The Celts
Michelle Brown of the British Library on the Book of Kells …
What exactly makes Celtic Christianity different from other kinds of Christianity? It’s not obviously associated with the towns, for example, as it would have been in the post-Roman world. You don’t have bishops based in cathedrals so much. You tend to have a rural society, and monasteries become the spiritual powerhouses within that. They can transcend the tribes and reach out in networks right around Europe, as Columba’s own federation of monasteries did.
Iona was really like a lightning conductor. On the high ground, Columba would stand in prayer as a channel between God and the world, which is what you want your super-saint to do for you.
So it was a very outward-looking type of learning that dipped right back into classical antiquity – Greek and Roman – and into Celtic and Germanic legends that were preserved and merged in the aftermath of the Druids and actually kept alive in monastic cultures such as Iona’s.
Celtic into Christianity
The pagan peoples that we think of as Celtic turned to Christianity with much vigour and enthusiasm. There was a lot about pagan religion that lent itself well to it. The idea of water as the source of life and of rebirth would lead straight to the idea of baptism. The idea of a hero who would sacrifice everything on behalf of his people and triumph over death is something that would have appealed to the gods and warriors of pagan mythology.
Threes were very important – it was how the Druids would remember much of their lore and verse. So the idea of the trinity is very natural to them. A lot of the way Christianity is couched philosophically would have rung bells in their mind. The Eucharistic feasts in which everyone participates are very much like the great ale feasts. Generosity, hospitality, giving – all these things are very much part of the Celtic mindset.
Nationalist and collaborative
The Book of Kells is significant because it can be all things to all people. It’s a bit of an encyclopaedia of its age as well as an incredible object of faith art.
It has attracted a lot of debate over the last couple of centuries. Some people have argued that it was made in Ireland, others in ‘Pictland’ (Scotland) and still others in Northumbria. However, there are many things about the book that have led historians to agree that it was probably made on Iona off the western coast of Scotland in about AD 800, shortly before the Vikings first started attacking the island in around 804.
A lot of nationalism has been projected on to a period where people were often trying to transcend those boundaries and actually worked together to make a new, more collaborative statement about the period. As you look at the mixture of ornaments and symbols in the Book of Kells, time and again you come back to figures like St Columba and St Huthbert on Holy Island (Lindisfarne) as the representatives of this sort of world and this movement.
Divine word
When we look into the individual parts of the decoration, you can begin to see an incredibly complex world coming alive. One beautiful symbol is the chi-rho, which combines the letters X and P – the first two in the word ‘Christ’ in Greek. This symbol explodes across the page and becomes almost an icon in its own right.
During this period, there was a lot of debate about idolatry: should you actually try and depict God? Judaism, Islam, Christianity – all were debating this. Islamic scribes would ultimately come up with the word itself being the visible symbol of the divine. ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God,’ says the Gospel of St John. I think, in a way, with the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels, the script itself became an incredible image on which you could layer all sorts of meaning.
At this time, people understand signs and symbol – they wouldn’t have trouble with things like Calvin Klein ads! They say who they are and what they believe by what they wear, in their metalwork, their clothing, etc. For example, if something I’m wearing was made in Orkney, you would think that perhaps my mother came from Orkney. If I was wearing amber beads, you’d think that perhaps my father was from the Baltic or that he’d traded there. People knew enough about those symbols to be able to make associations.
All living creation
When you look into the arms of the X in the chi-rho, for example, you’ll see all this incredible interlace work that goes right back to La Tène and to the Iron-Age ornament that we traditionally associate with Celtic culture. This is obviously very old-fashioned by this time, but it’s still common and still ringing bells in people’s minds.
When you looked at the body of the X itself, it’s a mass of birds and beasts, all living creation actually forming the letter itself. If you’d served as an auxiliary in the Roman army in the 4th or 5th century, it’s the sort of stuff that you would have had on your military gear. The illuminated interlace is actually Gallic in origin but was taken up throughout Britain and Ireland from the 6th to 8th century.
Then there is the Greek text, and you’ve got Latin down at the bottom. There are all sorts of other symbols layered in there, too. For example, we’ve got a little human head at the end of the passage about the birth of Christ, when Christ becomes human.
Cats and mice
At the foot, we’ve got a fascinating detail – two fat cats pinning down two little mice by their tails. You can see them in a round thing, which we think might be the wafer used in communion to symbolise the body of Christ. You can also see the cats have got two other little mice actually climbing on their backs.
Now, in early Christian philosophy, the cat was the symbol of evil – ever out there waiting to pounce if the mice are unwary, if the faithful are unwary … But you can see that, by actually believing, by taking Christian communion and by being in fellowship with enough other ‘mice’, you can actually overcome evil.
The other thing that I like about this detail – and again you’ve
got it in the Lindisfarne Gospels a bit earlier, in about the 720s – is
that the cat is so prominent because it’s the Celtic Cerberus:
the cat that is the guardian of the entrance to the underworld.
The mouse always wins. People would have had this explained to them,
and those already in the know would wink and say, ‘Oh yeah, we
know what’s going on there.’
Big, juicy salmon
Also in the Book of Kells is an otter grasping a big, juicy salmon. The salmon pops up time and time again in the miracles associated with St Columba. It’s how he sees the faithful – by having the salmon brought to him by different creatures and given to him by the Lord.
And not only is the salmon a symbol of the faithful. Ichthys is the Greek word for ‘fish’. To the early Christians, the letters of ichthys stood for ‘Jesus Christ, son of the high god, saviour’. So, again, it’s word play.
Another idea about the otter eating the salmon in Irish literature of the period is that of the partaking of wisdom, consuming it in the way that Columba would have studied at St Finian’s school at Clonard by the river Boyne, where there were 3,000 students avidly taking in all of this knowledge.
Where’s Wally?
Also in the Book of Kells is the moth, a symbol of the resurrection. That’s partly because they were looking at the chrysalis and thinking about how the moth goes through different stages of incarnation: it appears to be dead and then suddenly bursts out of the chrysalis and comes to life.
You’ve got numbers as well. For example, there are lots of what we call triskelions – swirls with three legs coming out of them. Those, of course, symbolise the trinity. Four brings with it the idea of the four evangelists, all talking about the different nature of the relationship between God the father, God the son and God the holy spirit. Then there is a lovely piece of interlace full of animal ornament, which signifies five. This was the number on the altar in the Columban Church at this time because it signals the wounds that Christ received during the crucifixion.
Trying to penetrate this mystery is a bit like the kids’ game Where’s Wally? But it also brings to life the mindset of the period – you wouldn’t have just one literal meaning if you could have 12 symbolic ones.
Who wrote the book?
We don’t know who actually wrote the Book of Kells. Books of this period seldom say who, where, when. It takes detective work to unpick all the styles, all the influences, to say where the text came from that was copied, etc.
It’s also difficult to say because – unlike the Lindisfarne Gospels, made on Holy Island in around 720, which were the work of one person – here you’ve got a team of at least eight artists and scribes, possibly even as many as 12, taking their turns at the benches in the scriptorium. The book was probably intended to celebrate their founder, St Columba, and presumably would have been on the high altar on Iona and then subsequently at Kells after the community moved there in the face of the Viking attacks in the 9th century.
Collaboration
Often you can see the scribes collaborating. There are some pages where you can see two of them at work, as if one of them has just gone off to do his chores out in the field and the next one comes in to take over – a form of shift work.
But the big decorative pages tend to be the work of individual artists. There is one who is sometimes known as the goldsmith because his work looks very much like intricate, fine filigree work. Then you’ve got others who are known as the illustrators because they’re more concerned with figural scenes that illustrate or comment on passages in the text. They’ve all got their own dedicated tasks but have to dovetail together to make it all happen.
Unfinished
The other thing that’s worthy of note is that the Book of Kells wasn’t finished. You can see some pages where the underdrawings and the paintings have only just been started. This reinforces the idea that something quite cataclysmic interrupted the work, such as the Viking raids from 804 to the 840s.
Not only were the Vikings attacking and actually causing loss of life, but the politics changed, too. Perhaps an area that was once right in the heart of things was no longer ‘where it’s at’. So if your kinship site moves to York from Bamburgh, next to Holy Island, you’re going to have to follow it. If you want to still make a difference to people’s lives, you’re going to have to be where the power is and interact with it.
Radical stuff
The Roman historian Cassiodorus (c. 485-c. 585) said, ‘The scribe preaches with the pen and unleashes tongues with his fingers.’ This was radical stuff. Creating the Book of Kells was primarily opus dei – work for God. These guys were told that each word written is a wound on Satan’s body.
It wasn’t a quiet domestic exercise, it was back-breaking, migraine-inducing stuff. Imagine doing that without any glasses or optical aids. This was something where you showed your commitment in the same way as you would if you were fasting overnight or up to your neck in water. It showed your dedication. It was a living prayer while you were doing it – the highest calling.
Bear in mind that most people at this time couldn’t read. They would have the symbolism explained to them or would eventually recognise it on their own. So the words were meant to be seen as much as they were meant to be read.
Say, you’ve dragged your granny 300 miles for a miracle healing at the shrine of St Columba. When you get there, you see something on these pages that speaks to you and your people, which summons up this incredible world that you’d never even imagined. It gives you an idea of what eternity, heaven, hell and all of those things might actually be like.
Technical skill
The amount of technical skill that it must have taken to make this book is incredible. First, you’ve got to get all the calf skins to make the vellum. Now that’s going to be about 200 cattle. A community such as the one on Iona would probably only field about 15 cattle in a year for all its domestic purposes. Most monks were vegetarian, so they wouldn’t be eating the flesh. They would be keeping milk cows primarily.
Then you’ve got to make the inks, the colours. The maker of the Lindisfarne Gospels made 90 different colours, using six locally available minerals plus plants that he grew. He knew enough about his environment and about experimental chemistry to be able to do that.
When you look at the technique that the artists of the Book of Kells employed, you can see that they went a little bit too far. This is a later product, made about 80 years after the Lindisfarne Gospels. They were trying to make even more colours by having layers of paint. So you might start off with a green and then you do a transparent purple wash over the green and then you add orange dots. Your eyes mix the dots and change the colour visually for you.
The problem is that the only thing holding those jewel-like colours on to the vellum page is beaten egg white. Of course, when the page moves, the egg white cracks and the colours flake off. The more you layer them, the more it’s going to do that. The Book of Kells wasn’t helped by a helpful Dublin binder who, in the 19th century, washed the whole book in water!
Blue, yellow and green
All of these materials would have been made from ingredients from within the surrounding area. For example, from our analysis of the Lindisfarne Gospels, we know that the maker was aware of blue lapis lazuli, which is only obtainable from Afghanistan in the foothills of the Himalayas. But it was unobtainable, so, at Lindisfarne and probably Iona, what they did was boil up a wode plant, which is horribly smelly and messy. Then they floated crystals of animal gum in it so that it looked like powdered lapis.
They don’t seem to have had access to much gold for this book, or they preferred to use bright yellow instead. That was mostly made from orpiment, which is trisulphide of arsenic, a very poisonous by-product of tin mining that was probably imported from Cornwall.
Green would have been made by putting a piece of copper over a goblet of wine or vinegar. The green corrosion that would form on the surface of the copper would be scraped off and mixed with some egg white.
Local solutions
Finding these colours was a matter of trial and error. One book that was made on Iona probably in the 7th century had only three colours: red green and yellow – toasted lead for the red, orpiment (trisulphide of arsenic) for the yellow and verdigris for the green. But together they set up a chemical chain reaction that turned many of the pages into lace curtains because of the corrosion.
Now by the time of the Book of Kells, they’ve stabilised all that. They’ve been experimenting chemically and looking at new sources of colours, some of them perhaps imported from abroad. But mostly they found local solutions so that they could emulate things made in Constantinople or Rome that they might have seen.
Saving the universe
What’s the significance of the Book of Kells today? The fact that it has survived so long and that it still inspires so many people – that’s its true significance for me. It’s one of the things that made me go into the career that I did, being taken to see it when I was four years old. I decided then that I was going to save the universe by becoming a librarian!
How do you define what it is to be Irish, to be Scottish, to be Celtic? Things like this can help people to crystallise that. But often in doing so, they misrepresent what the book was intended to be in the beginning, which is something that brings people together rather than define what keeps them apart and makes them different.
Then and now
About 10 years ago, there was a conference on the Book of Kells at Trinity College Dublin. The six of us who had actually worked on the book in the flesh were having detailed discussions about its meaning and where it was physically made. The rest of the scholar community were having their own informed debates.
Some of us were going out in the field ‘preaching’ – giving public lectures – and using the idea of the book as a springboard into people’s minds in the same way that Columba and his missionaries, going out into the field in Scotland, would have used the idea of scripture, rather than expecting people to be able to read it with them.
And while all of this was going on, the sponsors of the conference wanted their own special insight and to have things explained to them, and a mile-long queue of people wound round the quad at Trinity waiting to pay their two punt to spend five minutes in front of the mystically lit object itself, for reasons of faith, of nationalism, whatever.
All of these things coming together – and I think that, when the Book of Kells was made, the reactions to it were probably rather similar ...
