PICTS: PAINTED PIXIES, OR GHOSTS IN THE MIST?

Reconstructed Crannog, Loch Tay, Scotland

Scotland.  It is only fitting that this is the land of Sir James Matthew Barrie, Peter Pan and his pixie, Tinkerbell, and, well, the people for whom the pixies were named: the Picts.  It is a land of glass-eyed lochs, floating wraith-like mists, torrential rainstorms, craggy mountains, purple thistle growing wild on the hillsides, herds of thick-fleeced sheep grazing placidly, and a warm-hearted, welcoming people.

I love Scotland.  (I visited the place for several weeks in 2000 and am, proudly, one-sixteenth Scottish myself).  On close examination, Scotland really holds up well to comparison with Braveheart and Rob Roy.  All those picturesque lochs and tatters of floating mist and rain.  Tons of rain.  Oodles of rain.  Barrels and buckets and big bronze cauldrons of rain.  It’s the perfect place for hiding numerous tribes of a quasi-historical people.  Or Picts.  Or pixies.

(“Quasi” because no one seems to know just who the Picts were.  Were they the native inhabitants of the land?  Or had they merely gotten there early, before the Celts arrived?  Were they some outlandish people who had emigrated to Alba from a distant, eastern land?  Or an offshoot of the Celts themselves?  No one seems to know).

The Picts occupied Scotland before the Romans did.  They are said to have had seven kingdoms named after the seven sons of Cruthne, but there were probably more than seven.  (Even in ancient times, as now, seven was a magic number, which happily made it easier to remember if you were, say, a bard reciting the history of Scotland.  For instance, there may have been another kingdom in the far north, in Orkney.  And, maybe, there was another, in the western Hebrides).  In the early centuries of the first millennium AD, the Picts formed a confederation of tribes, thus changing the alliances and geographical boundaries once again.

Dun Carloway Broch, Lewis, Scotland

There are, as previously stated, many theories about whence the Picts came before they arrived in Scotland…and here’s one more.

An ancient legend tells of a group of Picts wandering, long ago, on the Continent, when they crossed paths with a group of itinerant Celts, soon to be the Gael of Ireland.  The two groups made a pact: when the Gael had settled somewhere, the Picts would join them, and their friends would find them a swordland.  Once the Gael had put down roots in Ireland, the Picts took them up on their offer and settled near them, becoming the Irish Picts, or Cruthne (“People of the Forms” in Gaelic).  Eventually, the Gael under Conall Corc crossed the sea and carved a swordland for their Pictish allies in Scotland.  This group of Picts became the Prydne, or Prydeni (“People of the Forms” in Brythonic), or Britons.  (This story appears in my series The Annals of Anavere, in Book II: The Covenant and the King).

For more than two decades, I have studied as much of the Pictish culture as remains.  Only fragments of their language survive.  Their mountainous island home is as different to the boundless horizons of the steppes and the gold-and-indigo paradise of Santorini as night is to day, but their zoomorphic art weirdly resembles both the steppe art of the Scyths and the fabulous Minoan frescoes.  Their women were known – as recorded by Julius Caesar himself – to fight beside their men in battle.  Indeed, Pictish primogeniture law gave their women strange rights; it appears to have been a matrilineal society, just like that of the Amazons, and maybe the Scythians, too.  And maybe even the Minoans.

So, having kicked off this blog by giving some good, general information on location, let’s commence with the small details.  Perhaps, we can discover some other connections between these cultures, formerly thought to be entirely unrelated…