'Full of human voices': monks' books back in Ireland after 1,000-year exile

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.

- Rory Carroll

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

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.

Switzerland's Abbey of Saint Gall has now 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 now 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.