In later times, especially during the ninth century, the Celtic art of Ireland appears to have been largely introduced into Scandinavia by means of the Viking pirates who harried the whole circuit of the shores of Britain and Ireland, and finally in the ninth century established a Norse Kingdom in eastern Ireland with the newly founded Dublin as its capital[77]. The Norsemen were far from being a literary race and it was not in the form of manuscript illuminations that Irish art was introduced into Norway and Denmark, but rather in the rich gold and silver jewellery with which the Viking chiefs adorned themselves, and also on a larger scale in the magnificently decorative reliefs which were carved on the wooden planks which formed the frames or architraves of the doors of the Scandinavian wooden churches in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, after the worship of the Thunderer had been replaced by the Faith of the White Christ. Lindisfarne, Iona and the other chief Irish monasteries suffered again and again from the inroads of the Vikings, who found rich and easily won plunder in the form of gold and silver chalices, reliquaries and book-covers in the treasuries of the monastic churches undefended by any except unarmed and peaceful monks. _The Golden Gospels of Stockholm._ One curious record of Viking plunder is preserved in the Royal library of Stockholm. This is a very magnificent manuscript Book of the _Gospels_ of the eighth century, commonly known as the _Codex aureus_ of Stockholm. It is mostly written with alternate leaves of purple vellum, the text on which is in golden letters. In general style and in the splendour of its ornaments it closely resembles the Lindisfarne "_Gospels of Saint Cuthbert_," described above at page 88, and most probably, like the latter, was also written in the monastery of Lindisfarne. The interlaced ornaments of the Irish type are marvels of beauty, while the dignified drawing of the enthroned figures of the four Evangelists shows clearly the influence of Continental manuscript art. In this case the Celtic or English illuminator must have had before him a copy of the _Gospels_ not of the Italian but of the Byzantine style, since the Evangelists and other figures in the book which are represented in the act of benediction do so in the Oriental not in the Latin fashion[78]. _Viking robbers._