First published in 1972.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Ten Thousand Saints raises fascinating problems that take us beyond the frontiers of recorded history to the remote movements of European peoples, to the clash of tribes and tongues. Why were there ten speckled saints, eleven leper saints and fifty called Mo Chua? Why did St Fintan of Aran in a rage chase the humble St Goban right across Ireland to Anglesey? Why did St Tigernach of Clones breathe alternately white, red and yellow? Were these real men and women or were they, as the antiquarians of 150 years ago insisted, 'monkish fictions'? Hubert Butler believed that there was a hard reality behind these fantasies and that to the patient explorer it would ultimately be revealed. He thought that the Irish inherited their saints from the pre-Celtic past, in which they figured as ancestors of half-forgotten tribes. They domesticated them in their mythology, sacred and profane, much as the Greeks assimilated Perseus, ancestor of the Persians and Medea, ancestress of the Medes.These stories were written with humour and imaginative ingenuity and now, if we can interpret them correctly, we shall one day learn who were the first colonists of Britain and Ireland and where they came from.