Medieval Monks Did What?

More than 1,000 years ago, Irish monks took precious manuscripts to the European continent to protect them from Viking raids and to spread Christianity and scholarship – a glow of culture in what would be called the dark ages.

The monks did not know if the books, which included religious scriptures, linguistic analysis, scribbled jokes and a collection of tomes described as the internet of the ancient world, would survive, or ever return.

A millennium later, fragments of that trove are for the first time finding their way back to Ireland.

Switzerland’s Abbey of Saint Gall has agreed to lend 17 manuscripts to the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin for a landmark exhibition that will combine artefacts and parchments to recreate a sense of Ireland’s golden age as the “land of saints and scholars”, when missionary monks established monasteries in what are today Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy.

“What we’re trying to do is to retrace those journeys and the world in which those manuscripts were produced,” said Matthew Seaver, who is curating the exhibition, titled Words on the Wave: Ireland and St Gallen in Early Medieval Europe. “These books are key to an understanding of ourselves, our language and our links with the continent. Their value and importance are difficult to overestimate.”

Ireland retained the Book of Kells, a masterpiece that is now displayed at Trinity College Dublin, but lost most of its ancient books to the Vikings and subsequent centuries of political turmoil, Seaver said. “That’s why today there are more Irish manuscripts in Britain and the continent than in Ireland.”

The exhibition, which coincides with challenges to international trade and European unity, is a reminder of economic, cultural and political ties that threaded the Atlantic to the Alps from the fifth century.

After much of Ireland converted to Christianity, its monasteries became centres of learning that produced and replicated academic and religious manuscripts, including the oldest surviving copy of Etymologiae, an encyclopedia of the origin of words that has been called antiquity’s internet.

Scribes who wrote a grammar book titled Priscian’s Institutiones Grammaticae recorded not only Latin language rules but, in the margins, scribbled comments about their daily lives. One admitted to being “ale-killed” – having a hangover. Some complained of the cold, others grumbled at their materials. “New parchment, bad ink. O I say nothing more.”

Another expressed hope that a storm would deter any Viking raid. “Bitter is the wind tonight, it tosses the ocean’s white hair: I fear not the coursing of a clear sea by the fierce heroes from Lothlend.”

Such comments showed the manuscripts were not just relics of scholarship, Seaver said. “They’re full of human voices, humour, frustration and resilience, offering us a rare and very real glimpse into the daily lives and personalities of early medieval Irish monks.”

Taking manuscripts to the continent was a response to the Viking threat and also part of a system of cultural exchange, said the curator. “It was a two-way street. From an early stage, Ireland was receiving books and scholars from the continent and Anglo-Saxon England.”

It is thought that ships that brought wine, oils, pottery and other wares from the continent took Irish monks in the other direction.

The most famous, Saint Columba, also known as Columbanus, established monasteries in the seventh century in the Frankish and Lombard kingdoms. One of his reputed disciples, Saint Gall, founded a hermitage that became an abbey in what is now the Swiss city of St Gallen.

The abbey library, now a Unesco world heritage site, has agreed to lend 17 manuscripts for the exhibition, which will run from 30 May to 24 October.

The National Museum of Ireland will display the books with more than 100 artefacts from its own collection, including the Lough Kinale Book Shrine, which is the earliest and largest known container for a sacred text. Discovered broken at the bottom of a Longford lake, it makes its public debut in the exhibition after years of conservation.