Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/468

426 a Latin word, no doubt adopted from St. Paul's expression induti loricam justitiæ (Ephesians, vi., 14), is one found in the body of several of the hymn-charms we have been considering, and it forms the express title of those we are now about to consider. It became the usual word used to express a poem of which the recitation was designed to form a protection against some explicit evil, or to give an indulgence to the reciter. It is quite possible that the poems were originally written in the form of a breastplate, just as charms in the form of crosses, circles, and squares with cross lines, are found in manuscripts and in written charms still in use. Six of these Loricas, or "Hymns of the Lorica" as they are sometimes more justly styled, have up to the present been printed. They are—

(1) The Lorica of St. Patrick.

(2) The Lorica of Lodgen, so called in the Book of Came; called also the Lorica of Laidcend mac Buith bannaig (in Leabhar Breac), and of Lathacan Scotigena (in Darmstadt or Köln MS.); usually known as the Lorica of Gillas or Gildas.

(3) The Lorica of Columcille; edited from Yellow Book of Lecan, by Dr. O'Donovan, for the Misc. of the Celtic Society.

(4) The Lorica of Mugron, Abbot of Hi or Iona, †980; edited by Dr. Kuno Meyer from Ms. Rawl. B. 512, (Hib. Min., Anecdota Oxon., 1894).

(5) Lorica of Leyden; edited by Dr. V. H. Friedel in Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie, vol. ii., p. 64.

(6) Lorica from MS. jfi^, p. 237, Royal Irish Academy; printed in Bernard and Atkinson's edition of the Liber Hymnorum, vol. ii., notes, p. 210.

A good deal of attention has been bestowed upon these poems in recent years on account of the similarities which several of them show to the tract known as Hisperica

See, for example, "The Circle of St. Columcille" in Ms. Cott. Vitell, E, xviii., fol. 13.b, and another charm for discovering a thief quoted by Cockayne, Saxon Leechdoms, vol. i., pp. 395-396; Hyde, Religions Songs of Connacht, vol. ii. , p. 32.