Enda of Aran

A warrior chief in early Ireland laid down his sword and crossed the Atlantic standing on a floating slab of stone. His goal was Inishmore in the Aran Islands, a wind-battered limestone ridge off Galway Bay. There Enda built a monastery. In island legend, the ocean itself guarded the settlement, keeping sinners out and holding sea-women at bay whenever the church bells rang.

From warrior to monk

Before he became a monk, Enda was a fighting chief in the north-east of Ireland. When his father died, his clan made him their leader. He opened his rule with a raid on their enemies.

On the way home his men sang a victory song. They passed the convent where his sister lived as abbess. Enda asked her for one of her royal pupils as a wife. She let the girl choose between the chief and the convent, and the girl chose the convent. The story makes her choice final, and the girl dies on the spot. His sister preached to Enda over the body, and he gave up his old life.

The old life did not give him up at once. While Enda dug a trench around his new cell, raiders passed by and a fight broke out nearby. He joined in, armed with a wooden stake. To keep him away from clan warfare, his sister sent him across the Irish Sea to train at a monastery in Britain. He returned years later as an ordained priest, looking for a remote sanctuary of his own.

How Enda won the island

Enda’s brother-in-law was a king in the south of Ireland. Enda went to him and asked for Aran.

The king offered him good farmland near his royal seat instead. Enda refused. The island was enough, he said, because “in it will be my resurrection.” The king asked how he could give away an island he had never seen.

A miracle settled it. Enda told the king to kneel and put his face on the saint’s feet. The ground rose up under both of them until they could see Aran far to the west. The king looked, said it was good land, and gave it to God and to Enda.

At the harbour there was no boat. Enda had eight monks carry a large stone from the beach into the sea. Enda stepped onto the slab like a passenger stepping into a skiff. A fair wind rose, and the stone sailed him across the sound. Islanders later pointed to a boat-shaped boulder on the shore called the Curragh Stone, named after the skin-covered boats of the Atlantic coast.

Corban and the pagans of Aran

Aran already had people on it. They were pagans who had come over from the mainland, and in Enda’s story they are the enemies of the light. They fled “like darkness before light.”

Only their leader, a pagan chief named Corban, stayed behind to watch the stranger. Corban had seen Enda arrive on a stone. Later Corban watched Enda shut himself inside a crack in the rock. So Corban decided the stranger was a magus, a sorcerer. “This magician is no bodily man,” he said to himself. “He has a body of air.”

Enda asked for the island. Corban gave him forty days and went home to the mainland. Enda then drove Corban’s horses into the sea. They swam to the middle island and on to the eastern one. The beaches where the animals swam ashore were remembered in island place names for generations.

Corban tried one more test. He filled a large barrel with seed grain and set it on the shore. If Enda’s God wanted Enda to have the island, he said, let that God send him the barrel. Angels carried it across. People said the track of the barrel could still be seen in the sea. That grain, an old kind of wheat, was still grown on the island nine hundred years later.

The sea as the monastery’s wall

In Enda’s story, the sea around Aran does the work of a monastery wall. It lets the right people in and keeps the rest out.

The strangest example is a test for the monks. Enda had a curragh built with only its wooden ribs and no hide stretched over them. Each monk had to step into this open frame every day. If water came in, he was proved a sinner. “Thus he kept up their angelic purity,” the story ends.

A hard rock once blocked boats from reaching the monastery. Enda marked it with his staff, and that night an angel with a flashing sword split it in two. The gap still gave boats a clear way in when the story was written down. When Enda’s monks fasted for three days, God sent a fish of great size into a spring, and it fed all 150 of them.

On the mainland, fishermen refused to share their catch with him. They told him to go and fish near Aran. Enda answered that no fish would be taken in their harbour again, and none ever was. One reading of all this is simple. On Aran the shoreline marks the border between a holy place and the world, and the sea obeys the saint who guards it.

The school of Aran

Young monks gathered on the island to learn under Enda’s strict rule. One student, the son of a carpenter, spent seven years on Aran threshing grain before founding the great inland abbey of Clonmacnoise.

The young man dreamed of a great fruit tree beside a river, and its shade covered all of Ireland. Enda told the young man that the tree stood for him and sent him away to build his monastery. When the student left, Enda saw the island’s angels leave with him. He grieved and fasted until an angel promised they would come back.

At the end of his life Enda refused to eat until God granted him three requests. Above all he asked that any repentant sinner buried beside him should find that “the mouth of hell” did not close over him. He also asked help for anyone who called on him in trouble, and a place for himself at God’s right hand.

Nobody knows exactly when he died, because the Irish chronicles do not record it. Tradition says he lived to about ninety and died on his island in the early sixth century.

Where the mermaids come in

While early legends surround Enda with swimming horses and miraculous fish, Aran also holds a famous mermaid story. It comes from an island tale published in 1919, yet it carries that same ancient border between church and ocean.

An Irish clergyman wrote it, under a pen name, as a short story called “The Mermaid.” In it a boatman sailing home from Aran tells of an island man called Anthony. Anthony swam out to three sea-women singing on a rock and stole one of their red cloaks. Its owner had to follow him home.

She kept his house and bore him seven sons. She would not go to Mass, though. “When the chapel bell rang she’d hide herself,” the boatman says. “The sound of it was what she couldn’t bear.” Years later a thatcher found the red cloak hidden in the roof and threw it down to her. She put down her baby and walked out, and nobody on the island saw her again.

Medieval Irish churches often carved mermaids in stone with a comb and mirror, treating them as warnings against worldly desire. On Aran, that boundary stayed sharp. Whether in the ancient legend of a floating stone boat or a later folk tale of a sea-woman, the church marks a line that the wild Atlantic cannot cross.

What remains on Aran

Enda’s feast day is March 21, and his monastery left its names on the island. The village of Killeany takes its name from the Irish for “Enda’s church.” Nearby lies an old graveyard called Enda’s Household, where he is said to be buried with more than a hundred other saints. This is the ground his dying prayer was meant to protect, where no repentant sinner would find the mouth of hell closing over him.

Sources

• Vita sancti Endei abbatis de Arann, in Charles Plummer (ed.), Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), pp. 60 ff.
• John Colgan, Acta Sanctorum veteris et maioris Scotiae seu Hiberniae (Louvain, 1645), Life of Enda at p. 704 ff.
• Acta Sanctorum, Martii tomus III (Bollandists), 21 March.
• Thomas Olden, “Enda”, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 17 (London, 1889).
• John Healy, Insula Sanctorum et Doctorum, or Ireland’s Ancient Schools and Scholars (Dublin, 1890; 6th ed. 1912), chapter on the monastic school of St Enda of Aran.
• Matthias Egeler and Susanne Ruhland, The Life of Saint Enda, Abbot of Aran: A Translation of Vita Endei (Cork Studies in Celtic Literatures 8, Cork).
• George A. Birmingham (James Owen Hannay), “The Mermaid”, in Our Casualty and Other Stories (1919); reprinted in Varla Ventura, Among the Mermaids (San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2013), pp. 2-21.
• Patricia Radford, paper on mermaid carvings in medieval Irish churches, republished as “Mermaids in the Medieval Irish Church”, Omnium Sanctorum Hiberniae (4 December 2012).