Send The Gospels Home

Date: 2003-05-17, Publication: The Guardian

St Cuthbert, renowned for his pursuit of simplicity and solitude, must be turning in his grave. More than 1200 years after Eadfrith, Bishop of Lindisfarne, produced a volume of illuminated gospels in his honour, they are sitting behind glass in the modern brick majesty of the British Library on London's congested Euston Road, 400 miles south of the tiny tranquil green island where they were created.
The Lindisfarne Gospels are the north-east's Elgin Marbles. The British Museum has owned the originals, first looted then sold, since its foundation in 1753. The British Library - which acquired them in 1973 - opened an exhibition on their history yesterday. When Eadfrith painted the famous "carpet pages", the north-east was the political and cultural powerhouse of Britain. Now, remote from the centre of influence and economically depressed, the region carries no political clout. Calls for the return of their treasure have led to a succession of promises from government ministers; these promises have never been kept.

Instead, Lindisfarne is being fobbed off with a fake. The library might like to imagine that the hermit saint would get some comfort from their gift this week of two state-of-the-art facsimiles, one to Durham Cathedral to rest by St Cuthbert's shrine, the other to the holy island of Lindisfarne itself. But a replica is not what the north-east needs; it wants the genuine gospels to be sent back home.

The gospels can't venture above the banks of the Tyne, say home county scholars, because only the British Library can afford the protection and security such a sacred text requires. But £46m (including over £33m Lottery money) was found to fund the Baltic contemporary arts centre at nearby Gateshead, where Anthony Gormley's Domain Field was unveiled this week. And perhaps Lindisfarne's modest heritage centre, a former B&B where the facsimile will be housed, could share in a fraction of the British Library's £88m annual budget.

Arguments that thousands would be denied access to the historic documents if they were so far from the capital also don't add up. The holy island attracts 1 million visitors a year, almost three times as many as British Library exhibitions. When the gospels were lent to Newcastle's Laing Art Gallery three years ago, almost 200,000 people queued to see them in just four months - double the number in the same period in London.

Nor is the north-east a place where only Geordies dare tread. You're as likely to be touring Lindisfarne's Lilliputian Lutyens castle with a coachload from Baltimore as from Berwick, and fellow guests at the B&B are more likely to be 10 vicars from Norway than ex-steelworkers from Sunderland.

Rightly, there's concern on the island that the arrival of the originals could lead to an invasion the size of the Viking raids. How could a 120-strong community cater for such a large number of gospel seekers? The islanders are used to turning their hand to almost anything. In such a small place, everyone's job doubles up: the chair of the island's development trust is the postman, and runs a tearoom.

The gospels could at least visit their ancestral seat, and find a permanent home in Durham Cathedral. Or perhaps they could continually tour a handful of selected venues in the north-east? They might even be loaned to London on rare occasions, although only after a thorough investigation as to their treatment - no corporate hospitality with canapés resting on their showcase, as happened with the Elgin marbles.

As always, the north-east has been courteous about its brutish southern neighbours, expressing thanks for facsimiles they wouldn't have been able to afford. But the British Library's generosity is not so selfless; while Durham and Lindisfarne have one copy each, the deal with the Swiss publishing company producing the facsimiles allows the library to retain a further four for its own use. The publishers are putting the remaining 900 on sale at £13,000 per copy. None of the profit will go to the region from which the gospels originated.

Durham Cathedral and Lindisfarne Priory Museum are among those bodies in the north-east which have gladly loaned valuable objects, including St Cuthbert's pectoral cross, to the British Library's new exhibition. The library should be as chivalrous, and let the Lindisfarne Gospels travel northwards once more to their spiritual home.

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