Áedán mac Gabráin was a king of Dál Riata from c. 574 until c. 609. He was decisively defeated by Æthelfrith of Bernicia at the Battle of Degsastan. He appears as a character in Old Irish and Middle Irish language works.
About Áedán mac Gabráin in brief
Áedán mac Gabráin was a king of Dál Riata from c. 574 until c. 609. He was a contemporary of Saint Columba. He appears as a character in Old Irish and Middle Irish language works of prose and verse, some now lost. He may have earned this epithet after an alliance with Rhydderch, king of nearby Brittonic kingdom of Clut. He also appears in the tale Compert Mongáin, making him one of the few non-Britons to figure in a variety of Welsh sources call him Aedan Bradawc, or ‘The Treacherous’ He was decisively defeated by Æthelfrith of Bernicia at the Battle of Degsastan. His date of death is recorded by one source as 17 April 609, but Bede’s history was written 30 years after Adomnán’s. A lost Irish tale, Echtra Áedáin mac GabRáin, appears in a list of works, but its contents are unknown. It may have been written to cement an alliance between Diarmait mac Maíl na mBó and the Scots king Máel Coluim mac Donnchada. The events which inspired the tale appear to have taken place in the middle of the 7th century. The Rawlinson B 502 manuscript, dated to c. 1130, contains the tale Gein Branduib maic Echach ocus Aedá in maic Gabrán.
In this story, Áesedán is the twin brother of Brandub mac Echac, a King of Leinster who belonged to the Uí Cheinnselaig kindred. The Prophecy of Berchán also associates �áedán with Leinsters. He is described as ‘one of the host of the War-Bands of the Island of Britain’ as they “went to the sea for their lord’s sake’ or ‘to the Orkney Islands or the Isle of Man’ This may point to an otherwise lost tradition concerning one of their expeditions, such as the Altkney or Altney War, or the Altney Sea War of the Clut; enmity between them is remembered in the Welsh and Triads; and elsewhere in the Old Irish. The Senchus fer n-Alban purports to record his ancestry and that of his immediate descendants. None of these sources are contemporary. The surviving Irish annals contain elements of a chronicle kept at Iona from the middle-century onwards, so that these too are retrospective when dealing with Áeadán’s time. The chronicle incorporates elements from a lost earlier life of Columba, De virtutibus sancti Columbae, by Cumméne Find. This may be written as early as 640.
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