The text of the Third Latin Life (LC) is contained in the well-known Brussels MS., called Codex Salmaticensis from its former sojourn at Salamanca.  It is of the fourteenth century.  This was the only continuous authority at the disposal of the compiler of the Bollandist life of our saint; he speaks of it in the most contemptuous terms.  The life of Ciaran in this manuscript is a mere fragment, evidently copied from an imperfect exemplar; there seems to have been a chasm in the middle, and there is a lacuna at the end, which the scribe has endeavoured to conceal by adding the words “Finit, Amen.”  The translation here given has been prepared from the edition of the Salamanca MS. by de Smedt and de Backer, cols. 155-160.

The Irish Life (here denoted VG, i.e. Vita Goedelica) was edited by Whitley Stokes from the late fifteenth-century MS. called the Book of Lismore.[7] The numerous errors in the Lismore text may be to some extent corrected by collation with another Brussels MS., written in the seventeenth century by Micheal o Cleirigh.  Stokes has indicated the more important readings of the Brussels MS. in his edition.  The scribe of the Lismore Text was conscious of the defects of his copy:  for in a note appended to the Life of our saint, he says, “It is not I who am responsible for the meaningless words in this Life, but the bad manuscript”—­i.e. the imperfect exemplar of which he was making a transcript.

There were other Lives of the saint in existence, apparently no longer extant.  Of these, one was in the hands of the hagiographer Sollerius:  for in his edition of the Martyrologium of Usuardus (Antwerp, 1714, p. 523) he says, Querani, Kirani, uel Kiriani uitam MS. habemus. uariaque ad eam annotata, quae suo tempore digerentur.  This promise he does not appear to have fulfilled; the Bollandist compiler, as we have just noticed, had no materials but the imperfect Salamanca Life, and was forced to fill its many gaps as best he could, by diligently collecting references to Ciaran in the lives of other saints.  Another Life of the saint seems to be referred to in the Martyrology of Donegal; under the 10th May that compilation quotes a certain “Life of Ciaran of Cluain” (i.e. Clonmacnois) as the authority for a statement to the effect that “the order of Comgall [of Bangor, Co.  Down] was one of the eight orders that were in Ireland.”  It would be irrelevant to discuss here the meaning of this statement; its importance for us lies in the fact that the sentence is not found in any of the extant Lives, so that some other text, now unknown, must be in question.