A Light in the Darkness: Theologies of the Book of Kells

I begin this essay with a 10^th century riddle and will end it with a 9th century poem, both of which illume the monastic world of the book and of learning, faith, and art in the first millennium in Ireland. So, riddle me this and say what I am:

One of my enemies ended my life sapped my world strength afterward soaked me wetted in water set me in the sun, where soon I lost the hairs which I had and then the hard knife edge cut me fingers folded me, and feather of bird traced all over my tawny surface with drops of delight. Then, for trappings, a man bound me with boards, bent hide over me glossed me with gold so I glistened wondrous in smithwork. Useful to mortals Mighty my name is A help to heroes, and holy am I. Say what I am.¹

You are a calf that becomes a book. The riddle-poem is found in the Exeter Book, a collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and it describes the process of creating an illuminated manuscript such as the Book of Kells, beginning with killing a calf, “ending its life,” and preparing its skin as vellum (from vitulus, Latin for calf) by soaking it in a bath of lime, scraping off the hair and fat, and stretching and drying it before cutting it into folios or pages. The folios are then “traced all over” with calligraphic script and decorative imagery and initial letters using “feather of bird,” a writing instrument made from the tail feather of a goose or swan stripped to its shaft and sharpened at the quill to create a nib. Inks, “drops of delight,” were produced from carbon or from the interaction of iron salts and crushed oak tree galls, varied pigments from clays and minerals, and dyes extracted from lichen, berries and even insects.² The manuscript was finally bound between boards, “trapping” it, and then placed in a shrine decorated with smithwork. The poem captures the brute physicality, almost violence, of building the book organically from the ground up, wresting it from nature. Christianity abandoned the scroll and adapted the codex format early on, becoming a cult of the book, with the Bible being the ultimate book of that cult. Medieval monasteries had to be their own publishing houses. Missals were needed for mass, psalters for the liturgy of the hours, and textbooks of Latin grammar for the school. Monks made the book, wrote the book, and in the case of the Book of Kells venerated the book. Books were important because they carried on the story of Jesus Christ. When these books were “lit up” with colourful imagery, ornate borders and decorated letters they were called “illuminated” manuscripts. Illuminated manuscripts grew from love of the book and of Scripture, specifically the monastic practice of lectio divina, sacred reading, a slow, prayerful reading of the text, falling in love with it, allowing your life to flow into it. There are more than forty images of books within Kells itself, books within a book.

The Book of Kells is one of seven early Irish gospel books held in the Old Library at Trinity College, Dublin, and has caught the public imagination as an emblem of medieval European art and culture. In the Irish collective consciousness, according to Bernard Meehan, “it symbolizes the power of learning, the impact of Christianity on the life of the country, and the spirit of artistic imagination.”³ Each year half a million people queue to see this 9th century religious manuscript; they are people of all faiths and none, and they want to see a Christian book that somehow transcends its orthodoxy and touches something universal in the human heart. In the hushed darkness of the treasury room they gaze silently on it. When I went to see it last year a woman whispered to me “It’s perfect, isn’t it?” Twelve hundred years after its creation it is still a catalyst for contemplation. What is the allure of the Book of Kells and what can...