Whispering Margins, Wailing Pages: Is There a Banshee in Kells?
#31daysofhalloween
Historians of Insular manuscripts have long emphasized the extraordinary synthesis of Mediterranean, Germanic, and Celtic visual languages in early medieval book art (ca. 650–850). Yet within that synthesis lies a persistent tonal register that feels, if not “ghostly” in a literal sense, distinctly liminal; pages that hover between text and creature, ornament and apparition, praise and dread.






Insular Gospel books rarely include the exuberant later Gothic menagerie of margins; nevertheless, their initials and frames sometimes sprout heads with gaping mouths, hair-like tendrils, and contorted grimaces (e.g., zoomorphic terminals in the Book of Kells, TCD MS 58, esp. Chi-Rho, fol. 34r). Read cautiously, such heads can be aligned with a visual rhetoric of cry rather than a literal “banshee.” On the page that explodes the monogram of Christ (XPI), Kells’ letter-limbs open into teeming creaturely mouths and tendrils whose “noise” is compositional (Meehan 82–97). The claim here is not that Kells pictures a bean sí but that it operationalizes a grammar of outcry in letters themselves. (Meehan) (Thames & Hudson)











For the broader medieval “shouting margin” (knights, snails, and shrieking grotesques) later English and French examples (not Insular) demonstrate a period taste for vocalized marginal drama (British Library blogs). These later motifs provide a foil against which Insular restraint appears deliberate and the “cry” is internalized into letter and line rather than acted as slapstick. (British Library, “Knight v Snail”; “Ludicrous Figures”)


Irish keening traditions documented in modern studies describe women lamenters (mná caointe) using vocalization, hair-touching/pulling, swaying, and hand gestures (McLaughlin; Williams Ó Laoire). When viewing Insular Entombment or Women at the Tomb scenes, it is methodologically cautious to avoid retrojecting later ethnography; yet gesture vocabularies (raised or clasped hands, torsion, veiling) were shared Christian signs of grief and can be placed in dialog with later Irish lament registers at the level of analogy. (McLaughlin; Williams Ó Laoire) (MDPI)


The Lindisfarne Gospels’ narrative miniatures (BL Cotton MS Nero D.IV) and their Insular framework situate such pathos within a page that itself performs intensification (fluttering interlace, crowded borders) producing what we might call a “visual keen” surrounding scenes of mourning. (British Library; Smarthistory, Lindisfarne Gospels)




Henderson’s classic synthesis underscored the Insular ornamental lexicon (spirals, triskeles, and interlace) as a transformed inheritance of late Celtic metalwork into Christian book art (Henderson 11–35). On pages like Kells’ Chi-Rho (fol. 34r) and the Book of Durrow (TCD MS 57), spirals often mark hinges or thresholds across which letter becomes creature and vice versa. It is methodologically sound to acknowledge that explicit “Otherworld portal” semantics are not stated by the manuscripts; nevertheless, the page’s thresholding behavior is demonstrable. (Henderson; Trinity College Dublin, Kells Chi-Rho)
Irish scholarship’s bilinguality leaves material traces; Old Irish glosses occasionally thread through Latin leaves, visually “speaking from the margins.” St. Gall, Stiftsbibliothek Cod. Sang. 904 (Priscian) preserves Old Irish glosses that literally interrupt and annotate a Latin grammatical authority (e-codices). “Haunting” is a metaphor, yet the visual fact of vernacular intrusions is secure; the page records a polyphony of learned voices. Comparative evidence from the Old English interlinear gloss to Lindisfarne likewise demonstrates how glossing overlays scriptural Latin with a local tongue (Fernández-Cuesta and Pons-Sanz, Old English Gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels).
Rudolf Otto’s formulation of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans offers a careful vocabulary for experiences that blend awe and dread; theologically saturated but not reducible to fear (Otto). The Kells Chi-Rho page is often read as the bursting-forth of the Incarnation in letterform; its dense, almost suffocating intricacy performs a sublime apparition on vellum that viewers describe as overwhelming (Meehan; Otto).





Raptors, corvids, serpents, and hybrids populate Insular pages as letter terminals and margin-creatures. Their meanings are polyvalent; scriptural exegesis, bestiary lore, and decorative flourish. Insular scholarship cautions against single-valence allegory, yet the persistent positioning of beaks and maws at textual thresholds (biting, swallowing, emitting) suggests transitional traffic; text crossing into image, and image into voiced utterance. Kells and Lindisfarne provide sustained corpora for such observation (Meehan; British Library, Lindisfarne).


Winged figures in Insular art are anchored in patristic angelology, not vernacular fairylore. Still, the formal overlap (invisible presences that mediate, guard, or terrify) permits a rhetoric of comparison if, and only if, carefully framed as heuristic. High-cross programs narrating judgment scenes, and book pages staging angelic bearers and evangelist symbols, situate those presences within an agreed Christian cosmology. For stone comparanda, the High Cross of Muiredach (Monasterboice) and Cross of the Scriptures (Clonmacnoise) supply monumental analogues of protection, judgment, and passage. (OPW Heritage Ireland, Monasterboice; Clonmacnoise)
Interlace in Insular pages generates a continuous, cyclical line with no acoustic register, yet a formal analogy can be made: as keening repeats and varies a limited motif, interlace repeats and varies a limited graphic phrase. The analogy is aesthetic, not historical. The numinous “overfullness” that Otto analyzes helps parse why such visual density can be experienced as both ravishing and unsettling (Otto).
Symbolic color readings must follow material analysis. Raman spectroscopy on the Lindisfarne Gospels identified a repertoire including orpiment (yellow), indigo/woad (blue), and verdigris/copper greens (Brown & Clark). Mark Clarke’s survey of Anglo-Saxon manuscript pigments emphasizes the stability, sourcing, and workshop practice behind these color choices rather than esoteric codes (Clarke). Any “spectral” reading of green fogs or indigo nights should therefore be signaled as interpretive overlay on top of firm pigment data.

“Biting borders,” devouring initials, and zoomorphic capitals, documented throughout Insular books (Kells, Durrow, Lindisfarne), literalize liminality. Henderson reads such devices within the continuum of Insular animal ornament; their jaws often coincide with letter joints, sewing graphic syntax to creaturely appetite (Henderson; Meehan).


Christian iconography of the Planctus Mariae and the Mulieres ad Sepulchrum intersects with Irish performance traditions only by analogy, but the shared repertoire (veils, raised hands, bowed heads) gives a common visual language of bereavement. Lindisfarne miniatures and associated Insular frames intensify that grief visually (BL; Smarthistory). Modern ethnography of keening details hair- and hand-gestures that help viewers notice, without collapsing difference,.how later Irish mourners performed grief. (BL; Smarthistory; McLaughlin; Williams Ó Laoire)
Insular scribes “raise” figures from knots, coaxing creatures out of letter-strokes. Kells (fol. 34r) is exemplary; letter-stems sprout beasts that in turn generate further script. The phenomenon is codicological, not occult; nevertheless, Christian claims for the Word’s life and efficacy grant theological warrant to the page’s animated surfaces (Meehan; Trinity College Dublin, Chi-Rho).


Medieval palimpsesting is well attested; the British Library provides accessible primers on erasures, corrections, and overwriting. Such traces produce literal “returns” of prior hands under ultraviolet or multispectral analysis; the past bleeding through as a scholarly, not supernatural, haunting. (British Library primers)

Insular folia most often leave parchment unpainted; yet scribe planners sculpt negative space, bays around initials, ink-saver corners, that read as nocturnes by contrast with saturated carpet pages. Benedictine night offices (Rule, ch. 8) contextualize monastic production in vigil hours; that temporal frame, not a specific “ghost hour,” is historically grounded. (Rule of St Benedict, ch. 8)



Miniature heads (bearded, veiled, or age-coded) dot Insular borders; any identification with the Cailleach (a later, rich Gaelic archetype) must remain heuristic. The safer claim is that age, gender, and otherness can be signaled at micro-scale in Insular frames, as Henderson catalogues.

Irish annals record portents (comets, prodigies). The CELT editions of the Annals of Ulster document celestial omens among other notices. Bringing such entries into dialogue with manuscript art does not prove intent; it merely situates Insular page-cultures within a wider ecology of omen-interpretation. (CELT, Annals of Ulster)





The Cathach (‘Battler’), a sixth-century psalter linked with Colum Cille, acquired a metal reliquary (cumdach) and was borne into battle as a talisman by the O’Donnells. This well-documented practice shows how books could be thought to “contain” power that spills into public space. (Royal Irish Academy, Cathach)
As a model, not a historical claim, we can map keening’s incantatory repetition and intensification onto Insular interlace and carpet pages, acknowledging different media but comparable formal logics of iteration. The analogy gains traction only where material studies (pigments, layout) are secure (Brown & Clark; Clarke).
Lindisfarne’s and Kells’ alphabets morph, bite, and coil. Henderson’s account of Insular animal interlace and Meehan’s page-by-page readings ground an argument that letters act out metamorphosis; alive at the boundary of sign and body.
Comparing stone and vellum clarifies shared rhetorics. Frames, medallions, and narrative bands on Muiredach’s Cross and Clonmacnoise’s Cross of the Scriptures echo page frames and canon tables in books; both are technologies for focusing the gaze toward judgment and deliverance. (OPW Heritage Ireland, Monasterboice; Clonmacnoise)




Insular hagiography consistently casts saints as boundary-walkers; the exorcism, miracle, and psychopompic repertoires. While specific episodes must be sourced case by case, the genre functions to police thresholds between visible and invisible orders that manuscripts also stage visually (British Library).



Carpet pages, canon-table arcades, and framed evangelist miniatures operate like ritual “circles,” containing visual energy. The effect is experiential; the claim is formal and is grounded in observed layout (Kells, Lindisfarne).









Beyond the Cathach, cumdachs and book-shrines attest to an Irish habit of treating books as power-objects. This does not make pages “magical” in an occult sense; it shows that visual splendor and ritual use co-inhabited early medieval Ireland. (Royal Irish Academy, Cathach)
Erasures, offsets, stitching holes, and parchment flaws can read as “specters,” but the responsible frame is codicology; signs of making, use, and repair. BL conservation primers and digitized interfaces help viewers see such traces, which scholars then narrate carefully.



The Benedictine Rule specifies nocturnal prayer schedules; monastic temporality is thus well attested (Rule, ch. 8). Any claim that scribes deliberately wrote at “ghostly hours” must be restrained; we can say with confidence that some manuscript labor sat within a lived rhythm of night office and vigil.
Readers of Insular pages commonly report being “drawn in and lost.” That phenomenology matches interlace’s labyrinthine paths. The labyrinth is not documentary subject matter. It is a structural analogy for prolonged contemplative looking; an attentional technology also legible in high-cross programs. (Henderson; OPW Heritage Ireland)


Where Insular books depict women (rarely e.g., Kells, fol. 7v, Virgin and Child), hair is generally controlled or veiled. Later Irish keening sources foreground hair touching and disarray as grief signs; that contrast helps articulate how Insular Christian decency codes shaped grief display in elite manuscripts. (FutureLearn/Trinity; McLaughlin; Williams Ó Laoire)
Majestas images and explosive monograms (Kells, Chi-Rho) effect sancta tremenda, holy dread, without horror. Otto’s terminology clarifies the experiential blend that medieval Christians sought in contemplation of divine power. (Otto; Meehan)
Pen trials, correction signs, and occasional apotropaic crosses register the pressure of copying Scripture; the “demon of error” is metaphor, but the documentary trace of anxiety is real. BL digitizations make those traces legible to non-specialists.
Nineteenth–twentieth century revivalists retrofitted medieval pages with folkloric banshees and fairies. Responsible reading distinguishes historical manuscript meanings from later nationalist or romantic overlays, while acknowledging that those overlays shaped modern reception. (Smarthistory; BL)
Insular manuscripts neither illustrate banshees nor enact folklore directly; they do, however, sustain a robust aesthetic of threshold; between letter and creature, ornament and voice, dread and delight. Lament analogies, omen frameworks, talismanic book-culture, and night-watch discipline provide securely documented contexts within which to read the uncanny force of Insular pages. By keeping technical studies (pigments, codicology) and verifiable references in view while deploying carefully bounded analogies (keening ↔️ interlace; theophany ↔️ tremendum), we can articulate how these books conjure the sensation of voices at the edge of sight; “whispering margins” in which the Word appears as both beauty and warning.
References:
British Library. Digitised Manuscripts and Archives: Gospel-book (Lindisfarne Gospels), Cotton MS Nero D IV. The British Library, n.d. Web. (British Library)
Knight v Snail. The British Library, 25 Sept. 2013. Web. (British Library)
Ludicrous Figures in the Margin. The British Library, 7 Aug. 2020. Web. (British Library)
Brown, Katherine L., and Robin J. H. Clark. The Lindisfarne Gospels and Two Other 8th-Century Anglo-Saxon/Insular Manuscripts: Pigment Identification by Raman Microscopy. Journal of Raman Spectroscopy 35.1 (2004): 4–12. DOI: 10.1002/jrs.1110. (Analytical Science Journals)
Clarke, Mark. Anglo-Saxon Manuscript Pigments. Studies in Conservation 49.4 (2004): 231–44. DOI: 10.1179/sic.2004.49.4.231.
e-codices: Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland. St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 904: Priscian with Old Irish Glosses. e-codices, n.d. Web.
Fernández-Cuesta, Julia, and Sara M. Pons-Sanz, eds. The Old English Gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016.
Henderson, George. From Durrow to Kells: The Insular Gospel-Books, 650–800. London: Thames & Hudson, 1987. (WorldCat record).
Heritage Ireland (OPW). Monasterboice. HeritageIreland.ie, n.d. Web. (Academia)
Clonmacnoise Monastic Site. HeritageIreland.ie, n.d. Web. (Heritage Ireland)
Lysaght, Patricia. The Banshee: The Irish Supernatural Death-Messenger. Dublin: O’Brien Press, 1996. Publisher page. (The O'Brien Press)
McLaughlin, Maureen. Keening the Dead: Ancient History or a Ritual for Today? Religions 10.4 (2019): 235. MDPI. Web. (MDPI)
Meehan, Bernard. The Book of Kells. London: Thames & Hudson, 2012. (Publisher page). (Thames & Hudson)
Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. Trans. John W. Harvey. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1923. Web (public domain PDF). (faculty.trinity.edu)
Royal Irish Academy. The Cathach / The Psalter of St Columba (RIA MS 12 R 33). ria.ie, n.d. Web. (RIA)
Smarthistory. Moss, Rachel. The Lindisfarne Gospels. Smarthistory, n.d. Web. (Smarthistory)
Smarthistory. Kilroy-Ewbank, Lauren, and Steven Zucker. The Book of Kells. Smarthistory, n.d. Web. (Smarthistory)
Trinity College Dublin / VisitTrinity. Symbolism in the Book of Kells: The Chi-Rho Page. visittrinity.ie (Official TCD visitor site), 13 Dec. 2024. Web. (Visit Trinity)
The Extraordinary Journey of the Book of Kells. visittrinity.ie, 17 Jan. 2025. Web. (Visit Trinity)
University College Cork, CELT Project. Annala Uladh: Annals of Ulster. CELT online editions, n.d. Web. (CELT)
Williams Ó Laoire, Síle. Vernacular Catholicism in Ireland: The Keening Woman. Religions 15.7 (2024): 879. MDPI. Web. (MDPI)
Rule of St Benedict. Chapter 8: Concerning the Divine Office at Night. (English text). Solesmes PDF; OSB archive index. Web. (Solesmes)


Amazing survey, as ever, thank you!