A Literary History of Ireland, from Earliest Times to the Present Day. Douglas Hyde

Saint Patrick, whence the origin of chanting it during the communion service.

      The Book of Armagh contains the two earliest lives of the national saint that we have, probably the two earliest biographies of any size ever composed in Ireland. They are written in rude Latin, with a good deal of Irish place-names and Irish words intermixed, the first by one Muirchu Maccu Machteni,[28] who tells us that he wrote at the instigation of Aed, bishop of Sletty, who, as we know from the "Four Masters," died about 698, and the second by Tirechan, who says he received his knowledge of the saint from the lips and writings of Bishop Ultan,[29] his tutor, who died in 656, and who, supposing him to have been seventy or eighty years old at the time of his death, must have been born only eighty or ninety years after the death of St. Patrick himself. Both of these writers appear to have had older memoirs to draw on, for Muirchu says that many had before them endeavoured to write the history of St. Patrick from what their fathers and those who were ministers of the Word from the beginning had told them, though none had ever succeeded in producing a proper biography,[30] and in Tirechan's life of him in the Book of Armagh—an evident patchwork—we read that all his godly doings had been brought together[31] and collected by the most skilful of the ancients. The first of these lives consists of two books containing twenty-eight and thirteen short chapters, respectively, the second, Tirechan's, of one book containing fifty-seven chapters, in addition to which there are a number of minor notes referring to St. Patrick in Latin and in Irish, which Ferdomnach, who transcribed the book in 807, appears to have taken from other old lives or memoirs of the saint. The Irish portions of these notes are of peculiar interest, as showing what the Irish language was, as written about the year 800.[32]

      If it is genuine the earliest life of Patrick ever written would probably be the brief metrical life ascribed to Fiacc of Sletty, the sixth or seventh in descent from Cáthaoir [Cauheer] Mór, who was king of Leinster at the close of the second century.[33] His mother was a sister of Dubhthach's [Duv-hach], the chief poet and Brehon of Ireland, who, we are told, helped St. Patrick to review and revise the Brehon Laws. Fiacc was a youthful poet in Dubhthach's train at Tara. Afterwards he was tonsured by St. Patrick, became Bishop of Sletty, and on Patrick's death is said to have written his life, and not forgetful of his former training, to have written it in elaborate verse.[34] So famous a critic as Zimmer believed half the poem to be genuine, but Thurneysen rejects it because it does not fall in with his theories of Irish metre.[35]

      But the longest and most important life of St. Patrick is that known as the Tripartite, or Triply-divided Life, which is really a series of three semi-historical homilies, or discourses, which were probably delivered in honour of the saint on the three festival days devoted to his memory, that is, the Vigil, the Feast itself, on March 17th, and the day after, or else the Octave. This Tripartite life, which is a fairly complete one, is written in ancient Irish, with many passages of Latin interspersed. The monk Jocelin, who wrote a life of the saint in the twelfth century, tells us that St. Evin[36]—from whom Monasterevin, in Queen's County, is called, a saint of the early sixth century—wrote a life of Patrick partly in Latin and partly in Gaelic, and Colgan, the learned Franciscan who translated the Tripartite in his "Trias Thaumaturga,"[37] believed that this was the very life which St. Evin wrote. Colgan found the Tripartite life in three very ancient Gaelic MSS., procured for him, no doubt, by the unwearied research of Brother Michael O'Clery in the early part of the seventeenth century, which he collated one with the other, and of which he gives the following noteworthy account:—

      "The first thing to be observed is that it has been written by its first author and in the aforesaid manuscript, partly in Latin, partly in Gaelic, and this in very ancient language, almost impenetrable by reason of its very great antiquity, exhibiting not only in the same chapter, but also in the same line, alternate phrases now in the Latin, now in the Gaelic tongue. In the second place, it is to be noticed that this life, on account of the very great antiquity of its style, which was held in much regard, used to be read in the schools of our antiquarians in the presence of their pupils, being elucidated and expounded by the glosses of the masters, and by interpretations of and observations on the more abstruse words; so that hence it is not to be wondered at that some words—which certainly did happen—gradually crept from these glosses into the texts, and thus brought a certain colour of newness into this most ancient and faithful author, some things being turned from Latin into Gaelic, some abbreviated by the scribes, and some altogether omitted."