bracelets, jewellery he had received from his lord, … which he passed to his own retainers… This is feohgift, a gift not only for the keep of this or that follower, but also to honour him in front of his comrade-in-arms in the hall.” The Romulus and Remus inscription alliterates on the R-rune ᚱ rad (journey or ride), evoking both how far from home the twins had journeyed and the owner's call to arms. The Titus side stresses the T-rune ᛏ Tiw (the Anglo-Saxon god of victory), documenting that the peak of a warrior-king's life is glory won by victory over his enemies. The right side alliterates first on the H-rune ᚻ hagal (hail storm or misfortune) and then on the S-rune ᛋ sigel (sun, light, life), and illustrates the hero's death and ultimate salvation, according to Becker. Becker also presents a numerological analysis of the inscriptions, finding 72 = 3 x 24 signs on the front and left panels, and a total of 288 or 12 x 24 signs on the entire casket. All these numbers are multiples of 24 = 3 x 8, the magical number of runes in the elder futhark, the early continental runic alphabet preserved within the extended Anglo-Saxon futhorc. "In order to reach certain values the carver had to choose quite unusual word forms and ways of spelling which have kept generations of scholars busy." Osborn (1991a, 1991b) concurs that the rune counts of 72 are intentional. However, "whereas [Becker] sees this as indicating pagan magic, I see it as complementing such magic, as another example of the Franks Casket artist adapting his pagan materials to a Christian evangelical purpose in the mode of interpretatio romana. The artist manipulates his runes very carefully, on the front of the casket supplementing their number with dots and on the right side reducing their number with bindrunes, so that each of the three inscriptions contains precisely seventy-two items.... The most obvious Christian association of the number seventy-two, for an Anglo-Saxon if not for us, is with the missionary disciples appointed by Christ in addition to the twelve apostles.... The number of these disciples is mentioned in scripture only in Luke 10, and there are two versions of this text; whereas the Protestant Bible says that Christ appointed a further seventy disciples, the Vulgate version known to the Anglo-Saxons specifies seventy-two. In commenting on that number, Bede associates