Book of Kells

The Book of Kells is a hand-written and hand-painted copy of the four Gospels of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, in Latin. Books like this are called Gospel books, and when they are decorated with paint they are called illuminated manuscripts, because the colours seem to light up the page.

It was made around the year 800 by monks who belonged to the network of monasteries founded by the Irish saint Columba, also known as Columcille. It takes its name from the Abbey of Kells in County Meath, Ireland, where it was kept for centuries. Since 1661 it has belonged to Trinity College Dublin, where it is displayed in the Old Library.

The Book of Kells is regarded as the high point of Insular art, the style of Britain and Ireland in the early Middle Ages, and as one of the masterpieces of Western calligraphy. No other surviving Gospel book of its time is decorated so fully or so boldly.

Today the manuscript has 340 leaves, or folios, which makes 680 pages when both sides are counted. It preserves most of the four Gospels: John breaks off at chapter 17, verse 13, and missing leaves also leave gaps within the other Gospels. Before the Gospels come preliminary texts: lists of Hebrew names, the canon tables of Eusebius, summaries of the Gospel narratives (Breves causae) and prefaces characterising the Evangelists (Argumenta).

The Gospel text largely follows the Vulgate, Jerome’s revision of the Latin Gospels made between 382 and 384, while keeping readings from the earlier Old Latin translations (Vetus Latina). Sometimes two alternative readings are combined: at Matthew 6:16, where most manuscripts read exterminant (“they wipe out”) and a few demoliuntur (“they disfigure”), the Book of Kells reads demuliuntur exterminant. The copying is also remarkably careless in places, with letters and words left out; text already copied on folio 218v was repeated on folio 219r, and the words on 218v were then cancelled with red crosses.

The book was never quite finished. On some pages the planned decoration exists only as an outline, and scholars think the original book had about 370 leaves. Some of the missing leaves may have been lost when the book was stolen in the early 11th century, but this cannot be proved.

Thirty-three pages are decorated so heavily that the ornament fills the whole page. Ten of these are full-page pictures: the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child, pages of the four Evangelist symbols, portraits of Matthew and John, Christ enthroned, a single “carpet page” covered entirely in pattern, and scenes of the Arrest of Jesus and the Temptation of Christ.

The most famous page is the Chi Rho (folio 34r). Medieval scribes shortened the name Christ by writing the first two Greek letters, chi (X) and rho (P). At Matthew 1:18, where the story of Jesus’s life begins, the makers of the Book of Kells turned these letters into a giant design that fills the page. The X sweeps across with long curving arms, and the space around it is packed with spirals, knots and hidden creatures: three angels rise from one arm of the X, and cats, mice and other small animals and insects are tucked into the ornament.

The beginnings of each Gospel get the same treatment. Matthew opens with just two words, Liber generationis (“The book of the generation”), and the first letters grow into a huge monogram. The opening of John (folio 292r) turns the words In principio erat verbum et verbum (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word”) into a single decorated page.

Even ordinary text pages are alive with small painted capital letters, animals and human figures twisted into letter shapes. UNESCO notes that every page carries some decoration: even the two pages without colour (folios 29v and 301v) have small decorations in ink.

According to the Annals of Ulster, the Irish monk Columba sailed to Iona, a small island off the west coast of Scotland, in 563, and tradition says he came with twelve companions and founded a monastery there. Iona became the head of a family of Columban monasteries in Ireland and Scotland and an important centre of learning and book production. In 635 an Iona monk, Aidan, founded Lindisfarne in Northumbria, which became another great centre of Insular art.

From the 790s Viking raiders attacked the coastal monasteries of Britain and Ireland. The Irish annals record that Iona was plundered in 795 and burned in 802, that sixty-eight members of its community were killed in 806, and that the monk Blathmac was killed there in 825. Meanwhile, in 804, Kells was granted to Columba’s community; building of a new monastery there began in 807, and its church was finished in 814. Iona nevertheless remained an important Columban house for decades: some of Columba’s relics were taken to Ireland in 849, and his shrine arrived there in 878.

These events provide the historical background for the view, now held by most scholars, that the book was made in the scriptorium of Iona, perhaps continuing or being finished at Kells after the community moved; Trinity College Dublin notes that there is no way of knowing whether it was produced wholly at Iona, wholly at Kells or partly at each. Some Irish scholars have linked it to the 200th anniversary of Columba’s death in 597; others to the enshrining of his relics. None of these links can be proved.

The Book of Kells belongs to a group of manuscripts made from the late 6th to the early 9th century in the monasteries of Ireland and Britain and in continental houses founded by Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries. Earlier members of the group include the Cathach of St Columba, the Book of Durrow (second half of the 7th century), the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Lichfield Gospels (early 8th century). The Book of Kells, with its fully developed ornament, comes late in the series.

Insular art combines several traditions. Spirals, triskeles and curving shapes come from late Iron Age Celtic art; interlaced animals come largely from Germanic metalwork of the kind found at Sutton Hoo; and the book format, the canon tables framed by arches and the Evangelist portraits come from the Christian Mediterranean. The Insular artists did not try to show depth or perspective. Instead they covered the flat surface with dense, energetic pattern.

In the Book of Kells this style reaches its most extreme form. Initials swell until they fill whole pages, and ornament spreads into the text pages, where it is denser and more varied than in any earlier Insular Gospel book.

The pages are vellum, fine calfskin that was cleaned, stretched and scraped. Sheets were folded in half to make pairs of leaves and nested into gatherings called quires; the surviving leaves form 38 quires. Guide lines were ruled for the text, and tiny prick marks for the ruling can still be seen on some pages. The vellum varies from thick, almost leathery leaves to very thin ones.

The text is written in Insular majuscule, a large rounded script, in iron gall ink. The art historian Françoise Henry identified three scribes, whom she called Hands A, B and C; Trinity College Dublin now describes four major scribes, and the division into individual hands remains debated. Henry also distinguished three main artists: the “Goldsmith,” who painted the Chi Rho page with ornament of goldsmith-like fineness; the “Illustrator,” who painted the Temptation and the Arrest; and the “Portrait Painter,” who painted Christ and the Evangelists. How far scribes and artists were the same people is still an open question, and their names are unknown.

A non-destructive study with micro-Raman spectroscopy, carried out by Trinity College Dublin in 2004–2006 at 681 points across the four volumes, identified blue from indigo, red-orange from red lead, yellow from orpiment (arsenic sulphide), a green called vergaut made by mixing indigo and orpiment, white from gypsum, and black from carbon and iron gall ink; a purple from orcein, a lichen dye, was also discussed. Trinity’s Library adds that some reds came from organic sources and that a copper green, reacting with damp, has eaten holes in some leaves. No gold or silver leaf was used. It was once believed that the blue was costly lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, but the research indicates that it was indigo or woad.

The first probable mention of the book is in the Annals of Ulster, in an entry under the year 1007 (Trinity College Dublin dates the theft to 1006). In the translation published by CELT, the entry reads: “The great Gospel of Colum Cille was wickedly stolen by night from the western sacristy in the great stone church of Cenannas [Kells]. It was the most precious object of the western world on account of the human ornamentation.” The translators mark the phrase about its ornament as uncertain; Trinity understands it as the book’s ornamental shrine (cumdach). The Gospel “was recovered after two months and twenty nights, its gold having been taken off it and with a sod over it.” Most scholars assume this was the Book of Kells, and the theft may explain why leaves are missing at the beginning and end.

In the late 11th and 12th centuries, records of property transactions concerning the monastery were copied onto blank pages of the book, which shows that it was at Kells by then; in 1090, according to the Annals of Tigernach as summarised by Trinity, relics of Colum Cille including “two gospels” were brought to Kells. A poem added in the 15th century shows that it was still venerated as a relic of the saint. After the rebellion of 1641 left the church at Kells in ruins, the governor of Kells, Charles Lambert, Earl of Cavan, sent the book to Dublin for safety around 1653. A few years later it reached Trinity College through Henry Jones, Vice-Chancellor of the University and a former scoutmaster-general of Cromwell’s army in Ireland, when he became Bishop of Meath in 1661.

Later owners and readers left their marks. In 1568 Geralde Plunket added chapter numbers and notes; in 1621 the scholar James Ussher counted 344 leaves; in the 19th century the leaves were severely trimmed and their edges gilded during rebinding, and small parts of some pictures were lost. In 1953 the bookbinder Roger Powell rebound the manuscript in four volumes. Two volumes can normally be seen, one opened at a major decorated page and the other at two pages of script, and the openings are changed several times a year to protect the pages from light.

The book’s worldwide fame began in the 19th century. It became a symbol of early Irish Christian culture and national pride. In 1849 it was shown to Queen Victoria, and she and Prince Albert signed a flyleaf that had been added in a new binding of 1826, not the medieval pages. Its designs fed the Celtic Revival: knots, spirals and animal patterns copied from its pages appeared in metalwork, embroidery, furniture and pottery, and they remain popular in Irish design today.

Reproductions have spread its images far beyond Dublin. The Swiss publisher Urs Graf in Bern issued the first complete facsimile, mostly in black and white, in the early 1950s, a colour edition with a study by Françoise Henry followed in 1974, and a full-colour facsimile was published in 1990. The whole manuscript can now be seen online through Trinity College’s digital collections. In 2011 UNESCO added it to its Memory of the World Register.

The 2009 animated film The Secret of Kells, directed by Tomm Moore with co-director Nora Twomey at the Irish studio Cartoon Saloon, imagines a young monk helping to finish the book as Vikings threaten his monastery. The film was nominated for an Academy Award.

The medieval tradition that Columba himself wrote the book was abandoned long ago on palaeographical and stylistic grounds. Scholars place the book late in the Insular series, in the late 8th or early 9th century, mainly by comparing its script and ornament with other manuscripts, since there is no colophon or inscription giving its date or makers.

Trinity College Dublin summarises the current position: the majority of scholars now tend to attribute the book to the scriptorium of Iona, but conflicting claims have placed it in Northumbria or in Pictland in eastern Scotland, and it cannot be known whether it was made wholly at Iona, wholly at Kells or partly at each. Paul Meyvaert’s 1989 article “The Book of Kells and Iona” is one important contribution to the debate. Julian Brown’s 1972 case for an eastern Scottish origin has gained some interest since archaeologists identified a workshop making vellum at the Pictish monastery of Portmahomack, although that evidence does not show where this manuscript was made.

The book is traditionally and most plausibly associated with the Columban monastic community connected with Iona, but its precise workshop and makers remain uncertain. Its unfinished state is often explained by the disruption of Viking raids, but this remains an inference, not a documented fact.

Several features suggest that the Book of Kells was made to be seen and venerated rather than studied. The canon tables, which should let a reader find the same story in different Gospels, occupy ten pages, but the matching section numbers were not systematically added to the Gospel text, so they are of little practical use. Many copying mistakes were left in, and words left over at the end of a line were sometimes squeezed into a gap in the line above so as not to spoil the layout.

Trinity College Dublin concludes from this carelessness, taken together with the book’s splendour, that it was designed for ceremonial use on special occasions such as Easter rather than for daily services. Its exact use is not documented, but the Annals say it was stolen from a sacristy, where the vessels for the Mass were kept, not from a library. It was also venerated as a relic associated with Columba. Carol Farr’s The Book of Kells: Its Function and Audience (1997) relates some of its images to monastic liturgy and biblical interpretation.

This also explains its lavishness. The book’s pictures and ornament carry theological meaning: the four Evangelist symbols appear together again and again to stress the unity of the Gospels, and peacocks, whose flesh Augustine in The City of God described as resisting decay, are generally read as symbols of Christ and the Resurrection.

The Book of Kells shows that early medieval Ireland and Scotland were not isolated. Ireland had never been part of the Roman Empire, yet its monks read and wrote Latin, copied texts from the Mediterranean and knew designs such as carpet pages and arched canon tables that have parallels in Coptic and Greek Christian books.

The Virgin and Child miniature (folio 7v), often described as the earliest surviving image of the Virgin Mary in a Western manuscript, seems to draw on Byzantine, Armenian or Coptic models, and it has been compared with the Virgin and Child carved on one end of St Cuthbert’s wooden coffin, made on Lindisfarne in 698 and now at Durham. The book thus sits at a crossroads of Irish, Pictish, Anglo-Saxon and Mediterranean art.

Modern debate also concerns national ownership. The book has been a symbol of Irish identity since the 19th century, while its probable making on Iona connects it with Scotland’s history as well; modern national associations do not settle its place of origin. Many scholars prefer to see it as a product of a Gaelic Christian network that crossed today’s borders.