Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1981, Page 279

Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1981, Page 279
Christian sculpture in Norse Shetland 287 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
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