(d) The fact, specially mentioned in LA, that Ciaran was reared by his parents, not put out to fosterage as would have been done had he been of gentle birth.
(e) The pre-eminent position of Ciaran's mother in the home. The pre-Celtic tribesmen of Ireland, like their Pictish kinsmen in Scotland, were organised on the system of mother-right, in which property and descent and kinship are all traced through the maternal side of the ancestry. Throughout the Lives, Beoit is a cypher: the house and its contents and appurtenances are almost invariably treated as Darerca's property. Matriarchate usually implies exogamy, a man choosing his wife from a sept differing from his own; and the children are related to the mother's, not the father's kin. The male responsible for the education of the child is not so much the father as the maternal uncle. The law of exogamy was strictly followed in the case before us. Beoit comes from north-east Ulster; Darerca belonged to a family which drew its origin from the south-east of the present county Kerry, though she seems to have settled in Cenel Fiachach at the time when Beoit met her. Incidents VIII and X of Ciaran's Life are laid in that territory, which falls in with a tradition, presently to be noted, that the dwelling-place of the family of the saint was not Raith Cremthainn, but the place where the parents had first met—which would be an instance of the husband dwelling with the wife's people, as is frequent under the matriarchate. The Celtic authors of the Lives have transferred the kinship of the son to the father's clan, in accordance with their own social system; but an older tradition has left an unmistakable trace in the confusion of the relationships of "father" and "uncle" in LA, §§ 9, 10.
It is possible that the prominence of the mother in the household, and Ciaran's birth away from his ancestral home as the result of a taxation, are specially emphasised because they offer obvious parallels with the Gospel story. The character of Darerca is, however, by no means idealised, as we might have expected it to be, had this been the chief purpose of the narrator.
The Parents of Ciaran, their Names and Origins.—The name of Ciaran's father is variously Latinised in the Latin Lives. The Irish lives call him Beoit, a name analysed in the Book of Leinster, p. 349, into Beo-n-Aed, which would mean something like "Living Fire." The -n- is inserted, according to a law of Old Irish accidence, because áed, "fire," is a neuter word. Thus arises the Latin form Beonnadus. By metathesis the name further becomes transformed to Beodan or Beoan. The Latharna were the people who dwelt around the site of the modern town of Larne, which preserves their name; Mag Molt ("the plain of wethers") is probably the plain surrounding the town. The Aradenses, to whom LB ascribes the origin of Beoit, were the people known in Irish record as Dal n-Araide, the pre-Celtic people of the region now called Antrim.
Dar-erca, "daughter of brightness" or "of the sky," was a common female name in ancient Ireland. The Glasraige to whom she belonged was a tribe with divisions scattered in various parts of Ireland. Irluachra was south-east Kerry with adjoining parts of Cork and Limerick. Of her poet grandfather Glas nothing is known.
It would perhaps be too far-fetched to see a hint at a mythological element in the traditions of Ciaran in the signification of his parents' names. Indeed, considering the Tendenz of the Ciaran Lives, it is remarkable that there is no supernormal element in the account of the birth of this particular saint; supernatural births are almost a commonplace in Irish saints' lives as a rule.
The saint's own name is regularly spelt with an initial K or Q in the Latin texts, doubtless because Latin c was pronounced as s before e and i in mediaeval Ireland.
The Annals of Clonmacnois preserves for us a totally different tradition of the origin and upbringing of the saint. Modernising the haphazard spelling and punctuation of the seventeenth-century English translation (the original Irish of this valuable book is lost), we may note what it tells us. "His father's name was Beoit, a Connacht man (sic) and a carpenter. His mother Darerca, of the issue of Corc mac Fergusa mic Roig of the Clanna Rudraige. He in his childhood lived with his father and mother in 'Templevickinloyhe' [wherever that may have been] in Cenel Fiachach; until a thief of the country of Ui Failge stole the one cow they had, which, being found, he forsook together with his father and mother the said place of the stealth [= theft], fearing of further inconvenience." Here note: (1) that Darerca is given the ancestry attributed in the Book of Leinster pedigree to Beoit, thus hinting at an originally matrilinear form of the official pedigree: (2) that the settlement of the family in Cenel Fiachach, i.e. the place of Darerca's dwelling, is definitely stated; (3) that the migration of the family does not take place till after Ciaran's birth; (4) that a totally different reason is assigned for the migration; (5) that incident X of the Lives is directly referred to; (6) that we hear nothing in this passage about the rest of the numerous family of Beoit; and (7) that the family is poor, having but one cow.
Cenel Fiachach (the clan of Fiachu) occupied a territory covering parts of the present counties of Westmeath and King's Co. VG erroneously writes this Cenel Fiachrach, which occupied a territory of the modern Co. Sligo. See further, p. 171.
The Princes.—Unfortunately Ainmire mac Colgain, lord of Ui Neill, and Cremthann, a chieftain of Connacht, are not otherwise known; we cannot therefore test the chronological truth of this part of the story. Ainmire reappears as an oppressor in the life of Aed (VSH, ii, 295). LA anachronistically confuses this Ainmire with Ainmire mac Setna, King of Tara, A.D. 564-566.