For Christmas 1922, James Joyce sent a gift to his main benefactor and supporter, Harriet Shaw Weaver. It was a facsimile of some pages of the ancient Irish illuminated manuscript known as The Book of Kells. Since Ulysses was by that time published, Joyce was embarking on Finnegans Wake and plotting out its systems. The Book of Kells would remain an abiding influence on his work; he would refer to one of its pages explicitly in his new novel. When his friend Arthur Power needed advice about how to write, Joyce suggested that he study The Book of Kells. "In all the places I have been to," he wrote, "Rome, Zurich, Trieste, I have taken it about with me, and have pored over its workmanship for hours. It is the most purely Irish thing we have, and some of the big initial letters which swing right across a page have the essential quality of a chapter of Ulysses. Indeed, you can compare much of my work to the intricate illuminations."
James Joyce's claim that The Book of Kells is "the most purely Irish thing we have" was not entirely true. The book may, in fact, have been created in the late 8th century on the island of Iona in Scotland, where a monastery had been founded by my namesake St Colmcille, or St Columba (or Columkiller as Joyce has it in Finnegans Wake) in the 6th century. It may have been taken to Kells in Co Meath, north of Dublin, for safekeeping once Norse raids began in 795. Or it may have been created in Kells by monks who came from Iona. Or it may have been created in both places. The illustrations were not made by a single hand and there is no evidence to suggest that they were made in a single place either.
As a result of its being endangered in the rebellion of 1641, during which the town of Kells suffered serious damage, the manuscript was taken to Dublin, probably in 1653, and presented to Trinity College, where it is now on display, seen by half a million people each year. In 1849, it was shown to Queen Victoria. (She and Prince Albert saw fit to sign their names on the flyleaf which had been added in a new binding made in 1826.) Slowly, it became popular and famous not only for its beauty but also for evidence of an advanced monastic civilisation in Ireland at a time when much of the neighbouring island was highly barbarous.
The original version of The Book of Kells, at 340 pages, contains a copy of the four Gospels in Latin with some preliminary texts. It also has elaborate, beautiful and playful decoration. This new edition comes with a lucid explanation of the book's history and its iconography by Bernard Meehan, who is the keeper of manuscripts at Trinity College, Dublin. It also includes more than 200 illustrations in very clear colour that give a real and vivid sense of the exquisite glory and intricacy of the original.
It is easy to see from these illustrations why Joyce loved the book so much. There is a sense of the ingenious mind at work in every page. Just as we can imagine Joyce's glittering talent as he created the patterns and tones of Ulysses and the word puzzles of Finnegans Wake, some pages of The Book of Kells can be best viewed as work in progress, the monks filling in gaps with elaborate coloured puzzles, snaking and looping lines, knots and interlacings. They used decoration for its own sake and colour for the delight it offered; they brought calligraphy to a fine and playful art.
Part of the energy comes from the quality of the colour. Even in reproduction, there are extraordinary tones of blue, yellow, rust, red, green and purple.
Some pages have a more finished look, as though the monk who made them liked pattern, design and symmetry and then, having created a semblance of order, loved a tiny swirling detail, a new colour added for no apparent reason; he enjoyed depicting animal shapes and bird shapes and saints' faces and angels as pure embellishment.
Meehan's text is helpful, however, in preventing the reader from feeling that the pages were created merely for their own sake. The pages were decorated, he makes clear, for serious religious reasons. "Though the decoration of The Book of Kells," he writes, "is dense and, in places, bewildering, its themes, expressed in a variety of images, are constant. They allude in various forms, including animals and objects, to Christ, his nature and his life, his suffering on the cross and his resurrection. The Evangelists (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) have their own symbols."
Meehan points out how decoration in the book was used to highlight meaning; he emphasises the use of the cross "in myriad sizes and forms" on almost every page. He is fascinating on the symbols used in the book. He also allows for uncertainty in how we might read some of the iconography.
His sober reading of the monks' work is a useful antidote to the casual turning of the pages to find, for example, a hilarious looking cat following a rat that is running along with a communion wafer in its mouth, or two other cats, with rats sitting on their backs, doing very little to prevent two other rats from nibbling at the host.
Meehan may be right when he says that the peacock "signified Christ's incorruptibility", but it was also a godsend for the monk who could forge the bird's head and beak with a sort of snarling, woebegone expression and then find a wonderful variety of textures for the rest of the peacock.
The Book of Kells thus becomes an early version of the battle between earnestness and the playful in art, between the monks doing their duty by illustrating the Gospels and also having the time of their lives, despite Christ's suffering on the cross or, indeed, perhaps because of it, making pages that displayed not only their talent as artists but the sort of wit that James Joyce and many other artists of the future would attempt to emulate.