Over a millennium ago, Irish monks safeguarded precious manuscripts from Viking raids, playing a crucial role in preserving knowledge and spreading Christianity during a time often termed the dark ages. These manuscripts are now returning to Ireland for the first time through a landmark exhibition at the National Museum of Ireland, featuring 17 loaned texts from Switzerland’s Abbey of Saint Gall. This exhibition attempts to recreate Ireland's golden age of saints and scholars, emphasizing the manuscripts' significance in understanding the nation's historical ties to Europe.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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