The Book of Kells

The Kerry Eagle wishes the election candidates well in the election and count over the weekend.

Taking a break from political commentary for the moment, above is a page from the Book of Kells.  Here is an extract from Geoffery Moorehouse's book, Sun Dancing.

"A famous example from the Book of Kells is the page which contains fantasised symbols representing the Four Evangelists; a man for Matthew, a lion for Mark, a calf for Luke, an eagle for John.  And in these highly stylised examples of Celtic art..which represent writhing mammals, birds and reptiles, as well as anthropomorphic depictions of the human form some specialists have seen a connection with the art of cultures that extend far beyond the Celtic origins in Mitteleuropa, but can perhaps be traced to the Assyrians, the Persians, the Chinese, the Turkmen of the Central Asian plateau.

Wherever this imagination began, its development in the scriptoria of the Irish and other Celtic monasteries was nothing less than the evidence of genius.  No work of art repays careful study more than the page of a Celtic manuscript, which is so copious and intricately related in its detail that you have to look at it long before your eyes become, as it were, accustomed to its light.  Only then do you begin to notice the half-concealed creatures writhing around the margins, of the fact that St Matthew appears to have been given two right feet, or the colour of human eyes, which much more often than not are grey or brown, while the hair of saints and angels is invariably in the range of yellow or red...

It is a matter of astonishment that some of these art works are with us still.At the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century, the Book of Durrow passed into the hands of a MacGeoghan, who lived nearby in County Offaly, and got into the habit of doctoring his sick cattle by plunging the relic into water, which he then allowed the animals to drink,a treatment which eventually resulted in many pages being holed by damp rot.  The Book of Kells..('the most sumptuous of the books to have survived from Europe's early Middle Ages', in one expert opinion), had an even more perilous passage to the twentieth century..stolen from the church in 1007, turning up in a ditch several weeks later, minus the shrine of precious metal and jewels in which it was kept...

It is obvious that, through warfare, pillage and other tragedies, we have lost many more of these illuminated manuscripts than we shall ever know.  But that any of them have survived to our own time is nothing less than a miracle in western civilisation."