Iona, Scotland, 800AD

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 455.

Here in the west, we went through the dark ages where rules and laws of the Roman Empire were distant memory. Christian community is like the monks_______ isle of Iona lived in real fear with Viking raids. But here they were also free to use their Celtic traditions, to create the greatest work of art___________ of the British Isles-the Book of Kells.

If I say this is a book to die for people probably did die for it. Hiding it, finally escaping with it. One can imagine a little boat______ and some monks`re sitting there with the Book of Kells close to his breast, one of the few survivors who are to live to take the precious book back to the Irish mainland, and even there it wasn't safe, because about 200 years later somebody stole the book, not a less for the book itself because it was probably unilateral________but for the wonderful ______________stay for some months until happily it was found_____________double_______and then the worst came because___________it was likely smaller and cut bits off, here you can see. This`s extraordinary page of St.John. The________shows in the tragedy that this is a real St.John because around the corners are sticking parts of another body: hands and feet and at the top cut off_____________creatures, name I will not reveal__________ whose this body is. Is that God the father embracing St.John, embracing the world? Or is this sort of fiction? Is this ______on the cross and St.John as it were makes the cross in the middle. Or is it nothing of this? Is this just Celtic imagination______we don't know because it has been destroyed and things were written in the book, business transactions of the monastery and people signed their names. It's one of the ________that something so wonderful and precious has survived.