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Manx Memorial Stones 17
carve his own runes.
The inscriptions tell us something of the lives of the
inhabitants of the Isle of Man in the Viking period: they
are rarely dramatic, as many Scandinavian inscriptions
are, but one, Braddan 138 (IIO), tells of treachery: (e)n
Hrossketill vitti £ tryggu eiosoara sinn, "but Hrossketil
deceived under truce the man he was bound to by oath".
Others give small details of family -life and, like Kirk
Michael 130 (104), of a family's pious banality: ... betra
es leifa f6stra g60an en son illan, "it is better to leave a good
foster-son than a bad son". One of Gaut's inscriptions
where we meet "Athakan the smith" tells of a man's
occupation, while two twelfth-century inscriptions were,
as we have seen, carved by a priest - Maughold 145 (IIs)
and 144 (II4). The inscriptions from Andreas III (84),
with its uninterpretable bind- or twig-runes may indicate
the magic or secret properties of the runes themselves. 49
The crosses also tell of the inter-relation of the two races
- Celtic and Norse - present in the island. It is difficult
to set the crosses in chronological order, but it is possible,
as Olsen pointed out,50 that the Celtic names tend to occur
in the earliest period of the Scandinavian sculpture (the
period of Gaut) and in the later period (the beginning of
the eleventh century) and that in between these two periods
the large majority of inscriptions bear Scandinavian
names. Generally speaking this seems a tenable thesis
and would indicate that the two elements in the population
lived peacefully side by side, marrying each other
and giving their children Celtic names - like Thorleif on
Kirk Braddan 135 (108) who, although himself Norse by
name, had a son with a Celtic name.
It is difficult to estimate the comparative chronology of
the Manx crosses, for there are no fixed dates from which
•• These properties of runes are difficult to define and interpret. For the
most recent summary and discussion of them, d. R. 1. Page, 'Anglo-Saxon
Runes and Magic', The Journal of the British Archaeological Association (1964),
14-31.
'DOlsen, op. cit., 228 fl.