The Airship of Clonmacnoise

Clonmacnoise. A monastery on the Shannon, in what is now County Offaly. In the middle of the eighth century, Irish annals recorded something in the sky above it. The Annals of Ulster place the entry in 749. The Four Masters say 743, the Annals of Clonmacnoise 744. Scholars generally treat them as records of one event.

The Latin is brief. Naues in aere uisae sunt cum suis uiris. Ships with their crews were seen in the air above Cluain Moccu Nóis. The Four Masters put it more plainly still. Ships with their crews were plainly seen in the sky this year.

The Book of Leinster moves the wonder to the royal assembly at Teltown, in the time of Domnall mac Murchada, and counts three ships voyaging in the air. The Book of Ballymote adds a crewman who throws a spear at a salmon and misses. He comes down after it. People on the ground grab him. "I am being drowned," he cries. When they let him go, he swims back up.

At Clonmacnoise itself, an Irish manuscript of the fifteenth or sixteenth century sets the scene in the church. The monks see a ship sailing overhead as if on the sea. Its anchor comes down to the church floor, and a crewman swims down after it. The clergy seize him. He begs, "for God's sake let me go … you are drowning me." Released, he swims back to the ship with his anchor.

The Old Norse Speculum Regale, written around 1250, places it on a Sunday during Mass. The anchor's fluke catches in the arch of the church door. The bishop warns that the man will die as if held in water. They let him go. He floats up, the crew cuts the rope, and the ship sails away out of sight.

Ireland was not alone. Around 1211, Gervase of Tilbury told of parishioners leaving church on a dark, cloudy day to find an anchor stuck in a heap of stones, its rope rising into the sky. Voices sounded above the clouds. A sailor climbed down the rope. Seized by the crowd, he died, suffocated by the "moisture of our thicker air."

The anchor's iron became fittings for the church door. In 1897, during the mystery airship wave, the Houston Post reported an anchor on a rope snagging near churchgoers in Merkel, Texas.

A superior mirage, or Fata Morgana, lifting real ships above the horizon. Ship-shaped clouds, like those St Albans monks reported in the thirteenth century. The aurora borealis. Some writers read it as alien visitation.

Scholars see a story that grew. John Carey traced its development over centuries from a terse annal note. Michael McCaughan stressed a natural order seen inside-out, from two viewpoints at once. Kuno Meyer concluded in 1910 that the Norse accounts came from oral information gathered in Ireland.

In 1991 Seamus Heaney made it a poem, "Lightenings viii," in Seeing Things. He called the tale "a kind of dream instruction, a parable about the necessity of keeping the lines open between the two levels of our being." The Swedish Academy cited the poem in its 1995 Nobel Prize material. In 2014, Peter Sís's tapestry Out of the Marvellous brought the sky-ship to Dublin Airport.