Life
S. Kevin of Glendalough, Gaelic-Christian hermit [reputed b.498]; a patron saint of the Dublin diocese; visited Uisneach and Clonmacnoise c.544, and spent 4 years in retreat before being called back to the community that formed around him in Glendalough; the hagiography of Kevin is given in the Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae of John Colgan [q.v.]; a popular legend surrounding relates that he resisted temptation from a naked women by thrusting her from the mouth of the cave - known as St. Kevin’s Bed - into the lake below; he is a character in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939; Pt IV, pp.604–07) where is ‘bath’ is investigated; he is celebrated by Seamus Heaney in “St. Kevin and the Blackbird” (Spirit Level, 1996) and his tale is retold by Marie Heaney in her accessible retelling of Irish mythology in Over Nine Waves (Faber 1994).
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Commentary
C. Plummer, ed., Vita S. Coemgeni; Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae. Life of St Kevin, Vita sancti Coemgeni: ‘Contigit aliquando Sancto Coemgeno cogitandi, ut vellut solus peregrinari. Et perrexit
solus de suo monasterio, volens longe pergerinari. Vidensque eum solum euntem sanctus heremita, Garbanus nomini, ait ei, “O homo Dei, quo pergis? Melius est iam uno loco fixis manere in Christo quam de loco ad
locum in senectute discurrere. Nullum enim avem sua ova volatu fovere audisti.” Haec audiens Sanctus Coemgenus compunctus est corde et promisit redire ad suum locum.’ (Garbanus ad sanctum Coemgenum, Vita Sancti Coemgeni, ed. Plummer, p.249, para. xxix; quoted in George A Little, Dublin Before the Vikings, 1957, with the remark: ‘An attribute of the people of Dublin in the narrative in the Life
of Kevin is asperrimi, very hardy; in the Book of Rights,
it is cruaidh, hardy.’ 18; with text in Appendix VII, 167.)
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