The Book of Killowen began, as did each of the books in this series, with a real-life archaeological discovery. In July 2006, Eddie Fogarty was operating a mechanical digger in the bog at Faddan More, County Tipperary, a few kilometers southwest of Birr. He spotted a leather-bound book as it fell from the bucket of his digger into an adjacent trench and immediately called the landowners, Kevin and Patrick Leonard, who had some experience with artifacts previously found in this particular bog. The Leonards knew they had something unusual when they spotted some illuminated pages, and they phoned the National Museum with the news that they’d discovered something like the Book of Kells. The manuscript in question turned out to be a Psalter, a book of Psalms written in the ninth century. Several lines of text were visible, and Dr. Raghnall Ó Floinn of the National Museum managed to pick out one legible phrase: “in ualle lacrimarum”: in the vale of tears. It was a line from Psalm 83, verse 7: “in ualle lacrimarum in loco quem posuit”: In the vale of tears, in the place which he has set. The Faddan More Psalter is now on permanent display at the National Museum of Ireland, part of an exhibit titled The Treasury: Celtic and Early Christian Ireland.
The leather satchel that Cormac Maguire and Niall Dawson discover at Killowen Bog is based on fact as well. After the discovery of the Psalter, previous artifacts discovered at Faddan More took on a greater significance. I visited the Collins Barracks Conservation Department at the National Museum of Ireland in June 1999 while doing research for Haunted Ground. On the very day I toured the conservation lab, a technician was beginning work on a leather satchel that had just been discovered in a Tipperary bog—at a place called Faddan More. Ned Kelly, Keeper of Antiquities at the National Museum, told me that the workers who discovered the satchel described it as looking “for all the world like Tina Turner’s miniskirt.” The satchel was found only a few yards from where the Faddan More Psalter turned up seven years later. Archaeologists say there’s no way that the book and the bag can be definitively connected, but Irish monks commonly used leather bags to carry and store their precious books. Depictions of Irish monastic life show satchels hanging from pegs in early medieval scriptoria. The wax tablet discovered in this story is based on the Springmount bog tablets, which you can also see as part of the Faddan More Psalter exhibit at the National Museum in Dublin.
As to the existence of John Scottus Eriugena, the ninth-century philosopher named in this story, both he and his pseudonymous scribe, Nisifortinus, are real historical figures. We know from his name that Eriugena was Irish-born and that he lived from about 815 to 880. He was known for his knowledge of Greek and for the originality and breadth of his ideas; he is often called the most creative thinker of the Middle Ages. He lived and worked for many years at the court of Charles the Bald (grandson of Charlemagne), and his work On Divine Predestination (he argued against), and his magnum opus Periphyseon (On the Division of Nature), still provide fodder for lively debate among scholars. Paleographers have long pored over early manuscripts of his work and tried to distinguish between Eriugena’s own handwriting and that of his assistants and scribes. The sixth book of Periphyseon imagined here is a complete fiction, although Eriugena did leave a note at the end of Periphyseon apologizing for all the topics he’d been obliged to omit from the preceding five volumes, “because of the weight of the material I had to deal with and the number of doctrines I had to expound,” and offering his pledge to deliver soon, point by point, on the promises contained in the text.
Since Book Six of Periphyseon is a fabrication, so, necessarily, is the cumdach, or shrine, in which it was purportedly encased. Such jewel-encrusted book shrines are real, however, and you can see some wonderful examples on display at the National Museum of Ireland, or if you’re willing to veer off the beaten path, there was a particularly fine example at the Boher parish church in Offaly, but it was stolen by treasure hunters in the summer of 2012 and may not be returned to its original display. The notes that Nora discovers about a particular family charged with protecting the Book of Killowen are also part fiction and part fact, pieced together from actual accounts in Annála Ríoghachta Éireann, Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland, by The Four Masters, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1616, translated and annotated by the great Celtic scholar John O’Donovan and published in 1851, and Devenish (Lough Erne): Its History, Antiquities, and Traditions, by Canon J. E. McKenna, published in 1897.