By the time Christianity reached Iceland, saints’ lives were already a vast and enormously popular genre of literature well-established across the medieval Christian world. This chapter discusses how Icelandic writers engaged with this genre, concentrating especially on translated saints’ lives in Old Norse. While rooted in and responding to the particular conditions of Icelandic society, these vernacular adaptations and engagements with Latin Christian culture also transported the readers and writers of Old Norse-Icelandic literature far beyond their immediate environs. Beginning with the earliest examples of saints’ lives from the twelfth century, this chapter outlines how the genre developed over time from relative simplicity to a more complex and rhetorically accomplished approach. It describes how saints’ lives intersected with other forms of literature being written in medieval Iceland, including romance and the family sagas, and addresses categories of saint’s life which have received less critical attention: the Marian corpus, the lives of virgin martyrs and Low German translations into Old Norse-Icelandic.

Of the three known offices or historiae for St Columba (Colum Cille), one is Irish and two are Scottish. The Irish office is found in three manuscripts spanning the fifteenth century. Proper processional material is found in a fourth. One full copy of the Scottish office is in the Aberdeen Breviary (1509); the second in the Inchcolm Antiphoner (c. 1400), which, although fragmentary, shares some material with the former. A unique hymn is found in a twelfth-century source now in Vienna. Although few in number, the sources reflect the wide Insular reach of the Columban familia, from Ireland, through Scotland, to Continental Europe, including modern-day France, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. Columba’s Continental cult waned with the withdrawal of the Irish communities but remains vibrant up to today in the Insular area, particularly in Ireland and Scotland where he is patron of numerous churches. His cult was also strong in Lindisfarne (originally an Iona foundation) and Durham, which held some relics even if no liturgical sources have survived.The texts of the offices highlight Columba’s image as a beloved patron, a learned and holy man, teacher, and physical and spiritual protector of his monks against the forces of nature (in particular the sea and the wind) and from warfare and human attack.