Abstract
If a viewer chooses to sit through the end credits of The Secret of Kells (Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey, 2009), she is rewarded with a rich voice reciting part of the ninth-century Irish poem, “Messe ocus Pangur Bán” in Old Irish. From the moment the white cat appears in the film in connection with the scribe and artist Brother Aiden, it is clear that this film is more than just a series of pretty pictures exquisitely rendered and influenced by “Celtic” art. It is deeply erudite as well as being thoroughly enjoyable. It is not an adaptation in the conventional sense: that is, there is no “original” or “base” textual work from which it draws its inspiration. Rather, The Secret of Kells is an adaptation of an aesthetic (that of early medieval Insular manuscript and metalwork) and an imagined historical epoch (that of the “Golden Age” of Irish civilization and art when it earned the title “Island of Saints and Scholars”) as filtered through a contemporary, multicultural collaborative group of artists, writers, and musicians. The result is an impressionistic, complex, and layered expression of medieval Ireland and the monastic scribal experience, as well as the long scholarly tradition that seeks to describe it, that is neither entirely fictional nor entirely factual; but is, arguably, entirely true.
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Notes
- 1.
See also Carnelia Garcia, “A Q & A with the Director of ‘The Secret of Kells’ Tomm Moore,” 14 April 2010, www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/34316/a-qa-with-the-secret-of-kells-director-tomm-moore.
- 2.
Burton places The Secret of Kells in her chapter devoted to Irish animation for obvious reasons, and it clearly belongs there. That said, it could easily deserve mention in her chapter entitled “Irish History and Trauma,” depicting as it does the Viking attacks.
- 3.
In comments clearly influenced by popular culture’s misconceptions about actual medieval culture, Barton remarks: “One of the most interesting aspects of this challenge was the filmmakers’ determination to exclude all but the most unavoidable mentions of Christianity, which was a startling omission in a country still identified by its religious adherence. […] The monks apparently spend little to no time in prayer and the Abbott is preoccupied with his fortifications. Instead, the film elevates craftsmanship and learning to the position of cultural identifiers” (54). For Ramey, this false binary leads to a complete misreading of the Abbot’s concerns and so obscures the larger issue he represents: “The absence of an overt reference to the Christian content of the manuscript has ramifications in the fictional world of the film where the abbot does not see the book as a Biblical text but rather as a pagan-tainted obsession with abstract art” (117–118). This interpretation does much violence to the character of the Abbot, whose concern is in reality the time spent working on the book that takes away from time that could be spent on his wall—he has absolutely no issue with the book’s visual aesthetic contents.
- 4.
Moore has said about the use of folklore in his films, “I believe there is a strong underpinning in folklore that connects us to the past generations who retold these stories orally, and that the old stories contain links to our culture, to the past, and to universal truths” (quoted in Meltz and Dentz, “Illuminated Animation”).
- 5.
The Viking raids on various monasteries, as well as specific references to Kells, can be found in the Annals of Tigernach, the Annals of the Four Masters, the Annals of Loch Cé, as well as the Annals of Ulster.
- 6.
The first full-color complete facsimile of the Book of Kells was not produced until 1990. See Peter Fox “Introduction.”
- 7.
It should also be noted that the angular black devil which hovers near the church on the “Temptation” page makes a cameo appearance in the film when the brothers are discussing the mythology which is already growing up around Columcille and his abilities as an artist and scribe in producing the book that Brother Aiden is hoping to finish. The multiple ways in which the film creates imagined mythologies and then intertwines them with existing bodies of lore about its characters is yet another way The Secret of Kells engages with the narratives Ireland has generated about itself.
- 8.
The name Crom Cruach can also mean “the Crooked One,” and although Massey does not mention this possible meaning, I would like to do so as in its invocation of crookedness it is another connection to the angular visual representations that this entity and all it represents is given in the film.
- 9.
“Because the visual dimension of the Book of Kells is so strong and the text, being in Latin, largely inaccessible to many viewers, the aesthetics of the book dominate the collective imagination as they reach back to the early Irish-Christian monastic era. Pulliam notes perceptively that ‘perhaps the most unique feature of the Book of Kells is the manner in which the imagery repeatedly invades the territorial domain of text.’ This has happened in both the cultural and religious reception of the book. The aesthetics of the Book of Kells have become—through both genuine, popular-cultural evolution and marketing manipulation—a portal which promises entry to the timeless compounds of ancient Celtic consciousness” (Dillon 310).
- 10.
As Dillon remarks, this polyvalent aesthetic “looks set to prevail into the future. From handmade craft work [sic], to kitsch and political art…the ability of the Book of Kells to inspire artists of every ilk and medium endures undimmed” (311).
- 11.
Interestingly, not only will the film become part of the continuum of Irish visual identity, but the products of the process of making it have now been, in a way, canonized through their preservation in the archives of Trinity College: “When [Bernard] Meehan learned the drawings from The Secret of Kells were going to be destroyed and the paper recycled, the archivist offered to house them in Trinity College, where they’ll be preserved. In a few years, or a few centuries, the 21st century drawings and the 8th century manuscript that inspired them may inspire future practitioners of the arts of animation and draftsmanship” (Solomon, “Foreword”).
Works Cited
The Secret of Kells. Created and directed by Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey. Produced by Cartoon Saloon, 2009. http://www.cartoonsaloon.ie/work/the-secret-of-kells-animated-feature-film/.
Allers, Roger. “Afterword.” In Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart. Designing The Secret of Kells. Korea: Cartoon Saloon, 2014.
Barton, Ruth. Irish Cinema in the Twenty-First Century. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2019.
Dillon, Amanda. “The Book of Kells and the Visual Identity of Ireland.” In Bradford A. Anderson and Jonathan Kearney, eds. Ireland and the Reception of the Bible: Social and Cultural Perspectives. London and New York: T & T Clark, 2018, pp. 295–312.
Eco, Umberto. Oscar Ratti, trans. “Foreward.” The Book of Kells: Trinity College MS 58/ Kommentar. Luzern: Faksimile Verlag Luzern, 1990, 11–16.
Flower, Robin. Poems and Translations. London: Constable and Co., Ltd., 1931.
Fox, Peter. “Introduction.” The Book of Kells: Trinity College MS 58/ Kommentar. Luzern: Faksimile Verlag Luzern, 1990, 17–21.
Massey, Eithne. The Secret of Kells: The Novel. Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 2009.
Mac Niocaill, Gearóid. “The Background to the Book of Kells.” The Book of Kells: Trinity College MS 58/ Kommentar. Luzern: Faksimile Verlag Luzern, 1990, 27–33.
Meehan, Bernard, “Afterword.” In Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart. Designing The Secret of Kells. Korea: Cartoon Saloon, 2014.
Meltz, Nathan and Shira Dentz, “Illuminated Animation: An Interview with Tomm Moore,” Tarpaulin Sky Press, 1 February 2016, https://tskymag.com/2016/02/tomm-moore-2/.
O’Brien, Maria. “The Secret of Kells, a Film for a Post Celtic Tiger?” Animation Studies 6 (2011).
Ramey, Lynn. “Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and New Media in The Secret of Kells (Moore 2009).’ Medieval Perspectives 29 (2014).
Ryzik, Melena. “An Indie Takes on Animation’s Big Boys,” New York Times 3 March 2010.
Scott, A.O. “Outside the Abbey’s Fortified Walls, a World of Fairy Girls and Beasts,” New York Times, 5 March 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/movies/05secret.html.
Solomon, Charles. “Foreword.” In Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart. Designing The Secret of Kells. Korea: Cartoon Saloon, 2014.
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Buchelt, L.C. (2022). “One Beetle Recognizes Another”: Translation, Transformation, Transgression in Cartoon Saloon’s Film The Secret of Kells. In: Conner, M.C., Grossman, J., Palmer, R.B. (eds) Screening Contemporary Irish Fiction and Drama. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04568-4_7
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