.e._ Clonmacnois) as the authority for a
statement to the effect that "the order of Comgall [of Bangor, Co.
Down] was one of the eight orders that were in Ireland." It would
be irrelevant to discuss here the meaning of this statement; its
importance for us lies in the fact that the sentence is not found in
any of the extant Lives, so that some other text, now unknown, must be
in question.

Ciaran of Clonmacnois was not the only saint of that name. Besides his
well-known namesake of Saighir (Seir-Kieran, King's Co.), there were
a few lesser stars called Ciaran, and there is danger of confusion
between them. The name reappears in Cornwall, with the regular
Brythonic change of Q to P, in the form Pieran or Pirran. This Pieran
is wrongly identified by Skene[8] with our saint; a single glance at
the abstract of the Life of St. Pieran given by Sir T.D. Hardy[9]
will show how mistaken this identification is. A similar confusion is
probably at the base of the curious statement in Adam King's _Scottish
Kalendar of Saints_, that Queranus was an "abot in Scotl[=a]d under
king Ethus, [anno] 876" and of Camerarius' description of him as
"abbas Foilensis in Scotia."[10]

The four documents of which translations are printed in this book
relate almost, though not quite, the same series of incidents. There
is a sufficient divergence between them, both in selection and in
order, as well as in the minor details, to make the determination of
their mutual relationship a difficult problem. We must regard all
four as independent compositions, though based on a common group of
sources, which, in the first instance, were doubtless disjointed
_memorabilia_, preserved by oral tradition in Clonmacnois. These would
in time gradually become fitted into the four obvious phases of the
saint's actual life--his boyhood, his schooldays, his wanderings, and
his final settlement at Clonmacnois. It is not difficult to form a
plausible theory as to how the systematisation took place, and also
as to how the slight variants between different versions of the same
story arose. The composition of hymns to the founder and patron would
surely be a favourite literary exercise in Clonmacnois. In such hymns
the different incidents would be told and re-told, the details varying
with the knowledge and the metrical skill of the versifiers. There are
excerpts from such hymns, in Irish, scattered through VG: and LB ends
with a _pasticcio_ of similar fragments in Latin. A