LIMITS So high in their leafy silence over Kells, over Durrow, as the Vikings raged south -- the old monks made the alphabet wild: they dipped iron into azure and indigo: they gave strange wings to their o's and e's: their vowels clung on with talons and the thin ribbed wolves that had gone north left their frozen winters and were lured back to their consonants. -- Ms. Eavan Boland (b. Dublin 1944) - apparently pertaining to the fanciful, highly decorated lettering on ancient books.