Chapter XXX: The Adventures of the Robbers of Loch Erne (lb, Lc)

LA and VG know nothing of the visit to Loch Erne of which this is the chief incident. Ninned here appears as an abbot, which is scarcely consistent with his previous appearance as a junior fellow-student of Ciaran. There is, however, a possible hint at this tradition in the statement in VG that when Ciaran departed from Clonard he left the Dun Cow with Ninned. Ninned's island, as we learn from an entry in the _Martyrology of Donegal_ (18th January) was Inis Muighe Samh, now spelt Inismacsaint, in Loch Erne. The reading in both MSS. of LB, _silua_ for _insula_, evidently rests on a false interpretation of a word or a contraction in the exemplar from which R1 was copied. This seems to have been hard to read at the incident before us. Later on there is a word, which the sense shows us must have been _potentes_. The scribe of R1 could not read it, and left a blank, which he afterwards tentatively filled in with the meaningless word _fatentes_--a word which his copyist, the scribe of R2, emended by guesswork into _fac(i)entes_.

_Parallels._--There are several cases of the restoration to life of persons who had been decapitated. Coemgen restored two women who had been thus treated (VSH, i, 239). The famous Welsh holy well of Saint Winefred in Flintshire is associated with a similar miracle (see Rees' _Cambro-British Saints_, pp. 17, 304). The story of the three murdered monks is also told of Saint Aed (VSH, i, 38), but there the blood-mark round their necks is absent. Ciaran seems to have been less expert than some of his brethren in replacing severed heads on decapitated bodies; for according to a tale preserved in the _Book of Lismore_, there was a certain lord of the region of Ui Maine (the region west of the Shannon), who was called Coirpre the Crooked, for the following reason: he was an evil man who did great mischief to every one, in consequence of which he was murdered and beheaded. But Ciaran had shriven him, and in order to deliver his soul from demons he restored him to life, replacing his head--so clumsily, however, that it was ever afterwards crooked.

A certain man called Ambacuc, having perjured himself on the hand of Ciaran, his head fell off. He was taken to Clonmacnois, and not only lived there headless for seven years, but became the father of a family![19]