Eccentric and Overbearing Irish Visitors

Last September I paid a visit to the National Museum in Dublin for the "Words on the Wave" exhibition, which was a special collaboration between the National Museum of Ireland and the Abbey Library of St. Gallen in Switzerland. The main attraction for me was a chance to see several important medieval manuscripts associated with Irish monks in Europe during the early middle ages. The so called Peregrini. One of the great names associated with the early Irish Peregrini was Gallus a disciple of Columbanus. According to later tradition Gallus established a monastic settlement in Switzerland around the year 612 that would later become the famous monastery and library of St. Gallen of today.

 

One manuscript caught my eye. Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 10 is a small tenth century Latin copy of several Old Testament books (Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Wisdom, and Sirach). A fairly mundane manuscript, no fancy illumination or art work. The reason why this particular manuscript was part of the exhibition was due to a poem added by an Irish monk to a blank page at the beginning of the manuscript. The so-called 'poem of complaint' by Dubduin. 

 The only information available at the exhibition about this poem was that it was added in Carolingian minuscule, probably at the turn from the 10th to the 11th century by a disgruntled Irish monk who was visiting the monastery in St. Gall who felt everyone was being mean to him because he was Irish. 

 

Sadly, no translation of said poem was offered in the exhibition materials.

 

I managed to find a transcription of the Latin by Ildefons von Arx in his 1830 Geschichten des Kantons St. Gallen Berichtigungen und Zusätze zu den drei Bänden Geschichten des Kantons St. Gallen.

 

I did some more digging and found an English translation by the British scholar James Midgley Clark in his 1926 book Abbey of St Gall as a centre of literature and art. Clark gives the following context for the poem.

 

"In consequence of the great veneration in which St Gall was held by the monks of  his monastery, the countrymen of the Saint were honoured guests. During his stay at St Gall between 850 and 855, Ermenrich, a monk of Reichenau, extolled the country which had produced such a holy man. "How could we ever forget the island of Hibernia,” he wrote, “from whence we received the radiance of such a great light, and whence the sun of faith rose for us?” It was, however, in the nature of things that friction should occasionally occur… The Celts looked upon St Gall as their own monastery. But when for several centuries the Abbey had been entirely Swabian in character, when the monks had their own local traditions, their own local saints, like Magnus and Othmar, they came to look with suspicion upon the eccentric and overbearing strangers. An Irishman named Dubduin bitterly complained of the lack of respect shown to his countrymen at St Gall."

 

Here is the Latin text and a translation adapted from Clark with the help of ChatGPT.

 

Hic sunt insignes sancti, quos insula nostra nobilis indegenas nutrivit hibernia claros, quorum grata fides, virtus, honor inclita vita has aulas, summasque domus sacravit amoenas.     Semina qui vitae anglorum sparsere per agros, ex quis maturos convertis in horrea fructus.     Nos igitur fratres, una de stirbe creati his sumus; imbicilles miseros quos mente superba dispicitis; proceres, mundique tumentia membra!      cum christi potius debetis membra videri, prudens hic pausat quin Gallus atque sepultus, ardens ignis scotorum conscendit ad altos.   Dubslane meruit nomen, dignumque vocari. Annue rex celi me hic pro nomine faelan.   Dubduin hos hortos fecit, quicunque requiris, Bessibus labrisque canens, qud dixit amice.

These are the distinguished saints whom our island, noble Hibernia, nurtures—native sons made famous, whose pleasing faith, virtue, and honour, their glorious life, has consecrated these halls and the highest, delightful dwellings.   They scattered the seeds of life across the fields of the English, from which you gather ripe fruits into the barns.    Therefore we too, brothers, created from one stock, belong to these men—though you, in arrogant mind, despise us as wretched imbeciles—O great men, swollen members of the world! When rather you ought to be seen as members of Christ. Here lies in rest a wise man—indeed—Gallus is buried here, a burning fire of the Irish, who ascended to the heights. Dubslane has earned a name, and one worthy to be spoken. Grant, O King of Heaven, that I may be as worthy to be mentioned as Faelan.     Dubduin made these chosen lines for whoever seeks them, singing in verse and on his lips what he spoke as a friend.

 

I'm not sure if Dubduin succeeded in making any friends at St. Gallen. Defacing a monastery's Bible with slam poetry was certainly a brave attempt to win over the nay sayers. 

In his desire to remind whoever read his hexameter that being from Ireland was actually great, he also offers a rebuttal to the elitism of the continental clergy by reminding them that Christian doctrine came to them (and to the English before them) via the Irish. God sometimes uses the eccentric and overbearing. As someone once told me, "there's room for us all."