324 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



caused a cumdach of elaborate workmanship to be made for the Cathach. 

 But it was then nearly as fragmentary as it is now.i It was never a book of 

 special beauty, though nine centuries ago its illuminated initials may still 

 have retained their colour.^ There is no way of explaining the construction 

 of the cumdach for the head of the O'Donnell tribe and in the Coluniban 

 Monastery of Kells except on the supposition that in the eleventh century.- 

 among the kinsmen of St. Columba and the monks of his order/ there was a 

 strong tradition, by no means suggested by the appearance of the manuscript, 

 that it was a relic of their patron saint written by his own hand."* Traditions 

 of that kind are certainly sometimes misleading;* but they count for 

 something. 



But again, the features of the manuscript are in harmony with the belief 

 that it may have been written in the circumstances indicated in O'DonnelTs 

 story of St. Finnian. We have seen that the scribe had apparently some 

 difficulty in procuring properly prepared vellum.* The script shows us thai 

 the text was penned by a man whose habit was not to write rapidly,' but who, 

 nevertheless, worked in this case at high pressure, and corrected his fairly 

 numerous slips as he went along.' If, as we are told, Finnian demanded his 

 exemplar at the moment when the transcript was being finished, there can 

 have been no time for revision. And we have found reason for thinking that 

 it was not, in fact, compared with the exemplar.' An anecdote told by 



1 Above, p. 246 f. 2 Above, p. 252. 



^ From the fifteenth to the seventeenth century the family of Mac Robartaigh of Tory 

 had the official custody of the Cathach (Reeves, p. 320). If it could be shown that this 

 arrangement was in existence in the eleventh century, and that Domnall mac Robartaigh, 

 the abbot of KcUs who was concerned in the making of the shrine, belonged to the Tory 

 family, the argument that the Cathach was believed to be the handiwork of St. Columba 

 by the monks of his order, as distinct from the members of his tribe, would be discounted. 

 But there is no proof of either hypothesis. There seem to have been families of Ua 

 Robartaigh or Mac Robartaigh in different jjarts of Ireland. Thus Ua Robartaigh, herenagh 

 of Connor, died in 1081, and Diurmaid Ua Robartaigh, abbot of Durrow, in 1190 (Annals 

 of Ulster). Cp. Reeves, pp. 284, 285, 400 f. 



'' This argument is confirmed by a fact of which I have been informed by my friend, 

 the Rev. P. S. Dinneen. In the T.C.D. Jis., H. 2. 6, there is a tract on the Maguire 

 princes. It was written in 1710 in late Irish ; but it was copied — the language being, no 

 doubt, modernized by the scribe — " from the old historical book," which may have been 

 contemporary with the events of the thirteenth or fourteenth century which it relates. 

 It is significant, therefore, that it records an oath of the O'Donnell of that period, " by 

 the Cathach, by which Tir Conaill swears.'' 



^As in the case of the Book of Armagh (.see Gwynn, " Liber Ardraachanus," pp xivf., 

 ci f.) and the Book of Durrow (above, p. 317 flf.j. But these manuscripts are of an 

 exceptional order. A closer parallel is the Book of MulHng (see my ' ' Chapters on the 

 Book of Mulling." p. 13 fi".). 



« Above, p. 247 f. ' Above, p. 248. 



>< Above, p. 2-4'.) f. » Above, p. 248 tf. 



