A most distinctive class of ancient Irish literature, and probably the
class that is least popularly familiar, is the hagiographical. It is,
the present writer ventures to submit, as valuable as it is distinctive
and as well worthy of study as it is neglected. While annals, tales and
poetry have found editors the Lives of Irish Saints have remained
largely a mine unworked. Into the causes of this strange neglect it is
not the purpose of the present introduction to enter. Suffice it to
glance in passing at one of the reasons which has been alleged in
explanation, scil.:--that the "Lives" are uncritical and romantic, that
they abound in wild legends, chronological impossibilities and all sorts
of incredible stories, and, finally, that miracles are multiplied till
the miraculous becomes the ordinary, and that marvels are magnified till
the narrative borders on the ludicrous. The Saint as he is sketched is
sometimes a positively repulsive being--arrogant, venomous, and cruel;
he demands two eyes or more for one, and, pucklike, fairly revels in
mischief! As painted he is in fact more a pagan deity than a Christian
man.

The foregoing charges may, or must, be admitted partially or in full,
but such admission implies no denial of the historical value of the
Lives. All archaic literature, be it remembered, is in a greater or
less degree uncritical, and it must be read in the light of the writer's
times and surroundings. That imagination should sometimes run riot and
the pen be carried beyond the boundary line of the strictly literal is
perhaps nothing much to be marvelled at in the case of the supernatural
minded Celt with religion for his theme. Did the scribe believe what he
wrote when he recounted the multiplied marvels of his holy patron's
life? Doubtless he did--and why not! To the unsophisticated monastic
and mediaeval mind, as to the mind of primitive man, the marvellous and
supernatural is almost as real and near as the commonplace and natural.