Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne Monastery
Some of the marauders are returning to the boats with blood on their swords and laden with the booty they’ve stolen. No one from the monastery is chasing them.
Gunnar knows my Christian nature and he chooses me to help in opening what might be Christianity’s greatest treasure, since it was placed as the centerpiece of the elevated table in the main oratorio. But it is no chest of jewels as they hoped for when they carried the heavy thing off. It is a beautiful book in a jeweled binding.
The marauders and slaves crowd around as I open it before us all on the sands of the beach. I open from the back of the book, at the end of the fourth gospel, where Jesus is on the beach amid the boats pulled onto the shore, asking Peter, “do you love me?” [John 21:15] Opening from the back, I turned first to these pages in John hoping to catch sight of the dialogue on the beach. This gospel was copied into the language of the Romans so I find myself translating the words into the Norse language I barely know. There seems an annoyed sense of disillusionment among these Vikings in finding no jewels inside, but here, instead, these written pages.
And it surely makes no sense to these marauders that the human-God shape-changer who is the subject of these gospels would end, not with a proclamation of victory, but with a begging for an affirmation of love. Instead of orders for retribution, Jesus orders the feeding of his lambs.
I flip the pages from back to front, pondering the details of the artwork. From end to beginning, it is ever more brilliant — full pages of color and miniscule decoration – beasts and birds, spirals and leaves, all good things of nature, monsters, dogs and cats, inked in the style these Norsemen recognize as their own.
This is an odd wealth for these who would steal riches of gold and silver. It is the human response to nature with art and imagination they already know well.
Turn back, again, each page nearly to the front, and here it is in Matthew 1:18, right at the first shape change story, the Incarnation, [Footnote] when the holy became a human infant, now with the murdering horde looking down on this page in awe. All spread out on the page like a great living form, are the Greek letters, “Chi Rho.”
[Footnote] Eleanor Jackson adds text to the picture book The Lindisfarne Gospels, Art, History and inspiration, The British Library guide, “With their apparent ability to metamorphose, expand, contract, progress and interact, the letters seem to be living beings, reminiscent of the interlaced and contorted creatures that are so prominent to the decoration.” (p,59)
(Continues Tuesday, June 17)
Lazarus Ink 