» HISTORY OF IRELAND
as Russia. While the blade may have been imported, the hilt and pommel were made in Scandinavia. This one is particularly fi ne, decorated with hammered silver and carefully inscribed with lettering and abstract patterns. There is little doubt that this is a very high-status object that came to Ireland with the Vikings. What is fascinating is where the sword
was found in 1928: on the site of a crannóg, or lake dwelling, at Ballinderry, near Moate, Co Westmeath. It was found with other Viking objects—a longbow, two spearheads, an axehead and a gaming board—but a crannóg is a distinctively Irish form of dwelling. ‘Crannógs are such an Irish type’, says Andy Halpin of the National Museum, ‘that it is very hard to believe this was a Viking site. So the best interpretation is that you are looking at an Irish chieftain or petty king who is wealthy enough to equip himself with the best of weaponry’.”
40. SILVER CONE, MID-TENTH CENTURY
“‘When I look at this’, says Andy Halpin of the National Museum, ‘the fi rst question that comes to my mind is, How do you make it? From a technological point of view, it is an extraordinary thing’. There are three separate interwoven bands of silver, each composed of between fi fteen and eighteen wires. Yet, Halpin says, it is very hard to fi nd where any of these wires ends. The visual effect is that of a single thread turning endlessly around itself. There are traces of some kind of organic material inside the cone, possibly a wax shape around which the wires were woven. The visual imagination and the physical deftness required to do so are of the highest order. This cone is one of the largest of a
group of eighteen found in 1999 in the limestone cave at Dunmore, just north of Kilkenny city. The larger cones like the one pictured are unique objects, but the smaller ones in the hoard have parallels
in Viking burials on the Isle of Man and Iceland. What we may have, then, is a development in Ireland of a general Norse form. The possibility that the cones were made in Dublin points to a very high level of distinctive craftsmanship in the new town by the mid-tenth century. A border of silver wire to which they
seem originally to have been attached was found with the cones. More exciting was a small, unpromising-looking remnant of textile that turned out to be very fi ne silk. It seems that this was an elaborate silk garment with a silver wire border and cones that functioned either as tassels or as buttons. The silk itself may have been more valuable than all the silver put together.”
44. CROSS OF CONG, EARLY-TWELFTH CENTURY
“This exquisite cross, which in the late-nineteenth century was in the possession of Fr Prendergast, the last abbot of Cong, Co Mayo, was made c.1123, in Roscommon, probably for the diocescan centre of Tuam. The work is of the highest order: a core of oak, a large rock crystal, an elaborate mount and a fl ange decorated with gold fi ligree, niello (a deep- black mixture of metals) and blue and white glass studs. The cross chimes with other objects, such as the shrine of St Patrick’s Bell, the high crosses of Kilfenora and Dysert O’Dea and the sarcophagus at Cormac’s Chapel in Cashel, as expressions of a post-Viking Irish culture. All are heavily infl uenced by Hiberno-Norse design, in this case the so-called Urnes motifs (named after a site in Norway) of S-shaped animals interwoven with threadlike snakes. The cross is a typically eclectic object.
The head of the beast that grips the base has been compared to German Romanesque models. At the same time, this is a culmination of a long tradition of Irish ecclesiastical metalwork. Dr Pat Wallace, former director of the National Museum, has described it as ‘both the last and one of the fi nest artistic efforts
76 INNOVATION IRELAND REVIEW Issue 7 Autumn/Winter 2013
of our entire Early Christian period’. The cross’s signifi cance, however, goes
beyond its artistic beauty. It can be seen as a weapon in the endless struggle for overlordship in Ireland. This is not just a crucifi x for church worship; it is a shrine designed for the public display in procession of the most prestigious of mediaeval relics: an alleged fragment of the True Cross on which Christ was crucifi ed, originally contained behind the central crystal.”
56. BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, 1551
“This object is the fi rst book printed in
Ireland and, as such, marks the island’s rather belated acquisition of one of the defi ning features of modernity. The revolutionary process of printing on a press with moveable type had been pioneered by
Johannes Gutenberg in Germany almost exactly a century earlier. The delay in catching up with this new technology says much about Ireland’s absence from the mainstream of the Renaissance, but if the advent of the fi rst printed book brings a key aspect of modernity to Ireland, that modernity arrives in a form that is unwelcome to a substantial
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