstract In Patrick’s Confessioa story is told about a vision that the saint saw in a dream when he was at home in Britain, after he had been a slave in Ireland, and before he returned as a missionary. In this dream he saw a man called Victricus give him a letter, which began ‘The Cry of the Irish’; and, as he read those words in his dream, he heard ‘the cry of those who were by theWood of Voclut, which is by the Western Sea, and they cried out as if from one mouth: “We ask you, deeply respected young man, to come and walk among us “.’ By the time of TÍrechán’s Collectaneain the late seventh century, this had been transformed into a cry uttered by children who were still in their mothers’ wombs; in the Tripartite Life of St Patrick, a century or two later, the story was attached to a particular church, where the mothers, from whose wombs the summons to Patrick had gone out, now named Creibriu and Lesru, were the patron-saints: ‘It is they who are the érlamaof Cell Forclann among the UÍ Amalgada west of the Moy.’ Patrick’s text, therefore, engendered a story that took on a life of its own, and acquired topographical precision, being attached to named persons buried in a named church.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 34 citations exist upstream.