Celtic knot
A pattern of bands woven over and under one another with no loose ends: the interlace of early medieval art in Ireland and Britain, best known from the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels. Its makers left no record of what, if anything, the knots meant. Readings such as eternity and unending love are modern.
Meaning
Celtic knotwork is interlace, one or more bands crossing over and under each other in strict alternation. J. Romilly Allen, in Celtic Art in Pagan and Christian Times (1904), wrote that in this art every cord laps under and over “with unfailing regularity (never over two or under two)”, and every cord is joined up so that no loose ends are left. Interlace was, he wrote, the predominant ornament of Celtic art of the Christian period: it lasted longer than any other motif and spread over a wider area. Art historians at Trinity College Dublin, which keeps the Book of Kells, describe Insular art, the art of Ireland from the 6th to the 12th centuries, as relying above all on repeated spirals, crossings in knotwork and maze-like fretwork. Today it is carved on monuments and gravestones, worked into Highland dress and jewellery, and tattooed. What it meant to its first makers is unknown. Stephen Walker, a maker of Celtic jewellery who wrote a series on knotwork for Dalriada Magazine, put it plainly in 2001: “We have absolutely no hard evidence that any such meaning were ever intended by the ancients, but this has not stopped modern designers from attributing such meanings.”
Origin and history
Interlace did not begin in Ireland. In Egyptian, Greek and Roman art, Allen wrote, the only kind of interlace was the plain plait. The step that made knotwork possible was the break: cutting the cords of a plait at intervals and joining them up again in a new order. He found no break in a plait on the Roman mosaic floors of Britain, nor on the plaitwork of the church of San Clemente in Rome (514–523), but true knotwork with secure dates in eighth-century Italy, on the ciborium of San Giorgio at Valpolicella (712) and the baptistery at Cividale (737). He traced the interlace of early Christian Britain to Italy, and through Italy to Byzantium. The only element he could trace to a native pagan source was the spiral. Sir Edward Sullivan, introducing his edition of the Book of Kells (second edition, 1920), put the immediate origin in the decoration of North Italy and southern Gaul of the second and third centuries, and wrote that it did not become widely popular in Irish art until the seventh century.
Allen did not think Ireland copied Italy wholesale. Dated Italian examples grow more elaborate as time goes on, so he argued that interlace spread through the whole of western Europe and developed everywhere at once, with constant traffic between Rome and the monasteries. Some peoples, he wrote, “like those in Great Britain, who appear to have had a special gift for inventing new patterns”, may have moved faster than their neighbours. He thought it “most unlikely” that Irish interlace came from the rough interlace on Saxon and Merovingian buckles. He thought interlace spread so widely partly because far more distinct patterns can be made from it than from any other kind of ornament.
The great examples are gospel books. The Lindisfarne Gospels, British Library Cotton MS Nero D IV, was made about 700, probably at the monastery of Lindisfarne; a colophon added in the 10th century names Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne, as its scribe. It has five carpet pages, at the openings of St Jerome's letter and of each gospel. The Book of Kells, Trinity College Dublin MS 58, was written close to the year 800. Most scholars now attribute it to the scriptorium of Iona, the library says, though Northumbria and Pictland have also been claimed. For Allen, its “wonderfully complicated and truly bewildering” interlace all goes back to whoever first thought of breaking a plait.
Did the knots mean anything?
No one knows, and the scholars who first described the art doubted it. Allen called early Christian art in Britain “essentially decorative, and to a lesser extent symbolic”. He allowed one case: many knot patterns are made by breaking a plait so as to leave a space in the shape of a cross, and he thought it “not unlikely that symbolism had something to do with the frequent use of the cruciform break.” Of the three-looped triquetra he wrote in 1903 that, apart from two carvings, it was purely ornamental. Walker found the same caution among art historians a century later: many state that interlace was used purely for decoration and that suggestions of symbolic intent are not supported by credible research.
Where “eternity” comes from
The usual modern answer, that a knot is an endless path and so stands for eternity or continuity, is one Walker calls “a standard answer to the meaning of knotwork question offered by many craftsmen and artists in recent times”. He traces it to the Scottish art teacher George Bain, whose Celtic Art: The Methods of Construction (1951) became the standard source book and made much of the single continuous path laid out in many old knotwork panels. From there it is a short step to the “circle of life” and to never-ending love, faith or loyalty. Many old knots are not one path, Walker points out, but several closed loops linked or woven together, and these are often called love knots. He did not dismiss the modern meanings. A meaning a present-day artist intends is valid in its own context, he argued, and the idea of continuity speaks to emigrants and their descendants who want to keep a tie to their heritage. What he objected to was the belief that the meanings come down from an ancient source.
The 19th-century revival
Knotwork came back into fashion in the 19th century. Walker dates the dawn of the Celtic Revival to the mid-1800s. In Ireland it began as an effort to restore pride in a distinct Irish culture, and the Book of Kells and the Tara Brooch were shown as evidence of a sophisticated early Irish society. The earliest revival monuments, he writes, are from the 1860s, and carving on monuments, often new high crosses (the Celtic cross), was and remains the most conspicuous use of Celtic design in Scotland and Ireland. The Victoria and Albert Museum dates a wider commercial interest in Celtic decoration to the 1880s in Ireland, after the discovery of the Tara Brooch and the Ardagh Chalice, helped by the Irish Exhibition in London in 1888 and the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. The London store Liberty & Co. sold Celtic designs, hundreds of them by Archibald Knox, a designer from the Isle of Man whose silver and pewter for Liberty used interlacing patterns and knotted forms.
The Celtic knot tattoo
There is no evidence of Celtic tattooing, the tattoo historian Anna Felicity Friedman told NPR in 2014. The Celtic knot tattoo seems to have begun on the American West Coast in the 1970s and 1980s, part of the trend for bold black geometric designs called blackwork, combined with a wish to mark European heritage. Tattoo parlours in Ireland told NPR that almost all the customers who ask for one are American.
See also
Triquetra, Celtic cross, Triskele, Endless knot.
Sources
- Celtic Art in Pagan and Christian Times, J. Romilly Allen (1904), via the Internet Archive, Chapter 7
- The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland, J. Romilly Allen and Joseph Anderson, 1903, Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (Internet Archive), Part II, p. 305
- The Book of Kells, Sir Edward Sullivan, 2nd edition, 1920, "The Studio" Ltd. (Internet Archive), Introduction
- The Book of Kells (Trinity College Dublin MS 58), The Library of Trinity College Dublin
- Manuscript art: the eye and the algorithm, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Trinity College Dublin
- Cotton MS Nero D IV: Gospel-book (‘Lindisfarne Gospels’), British Library Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue
- In Search of Meaning: Symbolism of Celtic Knotwork (part 4), Stephen Walker, 18 January 2001; published in Dalriada Magazine, Walker Metalsmiths (via the Internet Archive)
- Archibald Knox, Liberty and the Celtic Revival style, Victoria and Albert Museum
- The American Origins Of The Not-So-Traditional Celtic Knot Tattoo, Ari Shapiro, 25 November 2014, NPR
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Last reviewed October 1, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research