The Book of Kells

The story

Irish monks on a Scottish island

In 563 an Irish monk, Columba (in Irish Colum Cille), landed with twelve companions on the island of Iona, a small islet of rock and meadow off the west of Scotland, and founded a monastery there. From there the monks set out to bring Christianity to the peoples of Scotland and northern England, and they made Iona one of the most important centres of culture of the age. The Irish monks were famous for their skill in copying books and for their eagerness to teach.

In the British Isles and Ireland, after the fall of the Roman Empire, a style of art all of their own had developed, called Insular: spirals, knots and interlacing lines that never end, stretched and twisted animals, stylised faces. It combined the traditions of Celtic art and of the Germanic peoples with models from Mediterranean Christianity.

A book for the altar

Around the year 800, perhaps at Iona, perhaps in another monastery, a group of monks began to copy the four Gospels, that is, the accounts of the life of Jesus, in a splendid volume. It was a book for the altar, meant not to be read every day but to stay in the church on the great feast days. The monks wrote the Latin text with an ink made from oak galls and iron sulphate, in a clear, regular script called Insular uncial.

For the parchment they used calfskin: according to scholars' calculations, the skins of about one hundred and eighty to one hundred and eighty-five calves were needed. The pages were sheets about thirty-three centimetres wide. The book today has 340 leaves, that is, 680 pages, but some of it has probably been lost.

Colour and imagination

What marks out the Book of Kells is its decoration. Almost every page has giant initial letters, interlacing, animals and human figures, brightly coloured with pigments made from minerals and plants: yellow from orpiment, green from verdigris, blue from woad or from other plant pigments. There is hardly any empty space. Some pages show portraits of the four evangelists, the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus and the scene of the temptation of Jesus.

The most famous page is the one called “Chi-Rho”, where the first Greek letters of the name of Christ, X (chi) and P (rho), fill the whole page, with spirals, knots and hidden figures. If you look closely, you find tiny animals among the interlacing: cats, mice nibbling a communion wafer, otters with a fish, butterflies. The monks, clearly, liked a joke too.

Who made the book? Scholars recognise at least three or four different hands of scribes and decorators, who perhaps worked for years. The text is copied with some mistakes and with some lines left blank, a sign that the monks sometimes rushed or let themselves be distracted by the beauty of the decoration, which sometimes takes precedence over the text.

A book that nearly got lost

In 806 the Vikings attacked Iona and killed sixty-eight monks. The survivors took refuge in Ireland, at Kells (in Irish Ceanannas Mór), in County Meath, and probably took the book with them, or finished it there. It took its name from this place. In 1007 the book was stolen from the church at Kells: the thieves tore off the precious gold cover and left it under a heap of earth. It was found a few months later, damaged but still almost whole, according to the Irish annals.

Since 1661 it has been at Trinity College, Dublin, which received it as a gift. Today it is on show in the Old Library, and it is one of the most visited treasures of Ireland. To protect it, since 1953 it has been bound in four volumes, two of which are shown to the public, opened at different pages in rotation. An Irish animated film, “The Secret of Kells” (2009), tells a fantasy story about it.