1200 year-old Irish manuscript restored, from crumbling pages and scattered letters

[Chip]

Not sure where to post this, but it does attest to the power of the pen (and ink) to withstand the ravages of time.

"One summer’s day in Tipperary as peat was being dug from a bog, a button peered out from the freshly cut earth. The find set off a five-year journey of conservation to retrieve and preserve what lay beyond: a 1,200-year-old psalm book in its original cover.

Bogs across Europe have thrown up all sorts of relics of the ancient past, from naturally preserved bodies to vessels containing butter more than a millennium old, but the 2006 discovery of an entire early medieval manuscript, entombed in a wet time capsule for so long, was unprecedented, said the National Museum of Ireland.

The book fell open upon discovery to reveal the Latin words in ualle lacrimarum (in the valley of tears), which identified it as a book of psalms. One particularly unexpected feature was the vegetable-tanned leather cover with a papyrus reed lining, suggesting the monks could have had trade links with Egypt.

'It still blows me away,' said John Gillis, the chief manuscript conservationist at Trinity College Dublin, home of the Book of Kells, the Book of Armagh and 450 other medieval Latin manuscripts. 'It was by far and away the most challenging, most interesting project I have ever undertaken – and to put that in context, I am surrounded by these iconic manuscripts.' "


The iron gall ink acted as a preservative. Some disintegrated pages were reduced to individual letters.


https://www.theguardian.com/culture/...e_iOSApp_Other

[An old bloke]

Wow! Just wow.

[Yazeh]

Thanks Chip for this fascinating article. That must have been one hell of a conservation project. It is interesting how for once Iron gall letters survived while the support dissolved. Humidity is the bane for iron gall manuscripts.
I thought this article might also interest you, about how the reconstructed the old Vesuvius charred scrolls.

[AZuniga]

Fabulous information, what a pleasure to read it !!

[penwash]

It brings a new meaning to the phrase "down to the letter".

[FredRydr]

I organized those medieval letters and it says: "if u cn rd ths msg u can get a gd gb."

[Chip]

Being a hydrologist and interested in water in the largest sense, I've looked into the carpet bogs of Ireland as ecosystems. They exist in part because the early settlers cut the forest and cleared land for crops and pasture not reckoning the effect of the incessant rainfall, which was diffused by foliage and absorbed by the forest soils and root networks, much reduced by the conversion to annual crops and grasses. The dead vegetation built up as did groundwater, which quickly depleted the dissolved oxygen, creating an anaerobic environment, that is, there was little or no oxygen available to allow decomposition through oxidation. So the iron gall inks survived. And the carpet bogs took over the former crop and pastureland.