Lindisfarne Gospels

Most early medieval manuscripts are anonymous, and attributing one is an exercise in inference from handwriting. The Lindisfarne Gospels is the exception, because someone wrote the answer in it. Around the year 950 Aldred, provost of the community then at Chester-le-Street, added a colophon naming four men: Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne, who wrote the book; Ethelwald, who bound it; Billfrith the anchorite, who made the metalwork and gems for the cover; and Aldred himself, who added the gloss. Eadfrith died in 721, which places the writing around the year 700.

Aldred was working two and a half centuries after the fact, and a note that late is evidence about a tradition as much as about an event. Scholars have nonetheless generally accepted it, partly because the book's single hand is consistent with one man's sustained work and partly because there was no obvious motive to invent this particular set of names.

The decoration is more controlled than that of the Book of Kells: five carpet pages of pure ornament, evangelist portraits derived from Mediterranean models, and initial pages of great intricacy that never quite let the letter dissolve. The text is a clean Italian Vulgate, well copied. This was a book made to be read as well as displayed.

Two facts about this manuscript reach well beyond the history of book decoration.

The first is in its pigments. Analysis has identified lapis lazuli in the palette. In about the year 700 lapis came from one place, the mountains of what is now Afghanistan, and it reached Northumbria across the whole width of the known world. A monastery on a tidal island off the coast of northern England, in a kingdom that had been pagan within living memory, was buying at the end of a supply line that ran to central Asia. Whatever else the Insular monasteries were, they were not isolated.

The second is between the lines. When Aldred added his colophon around 950 he also added something else: a word-by-word translation of the entire Latin text into Old English, written small above each line. It is the oldest surviving version of the gospels in the English language, and it predates the great Anglo-Saxon gospel translations. It was not made to replace the Latin, which stays dominant on the page, but to help a reader through it, which is a modest purpose for a document of that significance.

The community carried the book away from Lindisfarne after the Viking raids, along with Cuthbert's body, and wandered Northumbria for over a century before settling at Durham.