The Book of Kells

Feast your eyes on this vision of beauty, Wake lovers! It comes from The Book of Kells, which you can see in the Treasury of Trinity College, Dublin. Trinity College has also made an amazing online version, which allows you to zoom in on details.
 

The Monogram Page, fol 34 R

This page is filled with a monogram, XPI, the first three letters of 'Christ' in Greek. At the bottom right, in smaller letters, you can see the word 'bgeneratio. So the whole text is an abbreviated version of Matthew.1.18, 'Christi autem generatio sic erat' (Now the birth of Jesus Christ was like this).

Joyce loved this book, and owned a volume of reproductions, with a description by Sir Edward Sullivan, published in 1914, which is online here. He also sent a copy to his patroness, Harriet Shaw Weaver, as her 1922 Christmas present.

'I hope you got my book. You will need a large magnifying glass for it. I used to pore over the pages (when not poring over the advertisement columns of Irish newspapers of before the flood) in the days when the shaker of the earth had not yet bereft me of vision.'

To HSW 30 December 1922 (from the British Library Weaver papers, posted in the James Joyce Digital Archive)

'I am very glad that you like the Book of Kells.'

To HSW, 6 February 1923, Letters I, p
 

Joyce told his friend Arthur Power what the book meant to him:

'In all the places I have been to, 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 the page have the essential quality of a chapter of Ulysses. Indeed, you can compare much of my work to the intricate illuminations. I would like it to be possible to pick up any page of my book and know at once what book it is.'

James Joyce to Arthur Power (from an interview quoted by Ellmann, p.545) 

Although Joyce called the book 'purely Irish', similar gospels were being produced in Wales, Scotland and Northumbria, whose monasteries had close links with the Irish Church. The style of decoration is also not pure but a fusion of Celtic, Pictish, Anglo-Saxon, Mediterranean and eastern influences.

The 'Carpet Page' from the Book of Durrow

Scholars call these books 'Insular', because they were produced in islands off the west coast of the European continent. The earliest is the seventh century Book of Durrow, which is also in Trinity College. Another great example, the Lindisfarne Gospels, from around 700 CE, is displayed in the British Library. The Book of Kells, dating from around 800 CE, is one of the last great works of the tradition. Its decoration is so rich and varied that it's like an encyclopedia of Insular styles.

The Book is named after Kells, in Ireland, but there is an old tradition linking it with the monastery of Iona. The first record of the book, in the eleventh century, calls it the 'great Gospel of Columkille.' Saint Columba, or Columkille, founded the monastery of Iona. He makes lots of appearances in Finnegans Wake.

The book may have found its way to Kells following the Viking raids on Iona, when the surviving monks fled the island.    

JOYCE AS A MEDIEVAL WRITER

Though we think of Joyce as the most modern of the modernists, he told Arthur Power that he saw himself as writing in a medieval tradition:

'I remember once standing in the gardens beside Notre-Dame and looking up at its roofs, their amazing complication — plane overlapping plane, angle countering angle, the numerous traversing gutters and roundels. In comparison, classical buildings always seem to me to be over-simple and lacking in mystery. Indeed, one of the most interesting things about present-day thought in my opinion is its return to medievalism....There is an old church I know of in Les Halles, a black foliated building with flying buttresses spread out like the legs of a spider, and as you walk past it you see the huge cobwebs hanging in its crevices, and more than anything else I know of it reminds me of my own writings, so that I feel that if I had lived in the fourteenth or fifteenth century I should have been much more appreciated....And in my opinion one of the most interesting things about Ireland is that we are still a medieval people, and that Dublin is still a medieval city. I know that when I used to frequent the pubs around Christ Church I was always reminded of those medieval taverns in which the sacred and the obscene rub shoulders...'

Joyce to Arthur Power, quoted in Conversations with James Joyce. 

The sacred and profane also rub shoulders in The Book of Kells. There are small comical illustrations, like this cat chasing a rat which has stolen a communion wafer.

I wonder if Joyce's 'black foliated church' was St Eustache in Les Halles (right). It's gleaming white now, but would have looked black in Joyce's day.

In Finnegans Wake, Shaun says of Shem the Penman (Joyce), 'He's weird, I tell you, and middayevil down to his vegetable soul.' (423.27)

Shem is also described as 'making believe to read his usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles' (179.26), where Ulysses is identified with The Book of Kells.  Eccles is the street where Leopold Bloom lives in the book.   Ulysses had a blue cover and a Blue Book was an almanac, or compilation of statistics. Stephen Gwynn's savage review in the Manchester Guardian summed it up as 'Seven hundred pages of a tome like a Blue-book are occupied with the events and sensations in one day of a renegade Jew' (Joyce never forgot or forgave a bad review).

You can see Joyce's medievalism in the way he structured Ulysses using colours, organs, symbols etc, as shown in the elaborate schema he produced for Stuart Gilbert and Carlo Linati. Dante would have felt at home with this way of writing a book.

Joyce was in a medieval frame of mind when he began writing Finnegans Wake. The early sketches were all based on Irish medieval myths and history - King Roderick O'Conor, St Patrick and the Druid, Tristan and Isolde, The Annals of the Four Masters and St Kevin. Most medieval in style is the St Kevin piece, which is structured according to ecclesiastical and angelical hierarchies, liturgical colours, canonical hours, gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the seven sacraments. Fweet describes its pattern as 'nine concentric circles, superimposed with two crosses, one of space (ascending angels and descending clergy crossing at lines 24-5), one of time (forward hours and backward sacraments crossing at lines 30-31)'

THE BOOK OF KELLS AND THE WAKE

On pages 13-14 of the Wake, Joyce gives us a look at some medieval annals of Dublin. A gap in the chronicle is explained:

'Somewhere, parently, in the ginnandgo gap between antediluvious and annadominant the copyist must have fled with his scroll. The billy flood rose or an elk charged him or the sultrup worldwright from the excelsissimost empyrean (bolt, in sum) earthspake or the Dannamen gallous banged pan the bliddy duran. A scribicide then and there is led off under old’s code with some fine covered by six marks or ninepins in metalmen for the sake of his labour’s dross...' 

Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, in The Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944), argued that the inspiration for this passage was Sullivan's description of the unfinished opening page of Matthew's Gospel, with the text 'Liber generationis' ('The book of the genealogy' of Jesus Christ).
 

Opening words of Matthew, fol 29 R

Here's Sullivan's description:

 
'The rudely-drawn figure standing in the lower left-hand corner is said to represent the Evangelist. The smaller and much more naturally drawn figure at the top may also be intended for him. The difference of execution in the two cases would, I suggest, almost justify the conclusion that the larger figure was a later addition in order to fill a space left vacant when the original artist had touched the Manuscript for the last time.  I think, too, that we can almost see from the illumination itself the very place where he was hurried from his work.'

'There are many unfinished portions in the whole page; for instance, the small face to the left of the upper limb of the L, the piece of the border of the same limb just above and to the right of the face, and possibly the space into which the right elbow of the upper figure projects.'

'But more noticeable than all these is the unfinished condition of the intertwined letters ER in the circle which forms the lower portion of the antique and curiously formed B. The dark line surrounding the red E is only half completed. The interruption of so very simple a feature of the work seems to tell a tale of perhaps even tragic significance.'

BOOKS FROM RUBBISH DUMPS

Joyce also parodies Sullivan at length in Finnegans Wake Book One, Chapter 5, which he called 'Hen'. J.S.Atherton has a good description of this chapter, in which a hen, Belinda of the Dorans, scratches a letter out of a 'midden' or 'mudmound':

'This midden is a symbol, elaborated later, for the inhabited world in which men have left so many traces. The letter stands as a symbol for all attempts at written communication including all other letters, all the world's literature, the Book of Kells, all manuscripts, all the sacred books of the world, and also Finnegans Wake itself. One reason why The Book of Kells is included here is that it was once 'stolen by night...and found after a lapse of some months, concealed under sods' (Sullivan)'  The Books at the Wake  p62-3

Literature discovered in a rubbish heap reminded me of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. Since 1896, vast amounts of papyrus have been excavated from the dumps here. Discoveries included poems by Sappho, several plays by Menander and part of a satyr play by Sophocles. But I can't find any specific reference to this in the Wake.  

A.L.Hunt's photograph of the his Oxyrhynchus dig in 1903

THE ASHPIT BOOKS

From Vivien Igoe's James Joyce's Dublin Houses

Joyce's dour brother, Stanislaus (a model for Shaun in the Wake) has a story of the younger Joyce children finding two books in the ashpit of their house at 8 Royal Terrace, Fairview (right). The children called these the 'ashpit books':

'Somebody found at the end of the garden two books which the children nicknamed 'the ashpit books'. One was a song-book, the first pages of which were missing. It contained a large and miscellaneous collection of classical and traditional songs, popular ballads and many so-called comic songs, the humour of which always remained a mystery to me. The other was a closely and badly printed collated edition of the four gospels in a red cloth cover...' 

My Brother's Keeper, p112

The street is now called Inverness Road. I visited the house in June 2022 - it looks very different from the photo in Vivien Igoe's book. It's been beautifully restored by Stephen D'Arcy, a gardener. There are new Georgian style windows, a fancy front door and a miniature maze in the front garden. 

And is that Anna Livia on the new door knocker?

These ashpit books must be one inspiration for the Hen chapter.  

In 2013, I learned from PQ's excellent A Building Roam blog that archaeologists have excavated the ash pit in this house, and found magic lantern slides!

When Stephen D'Arcy was replanting the back garden, he found fragments of glass slides, mainly on religious subjects, used in magic lantern shows. He called in archaeologists from the National Museum of Ireland.  Read about what they found here.

The document discovered by the hen in the Finnegans Wake dump appears to be an everyday letter from an Irish family in Boston to relatives back home in Dublin. Over time, it has been transformed by 'heated residence in the heart of the orangeflavoured mudmound' (111.33), taking on a life of its own, like Joyce's book. It's compared to a melting photographic negative. As PQ writes, this makes the discovery of photographic slides in Joyce's own ashpit an amazing synchronicity.

RED RADDLED OBELI

Here's part of Joyce's great description of the letter's appearance, which goes on for four and a half pages:

'Look at this prepronominal funferal, engraved and retouched and edgewiped and pudden-padded, very like a whale’s egg farced with pemmican, as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia: all those red raddled obeli cayennepeppercast over the text, calling unnecessary attention to errors, omissions, repetitions and misalignments...' 120.09-16

'Obelus' is a Latin term for a critical mark, placed by an editor beside spurious or misplaced text. Obeli were first used in the 2nd century BCE by Aristarchus of Samothrace, in editing Homer. Joyce's 'red raddled obeli' come from Sullivan's text:

'One important instance of correction is to be found on fol. 219 R., where the text of the preceding page, fol. 218 V., has been erroneously repeated. Attention is drawn to the error by four obeli in red, running down the middle of the page between the lines, and others round the margins, and red lines about the corners.' 

Kells obeli - the red crosses in folio 218.v.

They are 'raddled' because of Sullivan's discussion on the sources of the pigments, here quoting a Professor Hartley:

'Of red hæmatite of an earthy nature, such as is termed raddle, there is a plentiful supply in the County Antrim'

Joyce's whole description is modelled on Sullivan's, which begins like this.

THE CURIOUS WARNING SIGN

Here's part of the Gospel of John from The Book of Kells. At the bottom centre, just to the right of the griffin, there's a symbol like a big green C. Sullivan describes its purpose:


 

'The symbol C, known in Irish MSS. as "head under the wing" or "turn under the path" ...indicates that the words immediately following it are to be read after the end of the next full line.'

Joyce parodies this at 121.08:

'the curious warning sign before our protoparent’s ipsissima verba (a very pure nondescript, by the way, sometimes a palmtailed otter, more often the arbutus fruitflowerleaf of the cainapple) which paleographers call a leak in the thatch or the aranman ingperwhis through the hole of his hat, indicating that the words which follow may be taken in any order desired'

An Aran fisherman with traditional hat

 

So the sign reminded Joyce of an Aranman whispering ('ingperwhis') through his hat or a thatched roof with a leak on it.

The comparison of this 'warning sign' with a 'palmtailed otter' (121.10) is taken from Sullivan's description of the Monogram Page (34r):

'A strange group of animals will be observed between the bottom of the P and the up line of the X — two rats nibbling the Eucharistic bread under the eyes of a pair of cats....Slightly to the right will be seen an otter-like creature with a fish in its mouth. The animal has been described as rat-like, but its size, shape and colouring are all against the suggestion.' 15-16

Looking at the Monogram Page in January 2021, with the Glasgow Finnegans Wake Reading Group, I was impressed when Davy Cunningham found the otter. You can see that the enclosing yellow shape resembles the warning sign.

Davy also suggested that ''Palmtailed' could refer to palmier biscuits, for the shapes either side of the otter'.

THE TUNC PAGE

The most important page for Joyce was this one, called the Tunc page. It illustrates Matthew 27.38 'TUNC CRUCIFIXERANT XPI CUM EO DUOS LATRONES' (then there were crucified with him two thieves). 

The 'XPI' is the Greek monogram of Christ, which Sullivan calls 'the Chrismon'. It is identified by Joyce with his siglum for HCE ('the meant to be baffling chrismon trilithon sign' 119.17)

Joyce describes this page on page 122, where he says its design was inspired by the 'cruciform postscript', or kisses on the letter from Boston found in the dump by the hen! Originally there were four kisses  (‘with four crosskisses for holy paul holey corner holipoli whollyisland’ 111.17), but three of them have been scraped away, leaving just one:

'then (coming over to the left aisle corner down) the cruciform postscript from which three basia or shorter and smaller oscula have been overcarefully scraped away, plainly inspiring the tenebrous Tunc page of the Book of Kells (and then it need not be lost sight of that there are exactly three squads of candidates for the crucian rose awaiting their turn in the marginal panels of Columkiller, chugged in their three ballotboxes, then set apart for such hanging committees...'

('Oscula' and 'Basia' are Latin terms for kisses).

If you look at the Tunc page, you can see the three squads of candidates sitting in their ballotboxes. Joyce is drawing a connection between these panels and the three missing kisses, scraped away from the letter. If you draw lines connecting the heads of the men in each panel, you do make an X. At the bottom, you can see the big X, which Joyce associated with the surviving kiss on the bottom of his letter.

SERPENTINE DECORATION

'that strange exotic serpentine, since so properly banished from our scripture, about as freakwing a wetterhand now as to see a rightheaded ladywhite don a corkhorse, which, in its invincible insolence ever longer more and of more morosity, seems to uncoil spirally and swell lacertinelazily before our eyes under pressure of the writer’s hand' 121.20

'Lacertine' is defined in the OED as 'consisting of or incorporating interlaced lizard-like figures'. Sullivan refers to the 'lacertine convolution' in this passage describing the Genealogy of Christ in Luke:

'A singularly beautiful arabesque, the only example of its kind in the Manuscript, fills the middle portion of the fifth of these pages from side to side, forming a terminal to the Genealogy. It is divided into two horizontal panels, the compartment to the right suggesting a vase and vine motif, that to the left containing two eagle-headed serpentine creatures whose wings are strangely woven into the general decoration. The whole is surmounted at the centre by the head and shoulders of a human figure wearing a moustache and triple pointed beard, his feet showing below. The entire composition forms one of the most striking instances of lacertine convolution and colour to be found in the volume.'  p20-21

I haven't yet managed to find this image.

serpents, a detail of fol 29r

Sullivan has a lot to say about the 'serpentine' decoration found throughout the book, which he associates with a pre-Christian worship of 'ophidian reptiles'.

'The frequently recurring presence of serpentine forms all through the decorations of the Manuscript has given rise to the suggestion that these forms are in some way connected with the worship of ophidian reptiles. There certainly appears to be some evidence to show that amongst the immigrant races that had established themselves in the land before the introduction of Christianity the worship of the serpent was practised, though perhaps not very widely. It is even possible that this was the serpent which St. Patrick is said to have driven out of the country. The adoption of this serpentine form by the Church for decorative purposes would have been but another instance of what we know was the custom of the Christian Church in very early days, when many pagan elements were for good reasons absorbed into the practices of the Christian missionaries, and afterwards became permanently interwoven with Christian belief.'

a detail of 130r, the opening of Mark's Gospel

Sullivan quotes Dr F.Keller:

'In all these ornaments there breathes a peculiar spirit, which is foreign to the people of the West: there is in them a something mysterious which imparts to the eye a certain feeling of uneasiness and suspense. This is especially the case with those frightful-looking, monstrous figures of animals, whose limbs twist and twine themselves into a labyrinth of ornaments, where one can hardly resist the natural impulse to search for the other parts of their bodies, often nearly concealed or passing into different strange creatures . . . The variety of these forms . . . their luxuriant development, often extravagant, but sometimes uncommonly delicate and lovely . . . must have been originated in the East, or at least have their prototypes there. That the Irish system of ornamentation does actually find an analogy in Eastern countries is proved by the illustrations published by C. Knight in a small work on Egypt. We find there the serpentine bands of the Irish ornaments appearing already in the oldest Egyptian and Ethiopian manuscripts, and with a similarity of colour and combination truly astonishing.'

PEWS WITH THEIR TAILS IN THEIR MOUTHS

'the pardonable confusion...unthanks to which the pees with their caps awry are quite as often as not taken for pews with their tails in their mouths' 119.35. (corrected text)

Comical Q's in Fol 201 V

This line is taken from Sullivan's description of a page of the genealogy of Christ from Luke's Gospel:

'This page of the Genealogy... contains a string of Q's with which are intertwined a number of droll and impish figures in various grotesque positions, with legs tucked under their arms, and tongues protruding. They pull each other's hair from behind, and one has his toe thrust under the nose of  another figure in front. The uppermost of them even carries something resembling the air-bladder of pantomime; yet all the contortions of their limbs are contrived to fall in with the interlacings of the prevailing scheme of the design, a tour de force, as it were, of a big and genuinely human artist in holiday mood after months, or even years, of serious and reverent toil.'

PUNCTUATION

'The period, or full stop, is variously represented: (1) by three dots (:•); (2) by one dot at half the height of the letter; (3) by omitting the punctuation mark altogether and beginning the next sentence with a striking illuminated initial. So common, indeed, is this last form in the Kells text, that one wonders why full stops should ever be introduced before so obvious an indication of a new sentence as is provided by these fine and constantly recurring initials.'  Sullivan, 35

Sullivan talks about the punctuation of the Book of Kells at great length. On page 124, Joyce turns to the punctuation of the letter - the original document 'showed no signs of punctuation of any sort' (123.33), but if you hold it up to the light, you can see it's been 'pierced by numerous stabs and gashes made by a pronged instrument' (124.01-3) 

'Yard inquiries pointed out  that they ad bîn "provoked" ay /\  fork, of à grave Brofèsor; àth é's Brèak—fast—table; ; acùtely profèssionally piquéd, to=introdùce a notion of time [ùpon à plane (?) sù ' ' fàç'e'] by pùnct! ingh oles (sic) in iSpace?!’ '

Scotland Yard enquries suggest that these have been made by a grave professor at the breakfast table with his fork! By piercing the letter, he’s punctuated it - introducing the notion of time into something spatial (a 'plane surface'). The exclamation mark after 'punct' could be an image of the Professor's fork hovering over the hole it's just made - maybe expressing the paper's surprise at being punctured! 

The exclamation mark could also represent the hen's beak - the true cause of the holes in the letter.

'the fourleaved shamrock or quadrifoil jab was more recurrent wherever the script was clear and the term terse and that these two were the selfsame spots naturally selected for her perforations by Dame Partlet on her dungheap'. 124.20

AN UNDATED LETTER

The Book of Kells was undated. Sullivan wrote: 

'Indications to suggest its time of birth have been sought in all possible directions. Historical evidence is of little assistance. The Manuscript itself fails us where, conceivably, it might have helped us most, for the page that should have told its story is unfortunately no longer there.'

The Wake document is also undated 

'the studious omission of year number and era name from the date, the one and only time when our copyist seems at least to have grasped the beauty of restraint' 121.28 

Here's Joyce poking fun at himself – the ‘beauty of restraint’ was completely foreign to the author of Finnegans Wake!  

Yet he did put dates on his books.