Abstract

Samthann, who lived two centuries after the first three sisters, shows the stern but wise and merciful abbess who built on her older sisters’ work. She could unleash an enormous eel on male threats to her sisters and beat greedy landowners in their dreams until they saw the error of their ways and freely donated whatever her community needed. Such strength of leadership could be the difference between a community's survival and its disappearance. She is the only eighth-century Irish saint, male or female, honored with an extant Life, and one of very few who did not found her own community. All of her sister saints with medieval Lives died in the sixth century, and all were said to have founded their own communities. Samthann's Life may date to within a generation or two of her death, and it may reveal the woman before history remade her, before centuries of devotion and the growing power of her monastery turned her into someone who could kill with a single word, as Patrick's propagandists claimed of him.

Key words: célí Dé, Cáin Adomnáin, purgatory, soul-friendship

When he began to cross a stream, the water level rose until it reached his belt; and then an eel of astounding size gripped his loins, where it constricted him with great force. He was exceedingly terrified at this occurrence, and returned to the virgin of God, where on bended knees he begged her forgiveness. When this was given, at once the eel fell off his loins. And instructed by this affliction, he swore never again to come to the virgins’ monastery.