Medieval book pried from Irish bog

Today's bibliophilic note: a medieval Irish book gets turned up in a bog by a backhoe.  It's an amazing find -

"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."

And the book almost didn't survive discovery:

Crucially, [Pat Wallace, director of the National Museum of Ireland] 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 book was open to a Psalm, apparently, concerning Yahweh and nations against Israel.  Naturally some deem this a portent.

And it did take me several times to understand that bog was meant in the American, not British, sense.  The Yahoo pic copied here didn't help.

(via Tailrank)

Comments

[dav]

The timing was pretty bad to unearth that cool artifact.

[Len]

I read a clarification in the NY Times that removed the reference to the Psalm concerning the enemies of Israel -- apparently this was a mixup due to a different numbering of psalms in the Vulgate? The niceties escape me but another spooky coincidence goes up in smoke. The book in the bog was really open to the Psalm regarding the "vale of tears," which I suppose suggests we're all having a relatively rotten time, not just Israel.

[Len]

For the record, from NY Times July 29, 2006:

Psalm Corrections

The National Museum of Ireland, which this week announced the discovery of a 1,200-year-old Book of Psalms in a bog, has issued a clarification about just what the Psalter revealed. In its initial announcement on Wednesday, the museum said the 20-page manuscript was open to a page showing Psalm 83; news reports noted that in the 17th-century King James version, the psalm exhorts God to act against conspirator nations plotting to erase any memory of “the name of Israel.” But the museum’s director, Patrick F. Wallace, said in a statement yesterday that the announcement had “led to misconceptions about the revealed wording.” The text visible on the manuscript “does not refer to wiping out Israel,” Dr. Wallace said, “but to the ‘vale of tears’ ” in Psalm 83 of the Vulgate, the Latin version used in medieval times. The text about wiping out the name of Israel occurs in the Vulgate as Psalm 82, which is not visible in the Irish manuscript. ALAN COWELL

[Bryan Alexander]

Aha. Thank you, Len, for tracking that down.