Song of the Picts

Introduction

The Picts are not a mysterious alien race from another planet, their history and culture have not vanished. Languages, oral traditions, crafts, religious influences, ruins, archaeological relics and their DNA have all survived down through the years to this day. What has been lost is our knowledge to interpret what they passed down to us over the generations. Thankfully archaeologists and historians, like Gordon Noble, Alex Woolf, and W. A. Cummins are beginning to shed a modern, technical light on the past.  This book is not intended to be a deeply academic treatise on the history and culture of the culture groups collectively labelled as Picts.  What began as a series of feuding clans and tribes at the time the Romans invaded Prydein slowly morphed into a series of nations forged in a shared history of survival. War and cultural interactions with Romans forced the tribes to adapt and unite behind strong leaders and stronger families. From the unification of tribes and clans emerged perhaps a dozen families that vied for the right to rule the seven main provinces of the Pictish Britons.  For this is what they were, Britons, like those from Cornwall to the Shetlands, from Kent to the west coast of Ireland.  Britons with shared culture, languages, technologies, religious beliefs, trade, kinship links and a shared history of the islands. What forged them into kingdoms, then nations were the transformational arrivals of outsiders like the Beaker Folk, Celts, Romans, Germanic tribes, Vikings, Normans and the rest.

The purpose of this book is to promote discussion, perhaps reframe the narrative and look at it with fresh eyes and from a different vantage point.  What follows is a brief sample of Pictish history and culture across almost 1000 years of history and cultural transformation.  What you will read are my observations, and interpretations of information gathered by many folks more learned than myself.  Often what is not seen, can be inferred, when placed in its correct historical and material context. Like the shadows of bodies left behind in a Pictish cist or the shadow of the Saxon ship from Sutton Hoo, much information can be inferred, implied and perceived by what is left in the space once occupied. My observations and interpretations are just that, mine.  Hopefully though, with the ongoing benefit of further archaeological, scientific and historical study, further illumination can be shone upon that period in history from about 50 BCE until 1066 CE. 

The work on interpreting the symbol stones started with the interesting theories of W.A. Cummins, a historian with an eye for detail.  I took his ideas and tested them against the known historical records, and against the more recent studies like those of Portmahomack.  Again, and again the names of the people contained within the various histories, chronicles, and annals, kept appearing upon the stones in the very landscapes in which they lived and died.  What greatly helped was marrying local ‘Dreaming Stories’, (folk tales and legends), with historical sources, places names in the landscape, and in many cases the accompanying symbol stones, archaeological sites and other monuments.  Taken in context with the broader history of surrounding groups, cultural practices and the like, began to paint a much more vivid picture of a small band of elite, interconnected families from the 5th to the 10th centuries.

As a descendant of families with names like McDrostan, McGregor (MacGiric), Munro, Ferris (Ó Fearghasa), Simpson, and many others I thought that I as much as any descendant of the Ancient Britons could look at the ‘Problem of the Picts’ with fresh eyes. Hopefully, this work allows others to think about the past in a way that connects them to those who lived a millennium or two in the past. Not that long ago really, considering that Australia’s Indigenous people have oral histories going back a lot further than 2000 years. In a way, their culture was not that different from the early tribes encountered by the Romans, just the other day, historically speaking.

Paul W Simpson – 2022.

Origins of the Pictish People

An old poem, preserved in the 11th century Irish and said to have been written by St. Columba, relates:

The story of Cruithne and his seven sons, like the legend of the Firbolg, preserves key cultural elements of the Pictish people from the time when the tribal confederations, cut off from their kin below the Antonine Wall, began to coalesce into the seven mainland sub-kingdoms. However, the poem failed to account for the Pictish kingdoms of Skye, the Orkneys and the Shetland Islands.  These peripheral realms are mentioned rarely in the annals, and except for the Orkneys played a very role in the political landscape of the emerging Scottish nation.

An oral tradition ‘Cruithne, son of Cinge’ was recorded in an Irish manuscript, the ‘Book of Lecain, which claimed that Cruithne was the first king of the Picts. The son of a man named Cinge, his father’s lineage stated that he was the son of Luchtai, son of Partolan, son of Agnoin, son of Buain, son of Mais, son of Fathecht, son of Japheth, the son of Noah’. Except for the last two names the ancestors of Cruithne, again hold crucial cultural elements that hint at both Celtic and Iberian Beeker People’s origins. Cruithne himself had, according to the story recorded by Saint Ninian, seven sons named; Cait, Ce, Cirig, Fib, Fidach, Fotla and Fortrenn. The names of the sons correspond with particular political and cultural territories of the lands north of the Antonine Wall.

It’s unknown what the Picts called themselves, but the Romans gave them the name Picts, meaning painted ones. The name Cruithne simply means the ‘Scarred Ones" which indicates that their facial and body markings were both ritual and familial/clan-based. At the time of the Roman invasion, Scotland was inhabited by tribes with indigenous and non-indigenous origins. In the 2nd century A.D., Ptolemy created a geographical description of the Roman empire called Cosmographia. Cosmographia or Geographia. In this work, he named the major tribes encountered. The aboriginal tribes included the Alabanii,  Creones, Carnonacae, Caereni, and Caledones. Whilst the recent arrivals from 500 BCE onwards included the Lugi, Decantae, Vacomagi, Taexali, Venicones, Votadini, and Damnones.  The most recent arrivals were the Ebedi of Moray and the outer islands.  The Cornavii and their cousins upon the Orkneys had origins going back to a time before the arrival of the Beaker Folk.

Ancient Pictland was defined as the lands north of Hadrian’s Wall. However, to the local tribes, there were no Picts. There were the tribes north of the Antonine Wall, who retained their full independence from Rome, and those tribes, living between the walls that became foederati of Rome which later coalesced into the area of Britain known as Yr Hen Ogledd, in English, the Old North. The tribes of the southern Damnones and southern Votadini, the Novantae, Selgovae and the mighty Brigantes morphed over three centuries of contact with Rome and emerged in the post-Roman world as the kingdoms of Alt Clut, Rheged, Brynaech, Gododdin, Elmet and Gwynedd. 

More modern scholars have defined Pictland as the territory defined by the placement of symbol stones. Within this heartland, recent DNA studies published by researchers from the University of Edinburgh have shown that the Picts were closely related to the Basques of northern Spain, the Beaker People of Iberia. Within Scotland, there is a strong concentration of the R1b-S530 group in those very same areas. These pioneers originally travelled out from their homelands in the Levant moving into Europe about 7,000 years ago heralding the start of the Neolithic. These advanced stone and bone age farmers settled areas with established local hunter-gatherers who had lived in Europe during the last ice age.

So with genetics aside the early tribes of Scotland were a peculiar mix of indigenous peoples, and Neolithic and bronze age migrants. But more importantly, the migrations and cultural interactions brought significant changes in material culture, languages, religious practices and self-identification.  When the early Iberian migrants arrived in Scotland they encountered Aboriginal people who had migrated to the area after the retreat of the glacial maximum.

The genetic map of northern Britain and Ulster, divided into six main clusters of genetically similar individuals.

The University of Edinburgh.

The early Basque migrants are known today as ‘the Beaker People’, based upon bell-shaped pottery style that appeared in Iberia, in present-day Spain and Portugal around 4,500 years ago. These 'bell-beakers' quickly spread across Europe, reaching Britain fewer than 100 years later. These Bronze Age people, who lived between 2400 and 1800 BC, many of these people had straight black hair and brown eyes. Over several hundred years migrations of Beaker Folk changed the genetic landscape of Northern Britain.  The aboriginal Britons had dark skin and hair with blue or brown eyes. The Beaker folk's arrival and mixing with the locals brought a dramatic change in skin and eye colour and shades with lighter skin, blue eyes and blonde hair slowly more common.  The Beaker people introduced metalworking and mixed with local farming cultures following their migration. They later imported the art of bronze smelting and the associated manufacturing of bronze artefacts such as knives, axes, decorative jewellery and kitchen wares. Recent research done by geneticists from Harvard University and the Natural History Museum in London found that the Beaker people, who also settled across large swathes of England, replaced approximately 90% of Britain’s gene pool and with it their own unique history, cultures and religious practices.

Beaker culture artefacts include the distinctive ‘pottery’ that has a distinct bell shape, after which the culture is named.

Language of the Picts

From about 500 BC onwards a new cultural influence began to emerge in the form of Celts from mainland Europe.  Already well-established trade links helped to facilitate the movements of ideas, religious practices, languages, material culture and peoples starting in Southern Britain and gradually transforming the Beaker cultures, religion and languages with P-Celtic culture.  The culture of the ‘Celts’ was soon being adopted by the less insular Beaker communities. The use of iron, new textiles and manufacturing, and the religious evangelism of druidism.

With trade and technological advances came the language of the traders and innovators as the customs and cultures soon merged, just as Brythonic did with the language of the Beaker peoples, Gaelic did with the tribes of Ireland and later western Scotland, and English did with Romano-Brythonic, and later Gaelic and Pictish. Pictish was a Celtic language related to the p-Celtic group which includes the modern iterations of Welsh, Cumbric, Cornish, Breton, and Gaulish. Cultural, religious and linguistic transformation can happen in as little as 1-2 generations, though linguistic and cultural foundations remain deeply embedded in the newly blended cultural practices and underpin the adopted language.  Irish Gaelic may have become the lingua franca of Scotland, however the underlying Pictish Brythonic grammar, idiomatic and cultural expressions, blending with local dialects, and thought processes remained peculiarly Pictish. This process continued with the arrival of English so that in the 21st century Scotland, Scotch is a dialectic of English, blending Gaelic, Norse and English built upon a Brythonic-Pictish foundation.

The written evidence for Pictish is limited to:

•39 stone inscriptions, 32 of them in the Ogham script and 7 in the Latin script, which is, except for a few fragments, undeciphered.

•place names and personal names.

•a list of Pictish kings, in chronological order, recorded in a document from the 9th-10th centuries called the Pictish Chronicle, the only non-epigraphic text to have survived. 

The language of the Picts did not so much disappear as it fell out of use and blended what was useful with the new languages used for religious instructions, trade and cultural interactions.  Most Picts would have been multilingual.  This is still quite common in tribal societies with links across cultural groups. So for a tribal Pict living on the borders with Dal Riata, Alt Clut and Northumbrian territories, speaking southern Pictish, Auld Cumbric, Scots-Gaelic, and Angeln would have been quite normal. Languages tend to evolve and blend over decades. The best example of this is the vast differences between the dialects of English spoken in Gaelic-Norse Caithness, to that spoken in Anglo-Brythonic Cornwall, the Anglo-Cymric Welsh borders or in the Anglo-Brythonic Pennines.  All are built upon Brythonic foundations but all are vastly different in idiomatic expressions and cultural thought patterns.

A comparative word list of English and Brythonic dialects.

Leaving aside the pictographic nature of Pictish symbols, the first recorded written language of the Picts was Ogham. Imported from Ireland and Wales the alphabet utilises four sets of strokes to which another was added later. Each set contains five letters formed by one to five strokes. The only recorded examples still in existence are those on stone, usually added well after the symbols had been carved. The Ogham inscriptions carved on stones usually have little or no connection to the meanings of the symbols already carved upon them.  Except for the rare occasion when the meaning of the symbols was known by the carver, many Ogham inscriptions appear to be religious graffiti.  Often the name of Saint Edernan has been inscribed upon a stone when clearly the carver had no idea of the meanings of Pictish symbols he could not read. In many cases, erosion has all but obliterated that Ogham inscriptions, whilst those that can be read appear to show an odd mix of Brythonic-Pictish, Latin, Gaelic and perhaps even Angeln.  Combining this with the way both Latin and Ogham texts often forgo the use of vowels, and use letter/sound substitutions and omissions, it is no wonder that the only people who could fully read the original texts were those who carved them. 

The inscriptions were usually engraved vertically or horizontally (from right to left). Their transliteration is shown along with their sound between brackets. In several cases, the HH sound was substituted for the hard K-T as in Nechtan. So Nechtan appears as NEHHTN, or NEHTON or even NEHT/NHT/NAHT. In a semi-literate society, spelling was not uniform amongst the monks and druids who carved the inscriptions.

Examples of Ogham Inscriptions Upon Pictish Symbol Stones

The Scoonie Stone of Fife

Found in the old churchyard at Scoonie, the cross-slab stone shows the symbol for Edernan, the Pictish Beast or Dolphin. 

This is one of the few stones where the same name, Edernan appears in Ogham and Pictograph. In this case, an individual named Edernan.

Inchyra Stone

Found in 1945 whilst ploughing 100 m south of Inchyra House, in the Carse of Gowrie. The Inchyra stone carries the Pictish symbols for Cano – serpent, Cinaed – double-disk, broken sword/tuning fork – Elpin, Nechtan – salmon, and a mirror – death.

The Ogham inscriptions read a mixture of Pictish and Latin mentioning the name Nechtan and Custantine.

Ogham Inscription A

Ogham Inscription B

Ogham Inscription C

Ogham Inscription D

Brandsbutt Stone

The stone was broken up and used as an infill for a dyke. It was later reconstructed and translated.  The Pictish symbols read Brude – crescent v-rod map Der-Ilei – serpent z-rod.  The Ogham inscription appears to have been carved on the stone much later. It carries the names Uurat (Ferat) and Addaron (Edernan), though none of the Pictish symbols are the same names. This indicates reuse of the stone when the Ogham was carved.

Ogham Inscription

St. Fergus Stone

Cross slab with Pictish symbols on the front and an Ogham inscription on an artificial stemline, running up the right side of the stone, then bending round and running down to the left. The stone carries the names in Pictish symbols: Foith – mirror case, Drustan – double disk z-rod, Brude – crescent-rod and Fergus – triple disk.  The Ogham text reads as it appears in Pictish;

Formaston Stone

Found under the doorstep of the old church at Formaston, this piece of a cross slab carried the mirror but is missing the pair of Pictish symbols needed to identify the grave occupant. The Ogham reads in Gaelic, Latin and Pictish; Nechtan ???? Cinaed map Talorg. So the missing symbols are Salmon, ??? double disk mirror & comb, deer/selkie head.

Ogham Inscription

Brodie Stone

Discovered in 1781 in the graveyard of the old church when digging the foundations for a new church. The stone was erected in Dyke village in 1782 and named Rodney's Stone in commemoration of Admiral Rodney's victory at the Battle of the Saintes. The bottom two Pictish symbols read Edernan – dolphin, map Drust – double disk z-rod. A badly weathered Ogham inscription runs along three of the four edges (front right edge, rear left edge, and rear right edge), and reads:

                                                Edernan map Drust.

Ackergill Stone

Slate slab with two Pictish symbols, a spiral-filled rectangle and part of a salmon, and an Ogham inscription engraved on an artificial stemline at an oblique angle to the rectangle symbol. A large part of the slab is missing, resulting in the loss of most of the salmon symbol and some of the Ogham inscription. The Pictish symbols read Nechtan – salmon map Fercar – shield. The Ogham inscription reads in Pictish;

Ogham Inscription

Necht Ri - King Nechtan

Golspie Stone

A complex stone slab Originally sited in the churchyard of the parish church at Golspie earliest reference 1630. The top two symbols tell us that Fercar – shield map Edernan – dolphin is buried here.  The other symbols Erp – Welsh hound, Nechtan – salmon, Beli – flower, Brude – crescent v-rod and Cinaed – double disk are also mentioned.  The marching man is King (Ahlred) Æ̂lored son of the nephew of Fercar. He is clearly an Angeln or Saxon as he carries a Saxon axe, and is dressed as an Angeln noble.

Latheron Stone

Part of a sandstone cross slab, with images of an osprey, fish and two horsemen beneath the cross, and an Ogham inscription on an artificial stemline running parallel to the left edge. The Pictish symbols read Dunodnat – eagle map Nechtan – salmon.  The horsemen are portraits of the father and son. The Ogham inscription written in Gaelic with Pictish names reads;

Ogham Inscription

Dunodnat map Nechtan

CISP: Celtic Inscribed Stones Project. Department of History and the Institute of Archaeology, University College London Macalister 1945: R. A. S. Macalister, Corpus Inscriptionum Insularum Celticarum Vol. I. Dublin: Stationery Office, 1945.

Religion of the Picts

About 2500 B.C. an influx of migrants settled in Britain. Prior to the advance of Christianity, the religious beliefs of the early Beaker People supplanted the beliefs of the Aboriginal Britons. These Stone Speakers adopted many of the cultural and religious practices of the Iberian migrants and created a blended culture whereby the stones, cairns and henges took on different and renewed meanings and use. These newcomers have been called the Beaker People because of the shape of the pottery vessels which are so often found in their round barrow graves. They were often clustered in groups that suggest family cemeteries, sometimes very close to earlier Neolithic henges and monuments, as if taking advantage of sites already felt to be sacred. The barrow graves were generally filled with grave goods, indicating the importance of the dead person and a belief in some kind of afterlife. Some of the goods included in barrows were: pottery jars, golden buckles, bronze daggers, cups, necklaces, and sceptres in various stones and precious materials.  The early Bronze Age in Britain resulted from the spread of Beaker culture when people migrated in search of iron and tin

Whilst the earlier practice of communal tombs was abandoned by the people after the arrival of Beaker culture from Iberia, both men and women were accorded barrow burials. A curious fact was noted in studying these Bronze Age burials; in many cases, the corpses were carefully laid with the head to the south, men facing east, women facing west. The use of barrows, cist burials and cremations was continued by the early bronze-age Britons, many of the burial practices having been adapted from earlier Neolithic burial customs. 

One of the early gods that came across from Iberia was the worship of Taranis, a god of weather, thunder, portents and war.  Worshipped, or placated and feared from Iberia to Northern Europe the Thunder God’s portfolio often overlapped with the indigenous goddess, Beira, a deity of winter storms, portents, war and summer too.  The Britons were quick to adopt the technological, religious and linguistic innovations that came across from Europe.  These were combined with the more established practices as different tribes took what they wanted from the incoming religions, material goods and languages before discarding what was no longer useful, or relevant.

The advance of Celtic (sic) beliefs into Britain from Europe from about 500 BC onwards, brought with it new gods, religions, a revitalised druidic tradition and the rise of the Druids as a major political force in daily tribal life.  The Celts were not so much an ethnic group as they were a set of shared cultural, material and religious beliefs that spread across Europe and into western Asia, Britain and northern Africa.  There was some migration from Europe to Britain but much of what was Celtic was adopted by people already living in situ. One of the major religious changes came with the adoption of a broader pantheon of pan-Celtic deities. One such was Teutates.  He was the god of war, agriculture and by default, the seasons and fertility. He was a god appeased by sacrifice, much the same way as Taranis and Beira. 

The Celtic religions were intertwined with the natural and the spiritual realms. They believed that every aspect of the landscape possessed a spirit, and worshipped gods in sacred places like lakes, rivers, cliffs, caves, forest groves, rock formations, shrubs and trees.  Animals were believed to be servants and messengers of the gods and spirits and an understanding of the movements of the moon, sun and stars were central to life and all major and local religious festivals were tied to these.  The Celts thought that there were supernatural forces in every aspect of the natural world.

Gods of Northern Britannia

A sample of the gods and spirits of the Britons, Picts and Scots.