Two small letters settle a question the experts have spent a century complicating. It is not the Book of Iona. It is not the Book of Trinity. It is the Book of Kells.
In English, "of" tells you where something belongs and where it comes from. A man of Meath was born and reared in Meath. The Rock of Cashel stands in Cashel. The Book of Kells is the Book of Kells because Kells is where it lived, where it was treasured, and where its story was written into its own pages.
That isn't guesswork. The oldest written record of the Book is the Annals of Ulster for 1007. It records the theft of "the great Gospel of Colum Cille" from the western sacristy of the great stone church of Cenannas, the Irish name for Kells. It was the most precious thing the town had. When it was found months later, stripped of its gold cover, it came home to Kells.
The Book itself tells the same story. Monks of Kells copied the town's own land charters into its blank pages. These were deeds and agreements about Kells property. You don't write your town's deeds into a book that belongs somewhere else. You write them into the book that is yours.
It stayed in Kells for centuries, until it was sent to Dublin in the 1650s for safekeeping during war. Safekeeping means minding something until it can go home. It was never a gift, and it was never a sale.
Scholars like to say the question is complicated. Was it started on Iona? Finished in Kells? Both? But the people who made it, used it, guarded it and wrote their lives into it gave it one home, and history gave it one name. Nobody calls it the Book of Iona. Nobody calls it the Book of Dublin. Even Trinity sells tickets to the Book of Kells.
The name has always told the truth, and the Book belongs home in Kells.