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An Irish Blessing |
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| May the luck of the Irish
Lead to happiest heights
And the highway you travel
Be lined with green lights. |
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The Book of Kells
 The Book of Kells is now thought, by many palaeographers, to have been produced on the Scottish Island of Iona, by the followers of St. Columba, during the late eighth or early ninth century, and removed to Kells in County Meath soon afterwards.
An illuminated version of the Four Gospels, it is charcterised by its brilliant colouring, beauty and intricacy in design, with geometric patterns and delicate interlacing of lines and curves.
The style of the art, however originates from the pre-christian era. It was born of the Druidic religion and the oral traditions of the Celtic people, especially those who inhabited Britain and Ireland from the seventh century BC.
Seven created beings of the Celtic World - plant, insect, fish, reptile, bird, mammal and man are all featured in the artwork of the Book of Kells; but because the copying or portrayal of the works of the creator was forbidden, the artists representation of natural creatures is highly stylised and abstracted; arms, legs, hair and beard are intertwined in intricate patterns.
Like their pagan gods and spirits, the Druids themselves are said to have practised shape changing, so it is not unusual to find their gods portrayed as having bird or animal servants or even bird or animal parts. This same characteristic was later incorporated into the Book of Kells where the evangelists are given both animal and human forms.
Although thought to be asiatic in origin, Celtic knotwork, with its complicated cord patterns, reached Ireland via Germany. At the time of early Christianity, Germanic art had a style of animal pattern which the Irish and Scottish monasteries adapted and developed in a direction of anatomical integrity.
 Having clarified the anatomy of the animal form, a new development occured that distinguished between quadruped and biped. With this logical seperation of bird from beast, the hound and heron of Celtic animal pattern emerged to become the mainstay of Irish as distinct from Saxon tradition.
The introducation of the bird motif distinguishes Celtic animal patterns from any other. The Celts had always held birds sacred as messengers of the supernatural realm. In early Christianity, the eagle became the emblem of St. John the Evangelist, its Celtic form derived from pictish art.
In the Book of Kells, the long beaked waterbird, crane, cormorant or heron also appears. This bird of two worlds, air and water, in the signature of crien, greek root of Christos.
Spirals and interlaced patterns are characteristic of all Celtic design and can be seen to their best advantage in the Book of Kells.
The divergent spiral is composed of two winding lines which diverge into curved lines. A new spiral springs in inverted order from the points of the curved lines - the two winding lines repeating the original pattern in converging directions until they reach a central point. Then they start again, diverging and converging as before in an almost infinite sucession of spiral froms.
 In its earliest type, the spiral as found at Newgrange (c1200BCE), the curve is large and simple; in Christian times the curved spaces were treated as secondary to the spiral and the turns round the central point are frequently twelve or more. By the time the Book of kells was written, the monks were able to use their knowledge of geometry in the construction of the spirals.
The interlaced patterns are constructed with ribbons of unifrom size which are twisted, plaited, knotted or interwoven to cover the page with symmetry. They occur on a variety of forms from the plain twist to the elaborate chain composed of intricate knots and varied construction, being laid in squares, circles, oblongs, triangles, hexagons, octagons etc.
Dots, mostly red in colour are one of the leading features of the less important details of decoration. They are often used by themselves to form patterns in extended lines, or for filling vacant spaces in a large design as in The Book of Lindisfarne. Their most usual employment in the Book of Kells is for the purpose of adding a "fringe" to exterior lines. Their use is very frequently relied on in the case of the smaller initials. In the Book of Kells the dots are almost always in single lines.
Written by Pauline Millar (1995)
Bibliography:
Celtic Design: A Beginnners Manual - Aidan Meehan
Spiral Patterns - Aidan Meehan
Celtic and Anglo Saxon Painting - Carl Nordenfolk
The Book of Kells - Sir Edward Sullivan
Celtic Art in Pagen and Christian Times - J.Romilly Allen. |
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