board covered with red leather, very like that with which eastern mss. are bound." The leaves, he tells us, "appeared to have been originally stitched together, but the sewing had almost entirely disappeared."[1]
It appears that no one thought it worth while to preserve the wooden box or the board covered with red leather, or even to measure or describe them. And though the stitching had not entirely disappeared, no record was kept of the way in which the leaves were arranged in gatherings. The binder's knife has deprived us of all possibility of discovering the arrangement now.[2]
By the kind permission of its present owner, I have been enabled to make a study of this interesting manuscript, the results of which I propose to lay before the Academy.
Description.
The Cathach[3] is a fragment consisting of fifty-eight consecutive leaves, all of which are more or less mutilated. The first verse of which any part is legible is Ps. xxx. 10, and the last Ps. cv. 13. Consequently the existing leaves, before mutilation, included rather more than half the Psalter, and the manuscript when complete must have had about 110 leaves. That it was complete in the eleventh century is not probable.[4] It is true that the loss of portions of the leaves may be due, not to rough usage before it was encased, but to the action of damp after that event. And it is possible that a considerable number of the leaves were so far decomposed when the cumdach was opened that they were thought unworthy of preservation. Sir William Betham is not very explicit on that point. He writes thus[5]:—"It was so
- ↑ W. Betham, "Antiquarian Researches," i, 110. Betham was obviously ignorant of O'Donnell's Life of St. Columba, which will engage our attention in the sequel. The shrine, he says, had been closed for "more than a century" (i.e. from the time of Daniel O'Donel?), "under an idea that it contained the bones of St. Columkill himself." This, I believe, was an inference from the inscription on the outer case, according to which it held a pignus Columbani. The word pignus was used for the body of a Saint after death (see, e.g., V. S. Brendani I, § 105, Plummer, i. 151). Betham was unable to discover the meaning of the name Caah, "which is not an Irish word"!
- ↑ It may be conjectured, however, that the two pairs of transposed leaves, 35, 36, and 42, 43 (see below, p. 247, note), were pairs of conjugates, each in the middle of a gathering. If that be so, the two successive gatherings to which they belonged had probably one 6 and the other 8 leaves, or both 6 leaves, with the addition of a leaf without a conjugate in one of them. But I must add that I find it difficult to reconcile this supposition with other phenomena of the mss.
- ↑ This word is sometimes used as the name of the shrine. It is properly applicable to the book preserved in the shrine.
- ↑ Betham held the contrary opinion. "From the depth of the wooden box," he writes (p. 111), "there is no doubt but it once contained the whole Psalter." A most precarious inference.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 110 f.
