Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1981, Blaðsíða 276

284
Christian sculpture in Norse Shetland
was a mid-tenth century burial with grave-goods, which included
a cut half Anglo-Saxon penny, of king Eadmund, and a loose-ring
pin very like the one from Tjørnuvík. In considering the wider
implications of the site, Dr Ritchie pointed to other aspects of native
material culture also adopted by the colonists.
This makes it increasingly probable that the cross-slab from
Culbinsgarth, Bressay, in Shetland, not referred to by Thomas, was
erected by a Christian Pict, or half-Pict, in Norse times. It has
along the edge an inscription in late Pictish ogams, which has been
read as including not only the Gaelic words for a cross and a son,
but the Norse word for a daughter (ECM III pp. 5—10 and figs.
4 a—d). If one simplifies the double consonants (a convention in-
herited from Ireland), the transliteration is — Crosc:Nahtvdaðs:
Datr:Anbenises:Meqdroan. Kenneth Jackson has accepted the read-
ing and interpretation of the foreign words (1955, 140—2). Further
evidence of the mixed cultural origins is, as noted by Romilly Allen,
that the words are separated by two points as on many runic in-
scriptions. (The long ogam from Lunnasting also has such points,
but not that from St Ninian’s Isle.) There is coarsely executed
relief carving on both faces, which echoes three of the four main
features of the much more often illustrated one-sided cross-slab from
Papil in Burra, another island, on the far side of Shetland’s main-
land (ECM III 10—15). The Papil stone in its fine part-incised low
relief, seems to correspond to the one from Birsay in Orkney which
show three warriors below Pictish symbols, and which may have
lost a cross from its other face.1) Both probably date froiti the end
of the eighth century, the point at which there is now a break in the
sequence of Orcadian sculpture. (These two stones, and several of
the others mentioned later, are illustrated in Stewart Cruden’s
excellent small guide and picture-book, pls. 5 and 7). The stone
from Bressay seems to be a considerably later copy and elaboration
of that from Papil. They share a circular cross-head with expanded
arms and interlace in the angles, cowled monks facing one another
carrying crooks and book-satchels, and a lion, its tail arched over
its back like the evangelist’s lion ir. the much older Book of Durrow.
The Bressay stone has these in a different arrangement from Papii