The Kells alphabet:
FutureLearn in co-operation with Trinity College, Dublin has an informative page on the...
Trinity College also provides a video about the...
It is helpful to familiarize oneself with this lettering in order to better understand what use is made of it in the Book of Kells. As well as this lettering, there are the more ornate or geometrical letters used in the decorative pages or at the start of verses.
Early in the Book of Kells, we find a number of pages called Breves Causae that summarize events recorded in the gospels. These summary pages use a wide variety of capital letter forms, many of which will recur in variations within the Gospels themselves:
Folio 104r gives us the text of the Gospel of Matthew Chapter 24, Verses 19-24
The Catholic Bible Online has the Latin of the Vugate version as well as translations in English from two other well known bibles:
We combined the Kells page, the Vulgate Latin and the English translation:
We can see that the whimsical capitals are at the start of each verse and looking at the translated text lets us speculate on how the capitals may relate to the content of the verse. It looks like the SU of the last verse resembles an upside down church steeple with watchful eyes above it:
This would be in accord with the text that warns of false Christs and false prophets.
Likewise, the E figure which begins the 21st verse about great tribulation looks to be caught up in tribulations himself:
The bird located above the text of Verse 23 on this page (104r) has mystified the experts, but...
as noted on Ashley Jane Leonard's excellent Kells web site.
Peacocks are found throughout the Book of Kells, but on closer examination, this pseudo-peacock seems to have a false tail and so may be meant to suggest the false Christs that this text from the Gospel of Matthew is warning about:
The word "Christ" and its variants are often abbreviated in the text of the Book of Kells and these abbreviations usually have an indication mark above them. In Verses 23 and 24 on this page we see abbreviation indications above the words 'Christus' and 'Christi' that are abbreviated as 'XPS' and "XPI":
Alfredo M Graphic Arts Studio has published a fascinating collection of illuminated capital letters from the Book of Kells and you can browse through all the graphics from this book online:
Here is a sample page for the letter T:
Proceed to the next Kells post: Serpents of the Beatitudes - Exploring the Kells Text Part 2
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