Book of Kells

It's from around the year 800.

So it's kind of a cousin of the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels, very much around that time period.

So you have those decorated Celtic-style initials that you expect from the Book of Kells.

where you have intricate lacework and what's called fretwork inside letters, which form part of the text, but are also artworks in themselves.

The only thing that survived the sacking of the cathedral by the

He championed the belief that the historical ancient British churches, including the Christians of Ireland, had never ever been subjected to Rome in the sense that the Roman Catholic Church was claiming.

He collected manuscripts, early channels, early fathers, even had the very unique and precious Book of Kells, a richly illuminated manuscript gospel book created by Celtic monks around 800 AD, containing the four Gospels of the New Testament in Latin and renowned for its intricate Celtic art and calligraphy.

Incidentally, you can go and see that book.

It's now housed at Trinity College Dublin.

In other words, you keep traveling, you'll end up at this point you started with because it's an endless line.

Now, the Irish monks who did the Book of Kells understood these endless lines.

And you find in their designs, they're all endless lines.

No matter what the design is, it's an endless line.

And we went and wandered around the college and then to, which you can go and do for free.

We just paid because we wanted to go to see the Book of Kells, which was, I didn't know what to expect.

I'm an uncultured swine.

So I didn't, I think I'd heard of it, but I didn't know what it was.

But I think that's a really nice message for the future, right? We have this legacy of tradition and a desire to innovate.

If you were at Trinity, you probably saw the Book of Kells, which was this amazing technology of its time.

It was an incredible preservation of the past and a willingness to innovate.

So I think we've been very lucky geographically, educationally, Because we were a very, very poor country for a long time.

I find that profoundly affecting.

And Iona is also one of those places that's associated with the great religious artworks that come out of our part of the world, like the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Book of Kells, for example.

Now, obviously those Lindisfarne Gospels are associated with the island of Lindisfarne, which is the other holy isle off the east coast of England.

And then there's Kells, which is in Ireland.

And they create all of these wonderful Celtic weavings to think of the way in which life is brought together.

And even in the scripture, The famous books, the Book of Kells or the Duro Gospels or all of these things these monks worked on to preserve the scripture over time.

They didn't just write the words down.

They put animals within the text.

Even if you make a book, at least that's a physical thing.

Maybe a book today would last 50 years or 100 years.

The people who wrote the book of Kells, they might be happy to know that it's still drying crowds now.

A building like this was built with a kind of material theology to it.

And it is by far the most famous illuminated manuscript.

The second most famous illuminated manuscript is the Book of Kells.

Did you know? I didn't know this.

There's one of them.

And it's massive, isn't it?

It's very big.

Every piece of Irish knot work you've ever seen is inspired by the Book of Kells.

The whole thing is online.