The Fury Of The Norsemen

From the fury of the Norsemen, O Lord deliver us. An old Irish prayer dating back from when the vikings were invading Ireland starting around the year 795. Now, there's no hint that the Norsemen had anything to do with this particular find, but the timing seems about right. And it would have been likely that someone would have tried to hide valuables if the Norsemen were coming. A worker digging in a bog in Ireland spotted something just beyond his backhoe bucket. He stopped and looked and discover a book of psalms, dating from somewhere between 800 and 1000 AD.

The approximately 20-page book has been dated to the years 800-1000. Trinity College manuscripts expert Bernard Meehan said it was the first discovery of an Irish early medieval document in two centuries.

"This is really a miracle find," said Pat Wallace, director of the National Museum of Ireland, which has the book stored in refrigeration and facing years of painstaking analysis before being put on public display.

"There's two sets of odds that make this discovery really way out. First of all, it's unlikely that something this fragile could survive buried in a bog at all, and then for it to be unearthed and spotted before it was destroyed is incalculably more amazing."

He said an engineer was digging up bogland last week to create commercial potting soil somewhere in Ireland's midlands when, "just beyond the bucket of his bulldozer, he spotted something." Wallace would not specify where the book was found because a team of archaeologists is still exploring the site.

"The owner of the bog has had dealings with us in past and is very much in favor of archaeological discovery and reporting it," Wallace said.

Crucially, he said, the bog owner covered up the book with damp soil. Had it been left exposed overnight, he said, "it could have dried out and just vanished, blown away."

The really ironic thing? The book was open to a certain page:

The book was found open to a page describing, in Latin script, Psalm 83, in which God hears complaints of other nations' attempts to wipe out the name of Israel.