Celtic Wing · The craft of the page

The Reader's Aids

Ninth – seventeenth centuries

Birds in the margin · lines under wing · hands that point

At the bottom of a page in the Book of Ballymote, a scribe carried words that would not fit down into the margin and enclosed them in a creature. Beak, eye, folded wing: the leftover text held inside the animal so that a person reading the page would know where it belonged.

He was not merely decorating. He was helping. The creature means: this belongs up there.

Irish scribes used such devices for centuries. Birds and cats, dogs and hares, gloved hands and pointing fingers formed a visual vocabulary for the person bent over the page. Modern scholarship calls them reader's aids. They are the closest thing the manuscript has to an interface: images made to keep attention from losing the thread.

The practice at a glance

The page's working vocabulary

The three devices

1. The lower margin

An extracolumnar run-over begins with a practical problem. A scribe reaches the bottom of a column with a few words left in the sentence, but wants the next sentence or section to begin cleanly in the next column. The remaining words go below. A mark tells the reader that this marginal text continues the line above rather than introducing a stray note.

The commonest marks are quick abstract forms: brackets and inverted pyramids, sometimes extended with scrolls or color. Other scribes used the whole lower margin. The Book of Ballymote supplies the famous dog whose body and long tail are made from a natural hole in the vellum; elsewhere in the same manuscript a differently drawn dog turns at an angle so that its long tongue can fill the end of a line. The flaw in the skin and the blank on the page both become material for the same craft: making the intended route through the text visible.

Book of Ballymote · f.256rb · ISOS fig. 24

The dog in the vellum

A small natural hole supplies the creature's body and extended tail; the animal marks the carried text.

View fig. 24 in the ISOS exhibition ↗

Book of Ballymote · f.107rc · ISOS fig. 28

A hare below the column

One member of the manuscript's lower-margin menagerie, doing a reader's job rather than filling an empty space.

View the zoomorphic sequence at ISOS ↗

2. Between the lines

Intracolumnar run-overs solve a smaller problem. Words are carried into the open space on the line above or below, inside the column itself. Height constrains the mark, so scribes usually reach for a stock sign that can be drawn quickly between rows of script: dots, crosses, trefoils, triangles, little faces, and abstract knots. The device saves space only because its meaning is understood.

Kells is the extravagant exception. On f.71v a run-over from Matthew 14:16 is flagged by a cat-shaped symbol. Even in a codex famous for pages that seem to open into whole worlds, this small animal remains an instruction. Its first obligation is to show how the words move.

Book of Kells · f.71v · Matthew 14:16 · ISOS fig. 48

The cat between the lines

The most ornate tradition still performs the most ordinary service: carrying the reader to the displaced words.

View fig. 48 in the ISOS exhibition ↗

NLI G 3 · f.13v · ISOS fig. 49

Four or five dots

A distinctive compact mark repeats through NLI G 2/3, serving as both run-over symbol and line filler.

View fig. 49 in the ISOS exhibition ↗

3. The pointing hand

A manicule is a little hand whose forefinger directs the eye toward a passage. Isidore of Seville had already called the index finger demonstratorius, the pointer, in the seventh century. Irish readers used the form sparingly compared with readers elsewhere in Europe, but the surviving examples show the same range of motives: an annalist singles out a date, a corrector marks a repair, a reader identifies what must not be missed.

Not every hand is a manicule. The ornately cuffed hands in the Book of Ballymote are anthropomorphic run-over symbols: their job is to enclose displaced words. A true manicule points at something. Two of the best point at complaints about writing equipment. Sighraidh Ua Maíl Chonaire marked the admission that he had written with bad materials; an unnamed scribe in NLI G 7 drew a hand holding a pen beside the judgment that Ó Cenndubháin's thick pen was bad.

Book of Ballymote · f.50ra · ISOS fig. 34

A gloved hand — but not a manicule

The cuffed hand encloses a run-over. Its resemblance to a pointer makes the difference in function worth seeing.

Compare the hand-shaped run-overs at ISOS ↗

Bodleian Laud 610 · f.91r; NLI G 7 · col. 21

Two hands point at bad tools

A restoration done with poor materials and a complaint about a thick pen are each made findable by a drawn hand.

View figs. 78–79 in the ISOS exhibition ↗

Head under wing

Modern scholarship calls the intracolumnar run-over a ceann fa eite: “head under wing.” It carries words into spare space on the line above. The accompanying mark tells a reader where those words belong. No contemporary evidence shows that the scribes themselves used this name.

Eight centuries of reduction

The long descent

Zoomorphic run-over symbols tend over time toward simpler, more abstract forms, perhaps — ISOS keeps the qualification — because later scribes and patrons had fewer artistic and material resources available.

Eighth–ninth century · Book of Kells

Creature as miniature illumination

Color, interlace, and animal form compressed into the space needed to redirect a line.

View the Kells animals at ISOS ↗

Late fourteenth century · Book of Ballymote

Creature as working outline

The body remains legible, but the animal is increasingly made from the line it manages.

View the Ballymote sequence at ISOS ↗

Later manuscript practice

Stock mark

Brackets, dots, pyramids, and compact abstract signs preserve the function with little expenditure of space or pigment.

View the abstract forms at ISOS ↗

From the practice to the inheritance

Two books

The family's book · RIA MS 24 P 25

Leabhar Chlainne Suibhne

Vellum, eighty surviving folios. Ciothruadh Mág Fhionngoill of Tory Island wrote fols. 1–65 in 1513–14 for Máire Ní Mháille, wife of Ruaidhrí Mac Suibhne Fánad. That first portion is devotional prose: the family's Book of Piety. Later hands added the history of Clann tSuibhne, a family duanaire, and genealogical material.

The Academy acquired it with the Reeves collection in 1892. ISOS has carried the whole manuscript online since 2003. Its catalogue records decorative initials, including silver paint that has sunk through the vellum and damaged text: embellishment with a material cost still visible in the book.

Enter the family's book →

The tale's book · RIA MS B iv 1

Ó Duibhgeannáin's Book

Paper, 494 pages, chiefly tales and verse. Dáibhí Ó Duibhgeannáin of County Sligo wrote across a long span; dated entries in the manuscript include 1671, 1672, 1675, and 1684. Buile Suibhne stands at fols. 82r–95v. It is O'Keeffe's B manuscript and the base text of his 1913 edition.

ISOS added the manuscript in May 2026. The red interlaced capital used to announce it is on f.55v, well before the tale. The Buile Suibhne leaves themselves are austere: plain ruled marginal continuations and a small boxed diagram appear, but ISOS indexes no ornamental reader's aids there, and there is no colored bird to borrow from another section of the book.

Enter the tale's manuscript history →

RIA MS B iv 1 · fols. 82r–95v

The undecorated witness

Open the manuscript and inspect the tale itself. Its restraint is evidence, not a gap to be filled with an image from f.55v.

Open B iv 1 at ISOS ↗

The other end of the room

Gospel books such as Kells and Lindisfarne stand at the lavish end of manuscript practice: books made in glory, capable of serving as objects of devotion as well as texts. Yet Kells uses the same family of run-over devices found in working books. Its makers still had to tell a reader where a displaced line went.

That is the hard link between the altar codex and the later paper manuscript. Why Gospel books are venerated rather than merely read belongs to another study. Here it is enough to notice that magnificence never abolished the need for directions.

Where to look yourself

The exhibition

Irish Script on Screen

Read McLaughlin's illustrated guide, then use Refine your search → Ornamental reader's aids to filter by run-over symbols, manicules, and reference marks.

The term

CODECS

The manuscript and terminology record for ceann faoi eite, with links outward into Celtic-studies resources.

The scholarship

The Ériu articles

Begin with the 2021 study, then read the 2024 further observations. Together they are the spine of this page.

The printed tale

O'Keeffe, 1913

The public-domain edition based on B iv 1, with Irish and English facing and the manuscript sigla kept visible.

Paths from this page

Sources and image terms

The two studies that establish the vocabulary, the manuscript records checked for this page, and the rights terms that govern every proposed crop.

  1. Roisin McLaughlin, “Ornamental Reader's Aids,” Irish Script on Screen, School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. The principal orientation for the types, functions, manuscript examples, and image references used on this page.
  2. Roisin McLaughlin, “Text run-over imagery and reader's aids in Irish manuscripts,” Ériu 71 (2021), 69–115.
  3. Roisin McLaughlin, “Further observations on reader's aids in Irish manuscripts,” Ériu 74 (2024), 113–125.
  4. CODECS, “ceann faoi eite,” Online Database and e-Resources for Celtic Studies. The database headword uses faoi; the ISOS exhibition uses the conventional phrase ceann fa eite in its prose.
  5. Irish Script on Screen, RIA MS 24 P 25, Leabhar Chlainne Suibhne.
  6. Irish Script on Screen, RIA MS B iv 1, “Ó Duibhgeannáin's Book.” The catalogue dates within the manuscript include 1671, 1672, 1675, and 1684; Buile Suibhne occupies fols. 82r–95v.
  7. Royal Irish Academy, “A manuscript of Early Modern Irish poetry and prose … newly added to Irish Script on Screen,” 26 May 2026. The RIA announcement illustrates the rubricated capital on f.55v; that folio is outside the Buile Suibhne section.
  8. J. G. O'Keeffe, ed. and trans., Buile Suibhne (The Frenzy of Suibhne), Irish Texts Society 12 (London, 1913). Public-domain edition, with Irish and English on facing pages; B iv 1 is O'Keeffe's B manuscript and base text.
  9. Irish Script on Screen, “Copyright.” ISOS images are restricted to private study and may not be duplicated without express permission from the copyright holders.