Among the members of a Northumbrian monastic house celebrated in verse in the early ninth century by Ædiluulf, presbiter of that community, was a certain Ultán:

From this and the following passages we learn that the expert calligrapher was an expatriate Irishman, working at a monastic community that was dependent upon Lindisfarne, in the time of its founder-abbot Eanmund (so during the first third of the eighth century); we are told that he had a long writing career; in addition, we are informed that his skill was God-given, his work divinely inspired, and accordingly that, after death, the hand with which he had ‘merited to embellish the words of the Lord’ could work miracles. Given that Ædiluulf was writing approximately a century later and is thus unlikely to have known Ultán personally, it is also apparent that the great scribe’s memory had been kept golden within the community, and that his work remained a source of admiration and inspiration.