Moreover, the Irish picture furnishes a welcome light upon an obscure detail of our enamelled Figure. How are the heads of the sceptres to be explained? Some have taken them for palms, and others for lilies, but the Irish drawing shows them rather as plumes. And this finds support in a singular passage of Bede’s _Ecclesiastical History_. Speaking of Oswald the Bretwalda, Bede describes him as a prince who carefully upheld his imperial dignity, insomuch that, not only when he rode through his provinces did his standard go before him, but even when he walked forth in the streets he was always preceded by an apparitor bearing the Tufa, which (he adds) was in the vernacular called Tuuf. We learn from Du Cange that the Tufa was a wand with a head of plumes, and this is what we see in the sceptres of the Irish drawing. Sir Francis Palgrave divined that the Saxon Bretwaldadom had inherited this emblem of authority from the provincial dignitaries of the empire.
From these data the natural conclusion is that the Figure in this Jewel was derived from an Irish, and not from an Oriental, nor from any continental source. It was taken from an Irish symbolical drawing of Christ triumphant and reigning over his Church, and it was adapted by the king in a sense which his experience had made real and concrete and practical. As Chaucer was called ‘grand translateur,’ so we may call Alfred a grand adapter. Whoever has been drawn in to study both Alfred and Dante may have observed this in common to the two, that what they borrow they transfigure, their touch imparts to it the colour of their mind. King Alfred in early youth was tied by every thread of religious conviction and political interest and personal sentiment to the See of Rome, and he meant this Jewel to enshrine the frontispiece of his profession and the ensign of his creed ecclesiastical, political, and personal.
At the close of the former section I said that the conclusion there arrived at would be confirmed by another kind of evidence in the sequel. Up to that point the argument had run upon the technical aspects of our enamelled Figure, and these had seemed to indicate the British Isles as its native region. Since that stage our argument has turned upon the conception and pedigree of the device; and here again we find that an insular rather than a foreign source is indicated. Further evidence, pointing in the same direction, will be advanced before the close of the present chapter[26].