IRISH SCRIPT

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XLIII, Issue 1, 6 January 1916, Page 31

IRISH SCRIPT

To. St. Patrick Ireland owes its exquisite script, which speedily supplanted the original Ogham-, the Gaelic alphabet of > ancient times. f .* - The basis of this script is the Roman half-uncial hand— being the script used upon papyrus and parchment in the late years of the Roman Empire, consisting of rounded forms with somewhat curved vertical strokes. Owing to the isolated position of the island and the consequent absence of extraneous influences, a strongly, characteristic, national hand developed, which ran its uninterrupted course down to the Middle Ages. This hand was at first round in character and of great clearness, beauty, and precision; but at an early period, a modified, pointed variety of a minuscule type developed out of it, used for quicker and less ornamental writing. As might have been expected the English adopted both the round and pointed varieties of their Irish teachers. One of the earliest and most beautiful examples of the former is the Book of Durham or the Lindisfarne Gospel, written about 700 A.D. by Eadfrith, Bishop of Lindisfarne. And, as a specimen of the latter, may be mentioned a fine copy of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History in the University of Cambridge, written not long after 730, which possesses an additional interest as preserving one of the earliest pieces of poetry in lish language, ‘ The Hymn of Caedmon,’ in the original Northumbrian dialect. A Relatively Small Number of Manuscripts has come down to us through the vicissitudes of the ages they are scattered far and wide, at present through collections public and private, Trinity College, the Royal Irish Academy, London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, and scores of others are jealously preserving the most precious specimens. The exact amount of Irish literature still remaining has never been determined, maintains Dr. Douglas Hyde. According to him a French scholar has noted 133 existing manuscripts, all of them over three hundred years old, and some over a thousand years, and the whole number found existing in public libraries on the Continent and in the British Isles was 1009. But hundreds upon hundreds exist in private collections scattered throughout the country, and hundreds upon hundreds more have been destroyed. The Art of Illuminating Manuscripts has been known from time immemorial. The moment a manuscript had been finished in the Scriptorium, the general writing room of the typical monastery, it passed into the hands of another expert, the illuminator, before being turned over to the binder. The characteristic feature of Irish illuminating is the use of dots, following the outlines of the initials; delicate spirals, interlacing ribbons, and tessellated patterns. This applies particularly to early Irish manuscripts, : notably the Book of Kells of the seventh century, now in Trinity College, Dublin. A well executed specimen page giving a portion of Christ’s genealogy reveals other characteristics, profuse capitals, bold penmanship, and trenchant figures. To the monk-artist, illuminating was a labor of love, as may easily be seen from 1 the rich tints and delicate intricacies of his glorious art. • . The monastic rule of the early Church made liberal allowance for the copying of manuscripts, religious and profane. The men who wrote both roll and book, and to whose patience and devotion we owe so. much of our knowledge of the times gone by, were the monks themselves. The cloister was. the centre of life in the monastery, and in the cloister was the workshop of the patient scribe. In these scriptoria or writing rooms of various kinds the earliest annals and chronicles in the English and Gaelic tongues were penned, in the beautiful and painstaking forms in which we know ■ them. * v