Browse by time · century

8th century

701 – 800

Showing 11 works across all media from the 8th century

Book of Kells
Illuminated manuscript · Insular

Book of Kells

Artist unknown
800 · Trinity College Library, Dublin

The monogram of Christ swells until it fills the page, and among the spirals hide cats, mice, an otter with a fish, and a moth.

★ 8.8
Fiction · Epic

The Tain Bo Cuailnge

Author unknown
750 · 256 pages

Seventeen years old, Cu Chulainn holds the fords against the army Medb of Connacht raised to steal a bull, with Ulster's warriors paralyzed by birth pangs. Yeats built a national mythology on him.

★ 6.6
Fiction · Lyric poetry

Cold Mountain Poems

Hanshan
800 · 256 pages

A recluse calling himself Cold Mountain scratched more than three hundred poems onto rocks in Tang China, plain about hunger, cold, and the folly of ambition. Kerouac dedicated The Dharma Bums to him.

★ 6.6
Historical literature

The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail ahead; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant.

Venerable Bede
Ecclesiastical History of the English People · 731
★ 2.0