The Old Irish Life of St. Brigit

Ms. Rawlinson B 512, in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, contains a life of St. Brigit in Irish with numerous Latin phrases and passages interspersed. Some sections of this were edited and translated by Stokes in Lives of the Saints from the Book of Lismore, and the whole has been printed without translation, in Irish Texts, fasciculus i (ed. J. Fraser, P. Grosjean and J. G. O'Keeffe, 1931), under the title ‘Vita Brigitae’. I have preferred to call it the ‘Old Irish Life of St. Brigit’, as it is clear from the language of the text that it must have been compiled in the Old Irish period. The edition in Irish Texts is unfortunately disfigured by numerous mistranscriptions, faulty divisions of words and unnecessary conjectural emendations. My translation—a literal one—is based on this edition, corrected by reference to an excellent facsimile of the MS. which I owe to the kindness of the Oxford University Press. For convenience of reference, I have followed the division into sections of the printed text, though, as I shall point out in my notes, this is sometimes misleading.