The Book of Kells, the mysteries of Ireland's finest gospel book

The Book of Kells is neither a cipher nor a grimoire. Yet it is one of the most enigmatic artefacts of the European Middle Ages. Made around the year 800 and kept since 1661 at Trinity College Dublin, it contains the four Gospels in Latin, decorated with a complexity that still defies anyone who tries to describe it. Many questions about its making, its authors and its history remain without a sure answer.

Iona or Kells?

We do not know for certain where it was produced. The most widespread hypothesis is that it was begun in the monastery of Iona, in Scotland, founded by Saint Columba, and completed or kept at Kells, in Ireland, where the monks took refuge after the Viking raids of the early ninth century. Other scholars prefer to attribute it entirely to one of the two centres, and the debate remains open.

The number of artists is also uncertain. Stylistic study has led scholars to distinguish several hands, usually three or four illuminators and several scribes, but their identities are unknown. The manuscript is also unfinished: some decorations remained at the stage of preparatory drawing, as if the work had been interrupted by a sudden event.

A dizzying decoration

The volume now has 340 leaves of calfskin vellum. Its most famous page is that of the monogram of Christ, the Greek letters chi and rho that open the account of the Nativity in Matthew's Gospel. Within its spirals and interlace hide tiny figures: angels, an otter with a fish in its teeth, cats and mice, visible only on very close inspection.

The colours come from different pigments, including the yellow of orpiment, an arsenic-based mineral. The ornament combines spirals of Celtic tradition, fantastic animals and interlace of Germanic origin. Many initials are made of the bodies of animals or men knotted together, in a play of forms that seems endless and that required extraordinary precision.

Thefts, recoveries and legends

The Annals of Ulster record that in 1007 the great Gospel of Columba was stolen from the church at Kells and found some months later under a sod of earth, stripped of its gold cover. This book is generally identified with the Book of Kells. The precious binding was never recovered, and some leaves at the beginning and end of the volume are lost.

In the twelfth century the Welsh cleric Gerald of Wales described a gospel book he had seen at Kildare, so rich that it seemed the work of an angel rather than a man. He was not referring to the Book of Kells, but his description is often recalled to convey the wonder such books already aroused in the Middle Ages, even among those used to the most precious codices.

Today the Book of Kells is bound in four volumes and displayed in rotation in the Old Library of Trinity College, where hundreds of thousands of visitors see it every year. Its mystery is the mystery of perfection: how a small monastic community, in an age of wars and raids, could create a work of such refinement.