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The Influence of Viking Art on the Celtic Scribes

Around 830 AD the Viking Turgesis brought his ’great royal fleet’ of fair haired Norsemen to the north of Ireland and began to found colonies establishing at Dubh/Linn at the ford of Liffrey a stronghold from where they could plunder and bum the great monasteries, and kill the abbots and monks.

Aed Finnliath, the Irish High King, began to fight back and was successful in destroying the Norse strongholds in the north. The Vikings then moved to into the middle and southern Ireland ravaging churches and sanctuaries as they went, destroying and stealing precious reliquaries and books as they went. After 880 After constant pressure from the Irish the number of raids diminished and there was an uneasy peace in Ireland.

After the battle of Clontarf in 1014 when Brian Boru defeated the Vikings, and the power of the Norsemen in Ireland was at an end. a cultural revival in metalwork began, though its quality never matched the earlier work of the Armagh Chalice and Tara Brooch.. The new work had many influences including Scandinavian metalwork techniques and style and the beginnings of a true Romanesque art.

Despite the destructive power of the Vikings and the exodus of many of the Irish scribes to Europe to continue their work, the art of illumination continued in Ireland but in a much weaker form.

The twenty two gilt bronze bridle mounts found at Oseberg are the earliest remains of a Viking-art style and date from the late eighth century AD. As the ninth century progressed two new styles emerged which were both named after places in Scandinavia.

The first was the Borre style with its ring-chain decoration made up of a double ribbon, which was named after a rich find from barrow-burial at Borre in Vestfold, Norway.

In the late tenth early eleventh century the Mammen style developed from the Jelling style and sometimes it is difficult to tell them apart, but the fully developed Mammen style is easier to recognise because it has a more substantial animal than the Jelling beast and has the addition of plant tendrils. It takes its name from a silver inlaid axe found at Mammen in Jutland.

The Ringerike style grew from the Mammen ornament, it is more disciplined and the plant design had been expanded upon at the expense of the animals. This style became extremely popular with artists in Britain and Ireland and one of the finest examples can be seen in the churchyard of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

Liber Hymnorum

The craftsmen at Columban monastery of Kells were influenced by the Scandinavian styles and although it was alien to their own Irish tradition they soon adapted this new type ornament competently in their metalwork such as the Kells Crosier. It also found its way on to the pages of the scribes and the foliage influence can be seen clearly in the eleventh century Liber Hymnorum and the Rawlinson B502 of the twelfth century.

The second was the Jelling style named after a small silver cup found at a Danish burial- mound in Jelling, Jutland. It became popular in the late ninth until the late tenth century, and occasionally both the Borre style and Jelling style are found on the same objects.. The Jelling style was introduced in Britain by the Scandinavian settlers, who found an art form already based on highly stylised animals that went back to Germanic origins on memorial stones. The new settlers quickly adopted them for their own use drawing on the Anglo-Saxon traditions and their own style.

Viking art went through a continuous period of development that lead eventually to the Urnes style, which named after a masterpiece of decoration around the doorway of a small church at Urnes, in western Norway. The Umes influence marked the maturity of the revived art of metalworking in Ireland, its best-known piece the Cross of Cong dated by inscription to about 1123, as well as the shrine of St. Patrick’s Bell and the Lismore and Clonmacnois crosiers.

Legend tells us that the twelfth century Corpus Missal was found in an Irish bog though there is no evidence to tell us if it is fact or legend. Its twelfth century scribe introduces the Urnes style of decoration to the initials with emphasis given to the large ribbon bodies of the beasts in contrast to the thin network of snakes and sinuous lines.

Other books which have similar decoration to the Corpus Missal are the De Consolatione of Boetius and the Psalter (Galba).The location where these books were produced in Ireland is not known.