Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/228

 196 Collectanea.

his sister, the holy Fanchea, of Rossory, he became a pious, most austere, monk. He settled in Aran at the east end, where Teglath Enda Church, nearly buried in the sands, his well, cross and a fragment of a round tower recall his name. His greater church and several others were levelled by the Cromwellian garrison as material for their barrack at Arkin. On a fragment of the high cross a cowled figure is shown on a horse whose fore feet are fixed in a square block. ^ Legend says that Enda and Brecan determined to divide Aran and, after morning Mass, were to set out till they met. Brecan (one version, not what I heard in 1878, says Columba) got up early, celebrated the Mass and started before Enda was ready, the latter prayed and his opponent's horse got its hoofs embedded in the rock at Kilmurvey till Enda reached him.- There the island is destined to be split asunder, and tradition remembers a great wave crossing at the spot where the island is low, beneath the huge stone fortress of Dun Aenghusa ; this actually occurred about 1640.

A Clare legend tells how the converts of the gentle Brecan were far more numerous than Enda's. Boasting of this, they made ill-will between their pastors till Brecan went to Enda, followed by a crowd of converts, and asked his rival to teach him as he sat at his feet. After a while he rose and addressed Enda: " I am your pupil and these men are mine, therefore they are your disciples, now bless them," and the fullest re- conciliation was won and the love of the two rivals never dimmed afterwards. What the age of these kindly and sug- gestive tales may be is uncertain, but they fall in with the older picture of the two saints.^ In the late Life of Endeus, " the eight Abbots " are the opponents of Enda.

The story of how Columba (not Brecan) robbed him of half the island is given with the legend of that saint infra. The

^ See supra, vol. xxiv. plate iv.

- HIar Coiiuaught, p. 78.

•■ Brecan is not named in the late fourteenth century Life of Enda, which, however, is usually lacking in early features and even in local colour, and of but little value compared with the still later but folk-lore abounding Life 0/ Colli!)! ha.