Part of a Viking Age cross found during c19th rebuilding work in Leeds Minster. It is now in the excellent Leeds Story gallery on the second floor of the City Museum. The fragment is one of five Yorkshire examples of stone sculptures that seem to show Wayland the Smith strapped into his ‘flying contrivance’. The Weyland Legend probably dates back to the time before Norse and Anglo Saxon became separate languages. It is illustrated on a section of the early eighth century Anglo-Saxon ‘Franks Casket’ now in the British Museum, though the illustrations on the Yorkshire stone sculptures are much closer to a recently discovered, remarkably undamaged, item of 10th century metalwork from Uppåkra, Sweden. For more about the Uppåkra find, see https://raa.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1226564/FULLTEXT01.pdf . The Corpus of Anglo Saxon Stone Sculpture entry is at https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/wist_ahrc_2019/fullrecord.cfm?casss_mon_id=2504 and has photos of other sides of the stone .
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