Description
These short popular essays on fourteen well-known and well-loved early Irish saints present a very readable and informative amalgam of often scarce historical fact and much folklore and legend from the tradition of the people. Fr Ó Ríordáin introduces the book with an overview of the sources for information on these saints which includes a most informative and helpful commentary on what the authors of the early Lives of the saints saw as their function – something very different from the function of a modern-day biographer.
The result is a series of very lively pen-pictures which reverberate with the traditional faith and insights of the people who kept these stories alive for over a millennium. The saints include Patrick, Brigid, Colmcille, Enda, Brendan the Navigator, Cummian the Tall, Ciarán of Clonmacnoise, Ninnidh, Ita, Kevin, Adomnán, Cainnech, Columbanus and Gall.
About the Author
John J. O Riordain CSsR grew up is Kiskeam at the eastern edge of Sliabh Luachra on the Cork side of the county bounds with Kerry. As a Redemptorist parish missioner, he was like St Paul ‘in journeys often’ and has worked in all thirty-two counties of Ireland as well as in Britain together with its Northern and Western Isles and in North America.
He is the author of several books including The Music of What Happens, A Pilgrim in Celtic Scotland, Where Araglen so Gently Flows and A Tragic Troubadour, a definitive work on the Life and Collected Works of Edward Walsh (1805-1850) for which he was awarded a PhD by Saor Ollscoil na hEireann.