The other account (in Saxo) tells how Ring harnessed his own horse to Harold's chariot and bade him drive quickly to Valhalla as the best in battle, and when he came to Odin to prepare goodly quarters for friend and foe alike. The pyre was then kindled and by Ring's command the Danes placed Harold's ship upon it. When the fire destroyed the body, the king commanded his followers to walk round the pyre and chant a lament, making rich offerings of weapons, gold and treasure, so that the fire might mount the higher in honour of the great king. So the body was burned, the ashes were collected, laid in an urn and sent to Leire, there to be buried with the horse and the weapons in royal fashion. There are many curious coincidences of detail between these accounts and that given by Ibn Fadhlan of the burial of a Rûs warrior, and every detail of them has at one time or another been confirmed by archaeological evidence. [Illustration: _PLATE III_ The Jellinge stone] The dead were commemorated by the how itself, but _bautasteinar_, i.e. memorial stones, were also erected, either on the how or, more commonly, elsewhere. In course of time these monuments came to be inscribed with runes. Usually the inscription is of the most formal type, giving the name of the dead person, the name of the man who raised the memorial, and sometimes also that of the man who carved the runes. Occasionally there is some more human touch as in the wording of the Dyrna runes (_v. supra_, p. 85), and in the latter part of the Viking period we often find pictures and even scenes inscribed on the stones. This is true of the Dyrna stone (_v. supra_, p. 86): the Jellinge stone has a figure of Christ on it, while there is a famous rock-inscription in Sweden representing scenes from the Sigurd-story (Regin's smithy, hammer, tongs and bellows, Sigurd piercing Fafnir with his sword, the birds whose speech Sigurd understood) encircled by a serpent (Fafnir) bearing a long runic inscription. The runic alphabet itself was the invention of an earlier age. It is based chiefly on the old Roman alphabet with such modifications of form and symbol as were necessitated by the different sounds in the Teutonic tongues and by the use of such unyielding materials as wood and stone. Straight lines were preferred to curved ones and sloping to horizontal. During the Viking period it was simplified, and runic inscriptions are found from the valley of the Dnieper on the east to Man in the west, and from Iceland on the north to the Piraeus in the south. CHAPTER IX SCANDINAVIAN INFLUENCE IN THE ORKNEYS, SHETLANDS, THE WESTERN ISLANDS AND MAN