St. Adamnan, ninth Abbot of Iona, writing at the end of the seventh century, invariably calls the island Ioua or the Iouan Island. Unless the hypothesis of the careless scribes be accepted, this should be conclusive.
For myself I do not believe that there has been any slip of n for u. And I am confirmed in this opinion by the following circumstance. Three years ago I was sailing on one of the sea-lochs of Argyll. My only companion was the boatman, and incidentally I happened to speak of some skerries (a group of sea-set rocks) off the Ross of Mull, similarly named to rocks in the narrow kyle we were then passing; and learned with surprise that my companion knew them well, and was not only an Iona man, but had lived on the island till he was twenty. I asked him about his people, and when he found that I knew them he became more confidential. But he professed a strange ignorance of all concerning Iona. There was an old Iona iorram, or boat-song, I was anxious to have: he had never heard of it. Still more did I desire some rendering or even some lines of an ancient chant of whose existence I knew, but had never heard recited, even fragmentarily. He did not know of it: he "did not know Gaelic," that is, he remembered only a little of it. Well, no, he added, perhaps he did remember some, "but only just to talk to fishermen an' the like."
Suddenly a squall came down out of the hills. The loch blackened. In a moment a froth of angry foam drove in upon us, but the boat righted, and we flew before the blast, as though an arrow shot by the wind. I noticed a startling change in my companion. His blue eyes were wide and luminous; his lips twitched; his hands trembled. Suddenly he stooped slightly, laughed, cried some words I did not catch, and abruptly broke into a fierce and strange sea-chant. It was no other than the old Iona rann I had so vainly sought!
Some memory had awakened in the man, perhaps in part from what I had said—with the old spell of the sea, the old cry of the wind.
Then he ceased abruptly, he relapsed, and with a sheepish exclamation and awkward movement shrank beside me. Alas, I could recall only a few lines; and I failed in every effort to persuade him to repeat the rann. But I had heard enough to excite me, for again and again he had called or alluded to Iona by its ancient pre-Columban name of Ioua, and once at least I was sure, from the words, that the chant was also to Ioua the Moon.
That night, however, he promised to tell me on the morrow all he could remember of the old Ioua chant. On the morrow, alas, he had to leave upon an unexpected business that could not be postponed, and before his return, three days later, I was gone. I have not seen him again, but it is to him I am indebted for the loan of an ancient manuscript map of Iona, a copy of which I made and have by me still. It was an heirloom: by his own account had been in his family, in Iona, for seven generations, "an it's Himself knows how much more." He had been to the island the summer before, because of his father's death, and had brought this coarsely painted and rudely framed map away with him. He told me too, that night, how the oldest folk on the island—"some three or four o' them, anyway; them as has the Gaelic"—had the old Ioua chant in their minds. As a boy he had heard it at many a winter ceilidh. "Ay, ay, for sure, Iona was called Ioua in them old ancient days."
My friend also had a little book of his mother's which contained, in a neat hand, copies of Gaelic songs, among them some of the old Islay and Skye oar-chants of the iorram kind. I recall an iorram that had hardly a word in it, but was only a series of barbaric cries, sometimes full of lament (hò-ro-aroo-aròne, ho-ro, ah-hòne, ah-hòne!), which was the Iona fisherman's song to entice seals to come near. I remember, too, the opening of a "maighdean-mhara" or mermaid song, by a little-known namesake of my own, a sister of Mary Macleod, "the sweet singer of the Hebrides," because it had as a heading (perhaps put there by the Iona scribe) some lines of Mary's that I liked well.
I quote from memory, but these were to the effect that, in his home, what the Macleod loved, was playing at chess
Agus fuaim air a chlarsaich
Gus e h'eachdraidh na dheigh sin
Greis air ursgeul na Fèine
[and the music of the harp, and the telling of tales of the feats of the Féinn (the Fingalians).] There are not many now, I fear, who could find entertainment thus, or care to sit before the peat-fires.