The Airship of Clonmacnoise

Clonmacnoise is a monastery on the River Shannon, south of Athlone, founded by St Ciarán in 544. In the eighth century, Irish monastic chroniclers kept annals, year by year lists of killings, church burnings, deaths and wonders. The annals disagree on when this wonder happened. The Annals of the Four Masters say 743, while others give 744. The Annals of Ulster and the Annals of Tigernach place it in 748 or 749.

The Annals of Ulster record it in one line. "Ships with their crews were seen in the air above Cluain Moccu Nóis." The Annals of Tigernach are just as plain. "Ships were seen in the air with their men." No shape, lights or sound. Only ships, their crews, and the sky above a monastery.

Later writers filled in the scene. The Book of Leinster moved it to the royal assembly at Teltown, where people saw "three ships voyaging in the air above them." In the Book of Ballymote, King Congalach mac Máel Mithig saw a ship moving through the air. A crewman threw a dart at a salmon that fell among the crowd, then came down to fetch it. A man on the ground held the dart, and the stranger cried "You are drowning me!" Congalach ordered him released, and he swam back up to his ship.

The Norwegian King's Mirror, from the mid thirteenth century, brought the story home to Clonmacnoise. On a Sunday during Mass, an anchor dropped from the sky on a rope, and one fluke caught in the arch above the church door. A crewman dived and swam down to loosen it. The congregation held him fast. The bishop told them to let go, because if held down he would die as if held under water.

Freed, the man floated back up. The crew cut the rope at the top, and the ship sailed away out of sight. The anchor, the text says, "has since lain in Clonmacnoise church as a witness that the event really occurred."

Gervase of Tilbury told a darker version around 1211, set in Britain. His sailor climbed down the rope hand over hand and was seized. He "gasped in the hands of his captors like a man lost in a shipwreck, and died suffocated in the moisture of our thicker air."

Sceptics have offered ship shaped clouds, an aurora, and most recently a superior mirage, a Fata Morgana that lifts real ships above the horizon. Ufologists read it as a visit by aliens. Scholars look elsewhere. John Carey argued in 1992 that the anchor scene was borrowed and reversed from a tale of an ordinary ship whose anchor fouled an underwater monastery in the Sea of Wight. Máirtín Ó Briain called it a migratory legend. McCaughan noted that in medieval thought air and water could stand in for each other.

In 1991 Seamus Heaney retold it in "Lightenings viii", in Seeing Things. "The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise / Were all at prayers inside the oratory / A ship appeared above them in the air." At his 1995 Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy cited the poem as "a crystallisation of much of Heaney's imaginative world." Peter Sís turned it into Out of the Marvellous, a 2014 tapestry in Dublin Airport Terminal 2, and Eoghan Kidney animated it for RTÉ in 2009. Heaney called the story a parable. His advice still hangs over it. "Never be so canny as to ignore the uncanny."