Bressay Stone

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Replica of the Pictestone at St Mary's Church

The Bressay Stone , found in 1852, is a Pictish symbol stone from the Shetland island of Bressay in Scotland . It dates from the 9th century and is a replica in the cemetery of the abandoned St. Mary's Church in Cullingsburgh in the north of the island.

description

The 1.12 m high, slightly trapezoidal stone is decorated on one side with an intertwined symbol in a circle, below a rider between two monks, below two animals (a boar) and with several marginal symbols. On the back, part of the ornamentation on the front appears again. An Oghamin script runs along the side, combining Nordic names and words with Gaelic. In 1864 the stone was removed from the National Museum of Antiquities in Edinburgh (now the Museum of Scotland ).

In 1855, the Irish archaeologist James Graves (1815-1886) examined the Oghamin script and found the stone to be a shared memory of the daughter of someone named Naddodd and the son of a druid named Benres. Graves thought Naddodd was a Viking name. His view was influential. By 1952, many scholars assumed that Pictish was a Celtic language . Jackson concluded that the Picts had two languages: a Britton language and an incomprehensible, non-Indo-European language from the Bronze Age . Frederick Threlfall Wainwright argued that since the Picts had a non-Indo-European language, you couldn't tell if it was in place names because you didn't know what to look for. There are many place names that we cannot explain.

context

The Viking invasion of the Shetlands began around 800 AD. It is unclear what happened to the Pictish population at the time . Some place names indicate that it was displaced into the poorer regions. The northerners consolidated their position and Shetland became the northern third of a county during the Viking Age . After the Battle of Largs in 1263, Nordic rule was limited to Orkney and Shetland. Before the battle, King Harald IV of Norway assembled his fleet at “Breideyarsund”; that was probably the Bressay sound .

The Cullingsburgh Broch is an Iron Age Broch remnant near the replica.

literature

  • Robert BK Stevenson: Pictish art. In: Frederick T. Wainwright (Ed.): The Problem of the Picts. Reprinted edition. Melven Press, Perth 1980, pp. 97-128.
  • Kenneth H. Jackson: The Pictish language. In: Frederick T. Wainwright (Ed.): The Problem of the Picts. Reprinted edition. Melven Press, Perth 1980, pp. 129-166.

Web links

Coordinates: 60 ° 9 ′ 42 "  N , 1 ° 3 ′ 47"  W.