Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1981, Page 279
Christian sculpture in Norse Shetland
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common elsewhere in northern England at the period of the Aycliffe
sculpture.
A third carved fragment from White Ness is also unifacial
([Scevenson] 1947, not. ill.). It has a bold border of incised key-
pattern in horizontal and vertical oblongs. This is not a North-
umbrian design, but was possibly simplified from the oblique diaper
squares of various stones in eastern Scotland, and that on the fine
cross-slab at Farr in northern Sutherland which may belong to the
second half of the niinth century (ECM III fig. 51). However the
undecorated and somewhat attenuated hogback grave-cover from
St Ninian’s Isle of eleventh or twelfth century date (Thomas pl. xi),
can now be seen as a late result of cultural contact with eastern
Britain down to Northumbria over a prolonged period.
Given then that Christian stones were being sculptured in the
middle of Shetland’s Norse pagan period3), and Dr Ritchie’s evidence
for earlier continuity in Orkney, already argued by Frederick Wain-
wright (1962 158—62), the pre-Norse date of the St Ninian’s Isle
shrine-posts can not be taken as self-evident, nor their priority over
the wonderfully sculptured tomb-shrine at St Andrews in southern
Pictland, of around 800. In looking for the sources of the Shetland
scheme southward along the east coast, as Thomas did in a general
way, one does not find that its carving resembles eighth century
work stylistically. In particular the ‘S-dragons’ facing one another
with spiral tails are surely a debased form. The related creatures on
Pictish stones as at Meigle in Perthshire (ECM III fig. 310; Cruden
pl. 28), or considerably later at Brodie in Moray perhaps around
850, (ECM III fig. 136), must be dolphins. They were a regular
part of Christian symbolism, and reached Britain by the seventh
century in a form comparable to that used by the Picts later on,
to be seen on the engraved hanging-bowl escutcheons from south of
the Thames, from Faversham in Kent (Kendrick 1938 pl. xxxiii 18).
On these they rise vertically on either side of a bold Cross. The
Pictish dolphins are less realistically drawn, but there is in the far
north a fine pair adoring the cross on the slab from Skinnet in
Caithness, now in Wick (ECM III fig. 29); their tails each form a
spiral of three coils, and they have grown an ear-lappet like a