Celtic symbols

Older than the name

The spirals are far older than anything called Celtic. A large triple spiral is cut into the entrance stone of Newgrange, one of the passage tombs of Brú na Bóinne in a bend of the River Boyne, which the Office of Public Works says were built about 3200 BC. The Iron Age art once called Celtic is now more properly called La Tène art, Museum Wales says, used across Europe from the late 5th century BC, and experts no longer tie it to one Celtic people. One of its finest pieces in Britain, a bronze plaque from Llyn Cerrig Bach of 200 BCE to 50 CE, has a triskele hammered up from the back.

Knotwork is younger. J. Romilly Allen, in Celtic Art in Pagan and Christian Times (1904), found true knotwork with secure dates in eighth-century Italy and traced the interlace of early Christian Britain to Italy and, through it, to Byzantium. Art historians at Trinity College Dublin say the Insular art of Ireland, from the 6th to the 12th centuries, relies above all on repeated spirals, crossings in knotwork and maze-like fretwork. Its gospel books include the Lindisfarne Gospels, made about 700, and the Book of Kells, written close to the year 800.

What the knots meant

Nobody knows. Allen called early Christian art in Britain “essentially decorative, and to a lesser extent symbolic”. Stephen Walker, a maker of Celtic jewellery, wrote in 2001 that there is no hard evidence the ancients intended any meaning, and traced the usual modern answer, that a knot is an endless path and so stands for eternity, to George Bain’s Celtic Art: The Methods of Construction (1951). Knotwork came back into fashion with the Celtic Revival: Walker dates the earliest revival monuments to the 1860s, and the Victoria and Albert Museum dates a wider commercial interest in Celtic decoration to the 1880s. The Celtic knot tattoo, the tattoo historian Anna Felicity Friedman told NPR in 2014, seems to have begun on the American West Coast in the 1970s and 1980s.

Three legs and three strands

The three legs of the Isle of Man appear to have been adopted in the 13th century as the royal arms of the kings of Man, Manx National Heritage says, and one suggestion is that they adapt the triskele on the coins of Analaf Cuaran, a 10th-century Norse king whose lands included Dublin and Man. In Ireland the Irish Hospice Foundation’s End-of-Life Symbol is a three-stranded spiral, “inspired by ancient Irish history”, whose strands stand for the cycle of birth, life and death.