Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

The Vikings who had invaded stood there looking at 40,000 of the venerable Bede‘s books in this vast study on Lindesfarne island off the coast of Northumberland. Their broadswords dripped blood. Dying in the outlying corridor were 13 tonsured monks in their brown or black habits.

The Vikings, despite their conquests, had no use for paper as yet, even using it for blowing their noses or wiping their arses on it was not known to them.

They bowed as Black Eric from Narvik, their tribal chieftain, stepped among them. They grinned collectively as they guessed what he had in mind.

"Set fire to it all, men, and let Christian civilization burn with our wrath added!"

Black Eric, seven feet tall and with an ebony-coloured beard down to his chest, was a poet and a pedagogue who feared and hated the pious Christians. Soon the study, the academy and the library were blazing away. Black Eric wished that his eldest children, already wild Viking conquerors, could witness this act of sacrilegious arson.

All those manuscripts went up in a pall of smoke, and the smoke reached heaven no doubt. In the stratosphere angels cried in disgust. The thirteen murdered monks would not be making a comeback, at least, not soon.

But words survive even plague and bloodshed. According to the venerable Bede the remaining monks of Lindesfarne escaped a second Viking attack, taking with them the relics of their founder St Cuthbert and the deluxe versal edition of the Lindesfarne Gospels.