In the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, is preserved a very famous book, known as the Book of Kells, a monument of Irish learning and art in that period when Ireland most justly earned the glorious title of ‘Insula Sanctorum.’ One of the full-page illuminations which adorn that book represents a scene of the Temptation, in which Jesus is on the pinnacle and Satan is near. Such is the action represented: but besides the action the same picture conveys also a reflection or comment upon the action. Lower down, and more in the body of the building, there is a window at which is seen a majestic personage holding a sceptre in either hand, which leans and rests on either shoulder. At first sight the effect is quaint, bizarre, and puzzling; but a little attention makes all plain. It becomes clear that a contrast is intended between the humiliation and the triumph of the Christ; and perhaps also, by the association of ideas which the last two verses of St. Matthew’s Gospel have made familiar, to suggest the duty (zealously discharged by the early Irish Church) of missionary devotion. No one who has given time and thought to this picture can doubt that the two-sceptered figure is Christ. Here is no question of the pontiff of Rome. In the seventh century, to which the Book of Kells is assigned, the papal claims were not admitted, much less glorified, by those of the Scotian rite. Therefore the interpretation of that Irish picture is quite simple, and it represents the glorified Christ inhabiting his temple and looking out over his Church as Lord of heaven and earth[24].
Though we know only of a single extant copy of this picture, we may confidently assume that among the manifold activities of the monks and hermits and missionaries and pilgrims from Ireland it was multiplied and disseminated. It is (I think) impossible to compare our Figure of the ninth century with that of the seventh, without coming to the conclusion that the one is a descendant of the other. We need not be incredulous about the chance of Alfred’s being acquainted with Irish iconography. The narrative in the Chronicle (
. 891) of three Irish exiles who found their way to king Alfred, reflects a valuable light on his kindly relations with the learned and pious from the sister island. This connexion was neither new nor immature. When they found themselves ashore on the coast of Cornwall they set out ‘at once’—such is the effect of sona—for king Alfred[25].
Moreover, the Irish picture furnishes a welcome light upon an obscure detail of our enamelled Figure. How are the heads of the sceptres to be explained? Some have taken them for palms, and others for lilies, but the Irish drawing shows them rather as plumes. And this finds support in a singular passage of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. Speaking of Oswald the Bretwalda, Bede describes him as a prince who carefully upheld his imperial dignity, insomuch that, not only when he rode through his provinces did his standard go before him, but even when he walked forth in the streets he was always preceded by an apparitor bearing the Tufa, which (he adds) was in the vernacular called Tuuf. We learn from Du Cange that the Tufa was a wand with a head of plumes, and this is what we see in the sceptres of the Irish drawing. Sir Francis Palgrave divined that the Saxon Bretwaldadom had inherited this emblem of authority from the provincial dignitaries of the empire.
From these data the natural conclusion is that the Figure in this Jewel was derived from an Irish, and not from an Oriental, nor from any continental source. It was taken from an Irish symbolical drawing of Christ triumphant and reigning over his Church, and it was adapted by the king in a sense which his experience had made real and concrete and practical. As Chaucer was called ‘grand translateur,’ so we may call Alfred a grand adapter. Whoever has been drawn in to study both Alfred and Dante may have observed this in common to the two, that what they borrow they transfigure, their touch imparts to it the colour of their mind. King Alfred in early youth was tied by every thread of religious conviction and political interest and personal sentiment to the See of Rome, and he meant this Jewel to enshrine the frontispiece of his profession and the ensign of his creed ecclesiastical, political, and personal.
At the close of the former section I said that the conclusion there arrived at would be confirmed by another kind of evidence in the sequel. Up to that point the argument had run upon the technical aspects of our enamelled Figure, and these had seemed to indicate the British Isles as its native region. Since that stage our argument has turned upon the conception and pedigree of the device; and here again we find that an insular rather than a foreign source is indicated. Further evidence, pointing in the same direction, will be advanced before the close of the present chapter[26].
At the back of this Enamel there is a gold plate which serves the same purpose as a backboard to a picture, and it is secured by an overlapping undulating border of gold. In the Minster Lovel jewel this member consists of a blank gold plate, but in the Alfred Jewel this surface is occupied with an engraving which is certainly allegorical. At first sight it seems to be no more than a decorated pattern made upon the idea of a tree with branches and blossoms and fruit[27]. But upon closer inspection this tree appears to be a sword with its point buried in a human heart, and when this is discovered it becomes plain that the branches and blossoms must be allegorical.
A sword with its point planted in a human heart may mean compunction for sin and mortification of the natural man; it may also mean resignation in adversity to the overruling providence of God. Such a disposition of mind is productive of flowers and fruit, that is, of conduct which is beautiful and profitable, and (on great occasions) of action which is heroic. This mode of symbolical expression may be seen in the figure of St. Luke in St. Chad’s Book at Lichfield. The Evangelist holds in his right hand a pen, the feathery part of which branches out into flowers and fruit, to signify the fruitful nature of the writings of St. Luke[28].