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Ranuaik a kistu thosa, i.e., Ranwaig owns this casket. Rand-weig, in the form Rannveig, occurs frequently as a female name in Landnáma-bóc.

Runes are unknown in Ireland, whereas in Man they are numerous, makes it rather more likely that the Inis-patrick from which a Shrine is recorded to have been carried, refers to Peel, and not to Inispatrick off the Skerries, county Dublin, or elsewhere in Ireland. [OGHAM] [OLD IRISH] The Roman Low Countries were Gaulish counterparts of the Atrebates of Belgica Province provided frequent subject matter for Caesar's Gallic Wars. Frisian Ogham or the Ogham alphabet is thought to be named after the Irish god Ogma. The Armorican States were the tribes of north-western Gaul, now the French province of Normandy. Old European civilization was well-developed in the Balkan peninsula. All species of Ogham trees are natural placenames in Italy, Germany, France, and Switzerland, near seas and continental ice.

The inhabitants, whose language is the Erse, or a dialect of that spoken in the Highlands of Scotland, with a mixture of some words of Greek, Latin, and Welsh, and many of English original to express the names of things which were not formerly known to the people of this island, whose ancient simplicity of living and speaking appears in many instances. In this language, the substantive is generally put before the adjective, and many things which, in the English language, are derived from the Latin and Greek, and little understood by those that know nothing of those languages, in Manks are expressed by a periphrasis easily understood by the common people. The Gall-Gaelic dialect of Man and the Western Islands, however, would not be subject to a rapid extinction, and it is quite possible that this dialect— half Gaelic, half Norse— continued to be spoken well on into the 14th century.

The Anglo Manx dialect, which contains many Gaelic words and idioms, is still a living reality. Such must have been the passing of the language of the Stranger-Gael. If the Gaels borrowed generic terms from the Scandinavians, the latter repaid the compliment, although not nearly to the same extent, as their borrowings mainly consisted of personal names. The greater part of our Gaelic place-names date from the 13th century down to recent times, and their grammatical structure indicate the different phases through which the Manx language has gone since the Gaelic immigration subsequent to Norse rule.

The runic characters, too, resemble those met with on our Manx monumental crosses of the 11th century; thus we have the runes for A, N, and T, with the character-stroke on one side only of the stem-line, and S represented by the half-stroke instead of the usual Scandinavian form of two half-strokes connected in the middle by a diagonal. Still more characteristic of our Manx inscriptions is the use of t for nasalized A in the last word--thosa, for thási, acc. fem. of thessi, '' this," a word which occurs in this form (allowing for the difference in gender) in several of our inscriptions. This use of Finasalized A, is also to a certain extent an indication of date, for the same character came later to be used for O, in which sense, too, we find it on others of our Manx monuments, and this change came in gradually from about the middle of the 11th century. Again, the use of the dipthong AI for EI in the first. word word is a peculiarity frequently met with in the Isle of Man.

 

 

The greater number of these inscriptions are, however, in " Runes," the peculiar characters developed three or four centuries before the Christian era by the Goths, who came in contact with the Greek colonists from the Black Sea trading for amber. These characters underwent great changes in the course of centuries, and are classed according to their period as Gothic, Anglian, and Scandinavian. A solitary example of the Anglian runes of about the eighth century has recently been found at Maughold. Only eight characters now remain, a twelfth part of the inscription, if, as seems likely, it was continued round the circle. The rest of the Manks inscriptions are in the later Scandinavian runes of the tenth to the thirteenth century.

It is clear, therefore, that the Runic inscription (AS Futhorc) on this Shrine belongs to the group found on our Manx monuments, a group which is practically confined to the Isle of Man, with one or two examples in the Western Isles and a large assemblage in the great. mound known as the Maeshowe in Orkney; its origin may be traced to the Jaederen inscriptions in Norway, which bear a close resemblance to the Rök group in Sweden. Runic inscriptions are infrequent in Britain, and unknown in Ireland; those found in the North and on the East of England are of a totally different character and belong to a different period and a different people.

In the 11th century, it is more likely to have been originally set up here than to have been brought from Ireland, and there is no place so likely to have had such a Shrine in the 8th century, as Peel, which in all probability saw the first Monastery established by the Mission of St. Patrick; but Peel was formerly known as Inis Patrick, Insula Patricii. Now, the Annals of Ulster, of Inisfallen, and of Tighernac, contain other undoubted references to the Isle of Man, as under the yeare 581; and it would be natural and likely that Ulster should have record of such an early raid of the heathen Norsemen on a place so venerated in an island so close to their own shores, and so connected with their history; and it we have no other record and no local tradition of the event, neither has any other Inispatrick.

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