14 March 2025

In the recently published, ‘Scottish Religious Poetry’, there is a poem by St. Columba. Although he spoke in Gaelic, he wrote in Latin, the language of the Church. His poem is called ‘Altus Prosator’ and literally means ‘The Maker on High’.

The poem  has twenty-three stanzas and each one begins with a different letter of the Roman alphabet. It begins with the creation and ends with the Day of Judgement. It has been translated by a former Scottish Makar, Edwin Morgan:

Ancient exalted seed-scatterer whom time gave no progenitor:

he knew no moment of creation in his primordial formulation

he is and will be all places in all time and all ages

with Christ his first-born only-born and the Holy Spirit co-borne

throughout the high eternity of glorious divinity:

three gods we do not promulgate one God we state and intimate

salvific faith victorious: three persons very glorious.

Clancy and Markus analyse the poem in ‘Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery’. They make some observations about the language. The poem’s inspiration is Biblical. Evidence suggests that St. Jerome’s translation has been used, the first indicator of the Vulgate’s use in Scotland.

Columba uses exotic and foreign vocabulary not least words from the world of Greek mythology. He certainly had access to Greek terms. In addition, he ‘invents strange new words by forming nouns from existing verbs’. One comes from Hebrew and begs the question, ‘How did Columba come to use this Hebrew word?’