REINTRODUCING THE VIKINGS INTO SCOTLAND’S STORY

Over 1,000 years ago, on an island in the Clyde Firth, a child was doodling on a slate. The drawing was of a man with wild long hair and a sword, striding toward an oared vessel. He is leading another figure from a chain, a man with a comically large beard, his hands bound and held aloft. Hanging from the bearded man’s wrists is a box-like object – padlocked manacles, or a house-shaped reliquary? Either way, the scene is unmistakeable: a pirate and his men making off with an elderly hostage back to a longship. This was a child’s-eye view of a Viking raid on a monastery.

Not long afterwards, a slate of a different kind was made at Inchmarnock. This was a small, delicately-carved grave marker in the shape of a ringed cross-head. Down the shaft of the cross was a commemoration, written not in Latin or ogham, but in Old Norse runes. It uses the word , from Latin for cross, a term recently loaned into Old