St. Patrick is perhaps the most recognized name to come out of Ireland. On St. Patrick’s Day, people the world over tend to feel just a little Irish themselves. So would it surprise you to learn that St. Patrick wasn’t even Irish himself? That’s right, St. Patrick was actually of Scottish-Roman parents. He went to Ireland as a missionary for Christianity.
The legend of St. Patrick has come to involve everything from raising the dead to turning dogs to stone. But the most repeated of St. Patrick’s legendary feats is how he drove the snakes from Ireland.
The story goes that during the season of Lent, St. Patrick climbed a 2510-foot high peak (now called Croagh Patrick) in order to fast and pray. By the time the Lenten season had ended, all of the snakes of Ireland had gathered to the peak. From there, St. Patrick drove the snakes over the edge and into the sea below, forever ridding Ireland of snakes.
While St. Patrick may have performed miracles, he did not perform the miracle of driving the snakes from Ireland. The fact of the matter is that the snakes of Ireland were driven of not by a man, but by Mother Nature herself.
There were, at some point in time, snakes in Ireland but then came the Ice Age. Glaciers from the North covered Ireland (an island) in thick layers of ice that no snake would have been able to escape. Since snakes are cold-blooded creatures, they would have frozen solid in the cold and died.
Once the glaciers receded, there would have been no way for snakes to get back to the island because of the wide body of water surrounding it. All of this occurred over a million and a half years ago, long before humans and therefore, St. Patrick.
So where did the legend of St. Patrick driving away the snakes come from? The best that historians can figure, an overzealous but observant biographer from the twelfth century, a monk named Jocelyn, noticed the lack of snakes on the island of Ireland. He must have figured that such a strange thing could only be an act of the beloved saint and created a story about St. Patrick to explain the lack of snakes in Ireland. This story was included as fact in Jocelyn’s biography of the saint, and the rest is history, as they say.
To this day, the story of St. Patrick and the snakes is a popular legend, but it is no more than a legend. The saint did many things that would warrant his sainted title, but snake charming was not one of them.
Click here to learn more about the life and actual accomplishments of St. Patrick.