type, and it is these which make the Lives of Ciaran especially
remarkable. They may well be genuine reminiscences of the real life,
or at least of the real character of the man himself. Thus, there are
a number of coincidences, clearly undesigned (noted below, p. 104)
consistently pointing to a pre-Celtic parentage for the saint. Again,
the saint's mother is represented as a strong personality, with a
decided strain of "thrawnness" in her composition; while the saint
himself is shown to us as distinguished by a beautiful unselfishness.
This, it must be confessed, is very far from being a common character
of the Irish saints, as they are represented to us by the native
hagiologists; and in any case the character-drawing of the average
Irish saint's life is so rudimentary, that when we are thus enabled to
detect well-defined traits, we are quite justified in accepting them
as based on the tradition of the actual personality of the saint. In
other words, so deep was the impression which the man made upon his
contemporaries during his short life, that his _memorabilia_ seem to
be, on the whole, of a more definitely historic nature than are those
of other Irish saints.

There is, however, a disturbing element which must be kept in mind in
criticising the Lives of Ciaran. He was the son of a carpenter, and he
was said to have died at the age of thirty-three. It is quite clear
that these coincidences with the facts of the earthly parentage and
death of Christ were observed by the homilists--indeed the author of
the Irish Life says as much, at the end of his work. They provoked a
natural and perhaps wholly unconscious desire to draw other parallels;
and if we may use a convenient German technical term, there is
a traceable _Tendenz_ in this direction, as is indicated in the
Annotations on later pages. It is not to be supposed that even these
apparently imitative incidents are (not to mince matters) mere
pious frauds; they may well have come into existence in the
folk-consciousness automatically, before they received their present
literary form. But such a development could hardly have centred in an
unworthy subject; there must have been a well-established tradition
of a _Christ-likeness_ of character in the man, for such parallels in
detail to have taken shape.[3]

The homiletic purpose of these documents is most clearly shown in the
Irish Life. This was written to be preached as a sermon on the saint's
festival ["this day _