Arlia

It survives once. A small slab at Clonmacnoise, a Greek cross in a square panel, and a name cut into it: Arlia. Macalister catalogued it in 1909 as slab 41 and listed it among the fifteen legible names on that group of stones, and in his vocabulary of the inscriptions he could say nothing more than ‘Arlia (41), nom. A name not found elsewhere.’ The University of Galway’s Irish Inscribed Stones Project has since laser-scanned the stone and catalogues the reading as ARLIA, CLN 00074, tying it to Macalister’s CMS 41 and CIIC 629. What it meant, and whether the person under it was a man or a woman, nobody knows. Macalister wondered whether these small cross-slabs belonged to the later 8th century, then said plainly that the evidence would not carry the conclusion. The accented form Arlía is borne today as a modern feminine revival, and the meaning given to it now, radiant or otherworldly beauty, after Old Irish lí, lustre or brilliance, is a reading of the modern name rather than a translation of the stone.