Miracles aside, the finding of the ancient psalter in a bog this week was an incredible event in itself, writes Arminta Wallace
Many fascinating objects have emerged from bogs in recent decades, but never - until this week - a red herring. When the National Museum of Ireland announced that a medieval psalter had been unearthed from a bog in the south midlands, and added that the book was so well preserved that a verse from Psalm 83 was clearly legible on one of its pages, the news sent international biblical prophecy theorists into apocalyptic overdrive.
It must, one Jewish writer declared, be a message from God - a miracle, even. Imagine that, at a time when Israel is being castigated by the rest of the world for its actions in Lebanon, this ancient book should rise up out of the water and open at the very page which speaks about the destruction of Israel by its enemies! Imagine. Such a message would, of course, be open to different interpretations depending on whether it was intended for the Israeli military or the forces of Hizbullah.
But as a subsequent press release from an embarrassed museum hastened to point out, the book wasn't open at that page. It was in, fact, "open" - if that's the right way to describe the first tentative unpicking by museum staff, curious as to the nature of their find but anxious not to do damage - at a page which features a different psalm altogether, one which is all sweetness and light and nurturing pastoral imagery.
The psalm in question is actually Psalm 83/84, not Psalm 82/83. Why the confusion? It depends on which system you use for numbering the Psalms. Protestants tend to use the Hebrew, Catholics the Greek - while fundamentalists of all hues like to use these ancient Hebrew poems to provide divine justification for even the battiest beliefs. To clarify, the text visible on the book is verse 7 of Psalm 83 as printed in the old Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate. So should we cancel the miracle?
"I don't think I've ever heard of a book coming out of a bog before," says Caroline Harvey, conservation officer for the Irish Peatland Conservation Council. That the delicate pages should have been so well preserved for so long - nobody is quite sure how long at this stage, but 1,200 years is a possibility - is, she says, a matter of simple science. "Because of the way bogs form," Harvey says, "you end up with a waterlogged acidic environment which is low in oxygen. Great for preserving things."
The bogs of northern Europe have coughed up all sorts of artefacts over the years, from leather objects, wooden shields and bowls of butter to human bodies by the hundred. Of the latter, two of the most celebrated, Oldcroghan Man and Clonycavan Man - complete with ancient hair-gel - are currently on display at the National Museum of Ireland's Kingship and Sacrifice exhibition in Kildare Street, Dublin.
Still, as the director of the museum, Dr Pat Wallace, explains, there is something particularly thrilling about the idea of finding something as fragile as a book in this boggy burial place.
"When I first saw it, it looked for all the world like a piece of ceramic with black writing on it, glistening in the bog water," he says. "It was a sunny day, so it really sparkled."
The psalter turned up as an unusually large lump of turf in the bucket of a bulldozer.
"The man who was digging knew at once he had something, so he spoke to his boss - who, as it happened, has had a long relationship with the museum and knew we should be contacted immediately," Wallace says.
Crucially, this man also knew that the find should be covered immediately with wet peat to preserve it until the museum's conservation staff arrived. They slipped it on to a wide surface, put a consolidating shield over it to prevent further damage, and brought it to the laboratory. But did they recognise it immediately as something special?
"Oh, absolutely,"says Wallace. "We had no other discoveries of inscribed manuscripts from a bog. As a student of archaeology you study the Book of Kells and the Book of Durrow, and you say to yourself: 'I wonder is there one of these in a bog somewhere?' "
But did Wallace really believe one would turn up?
"To be honest with you, I didn't," he says. "I thought that vellum might be preserved - that's a delicate form of leather - but I never thought there'd be writing on it. When you combine that outside chance of preservation with the fact that the one man in Ireland who found it knew what to actually do with it, it's a really extraordinary thing to happen."
How the book got into the bog in the first place, we may never know. There were several monasteries in the area, so it might have dropped out of the satchel of a monk who was travelling from one to another. It might have been stolen and discarded by Viking raiders.
"But we should remember," Wallace says, "that the Irish were prone to raiding one another as well. Monasteries were under the jurisdiction of kings; the king's brother would be the abbot; so if I were a rival king, the best way to hit you would be to raid your monastery and steal your pride and joy out of the library, carrying off a few slaves while I was at it."
Charles Horton, curator of Christian manuscripts at the Chester Beatty Library, where some of the oldest New Testament manuscripts are on display, feels the discovery is "exceptional".
"It was probably someone's personal prayer book," he says. "Not necessarily a monk - but someone who could read, which excludes quite a lot of people. And someone with money. These books were specially commissioned, hand-written, made from leather. This one appears to have a wraparound binding, which also suggests it belonged to a person of status. It would have been an expensive object - and if somebody dropped it, it would have been missed. Maybe whoever was carrying it had an accident."
Horton says the discovery will be the start of a long process of scientific inquiry as the site is subjected to archaeological scrutiny and the manuscript itself to the latest conservation techniques, palaeographic testing and multi-spectrum micro-photography.
"The idea that a book can survive in a bog has to be good news. And the fact that the binding has survived is amazing," he says. "If it turns out to be earlier than any of the surviving manuscripts - such as the Cathach, which is in the Royal Irish Academy, and dates from AD 600 - then it's a fantastic find. What will be interesting is whether it has any decoration. If it does, it would be up there with the Derrynaflan discoveries [see panel]. Even if it doesn't, the shape of the letters themselves may throw new light on the Irish writing tradition. It will also be interesting to see if they find anything else in the vicinity - a box, or a cover of some kind."
What the psalter is not, he stresses, is some kind of Irish gnostic gospel, as was suggested by early, over-excited references to "an Irish equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls". Perhaps a Gospel of Brigid, or a Gospel of Patrick? Not likely, according to Horton. "The Dead Sea Scrolls and other early Christian manuscripts found in Egypt date from as early AD 200, when Christian texts were still in flux," he says. "By the time Christianity arrived in Ireland around AD 400, the texts were set in stone."
Only for one of them to fall into an Irish bog. And as Caroline Harvey points out, even though many of our wetlands have been designated natural heritage areas, they are still subject to outbursts of cavalier, unsympathetic treatment - such as the illegal installation of drains to provide peat moss.
"In the Netherlands," she says, "they've lost almost all their bogs and people are only now realising what a disaster that was. We've been mounting a big campaign, Peatlands Under Threat, all this year - and tomorrow, which is National Bog Day, we have a special open day here at the Bog of Allen Nature Centre in Rathangan, Co Kildare, which includes exhibitions, talks and a visit to the peatland reserve. If more people were aware of the importance of the peatland environment, it would be a big help."