In the Isle of Man the earliest series of Crosses have 11th century runes and figure subjects from the Edda and the Sigurd story which were late 11th century. Mr. Kermode, F.S.A., Scot., dates them 1050–1150 (Saga book of Viking Club, Vol. I., p. 369). We have them in the remains in Man a kindred race to ours in the age before the Normans came: and we find resemblances between these Manx Crosses and some of ours both in subject and in style. In subjects the 11th century Crosses of Kirk Andreas, Jurby, and Malew find a parallel at Halton, which Mr. Calverley places late in 11th century and attributes to people under strong Scandinavian influence: but Danish as it happens rather than Norse.
The Halton Crosses are not Norse in style. They are like the late pre-Norman work in Yorkshire where the Danes lived.
Then the Hogback stones have to be placed. We have fixed the Gosforth and Plumland examples by their dragonesque work as of the Viking settlement.
All these have the chain pattern, which Mr. Calverley called the Tree Yggdrasil or Tree of Existence, which shows that these monuments are of Viking origin.
From what models or pattern did these early sculptors copy their designs? It is sometimes said that they imitated MSS.: assuming that MSS. were fairly common and placed in the stone carver's hands. This is far less likely than that sculptors, at a distance from good models in stone, copied patterns from metal work which were the most portable, and most accessible of all forms of art, in the days before printing was invented.
Suppose, to make it plainer, the sorrowing survivor bids the British workman carve a Cross for the dead. "What like shall I work it?" says the mason. "Like the fair Crosses of England or Ireland, a knot above, and a knot below, and so forth." "But," says the mason, and he might say it in the 10th century, "I have never been in England or Ireland or seen your Crosses." Then answers the patron, "Make it like this swordhilt." (Calverley.)
The earlier Irish Christians were highly intellectual and literary, but not at first artistic. Literature in all races precedes art; it would be contrary to all historical analogy if Patrick and Columba had lived in the artistic atmosphere of the eighth and ninth century in Ireland. Patrick's bell is no great credit to Assicus his coppersmith: his crosier was a plain stick. There is no indication in our remains that Irish missionaries of the seventh century brought a single art idea into the country. It was the Irish Viking Christians of the twelfth century who did.
Mr. George Stephens, in his "Old Northern Runic Monuments of Scandinavia and England," vol. iii., under the heading "Runic Remains and Runic Writings," says:—
"I believe these stones, however altered and conventionalised, were all originally made for worship as gods or fetishes, elfstones, or what not, but in fact, at first as phallic symbols, the Zinga and the Zoni, creation and preservation, placed on the tumulus as triumphant emblems of Light out of Darkness, Life after Death. And the priapus and cups sometimes seen on burial-urns, must have the same meaning. Several of the grave minnes bearing old Norse runes were worship stones, carved with regular cups, etc., ages before they were used a second time for funereal purposes."
Prof. J. F. Simpson, M.D., Edinburgh, has a paper "On the Cup Cuttings and Ring Cuttings on the Calder Stones near Liverpool," in the Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, vol. xvii., 1865, in which he states that—