PICTISH HORSE NAMES: ONE IS ALL YOU NEED:

This is the "Maglocunos Stone", boasting fifth century names in both Latin and Ogham, the preferred written script of the Picts. Yes, it bears directly on this post. And, no: I'm not going to tell you how. For that, you need to pick up a copy of "The Annals of Anavere".

We have even less of the Pictish language than we do of Scythian. And, of that, very little has been translated.

Nevertheless, I went “hunting” for Pictish horse names. I didn’t find much. I did find a Pictish kings list. I located a couple of glossaries of Pictish male and female names. And, of course, there are the scattered Pictish words I’ve “collected” over my last zillion years of research.

It’s not a lot. But here’s what I’ve got.

Pictish has never been officially “diagnosed” as either a Celtic tongue – one of the languages dangling from a branch of the Proto-Indo-European language tree – or something else. (Scholars are divided on this issue, so I’m not going to weigh in very heavily). What seems to be generally accepted is that Pictish does have some “borrowings” from the Celtic languages, such as Primitive Irish, Old Irish, Gaulish, and Brythonic, that surrounded it. For instance, meqq appears as part of the names on some of the Pictish stones. In Old Irish, this would read as macc, meaning “son of”. Meqq may have been a “borrowing”, or else, if Pictish is related to Old Irish, it may have simply been the Pictish version of the same word.

Now that that’s out of the way…

No words in Pictish for “horse”, because, well, we just don’t have one. At least not that I could find. Here instead are the words in some of the Celtic languages for “horse”.

Ech: “horse” in Old Irish. It comes down from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE, going forward) h₁éḱwos through the Proto-Celtic ekʷos into the Gaulish epos and the Irish ech.

And, here’s one for those of you who grew up learning Spanish in the Southern California schools: caballo, “horse”. Turns out, it’s very similar in Celtic:

§  Kapallos in Proto-Celtic

§  Caballos in Gaulish

§  Capall in Old Irish, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic

§  Cabbyl in Manx

§  Ceffyl in Welsh

Last, but not least, we have the PIE márkos, “horse”, which is closely followed by the Gaulish markos. (I have noticed over the years that Gaulish, one of the “Q-Celtic”, or Goidelic, language branches spoken in Gaul – which is basically the name for Old France – often follows very closely on the heels of PIE and/or Proto-Celtic. The Gaulish apple seems not to have fallen very far from the tree. Maybe because Gaulish died out early, what we have remaining to us of it, being last in use so much longer ago, never had time to evolve away from the original tree trunk. Whatever the reason for its lack of evolution, you will see me referring back to Gaulish quite a bit, even though it was not in use in the British Isles). The PIE word, márkos, comes into the “P-Celtic”, or Brythonic languages, as the Brythonic marx, the Old Breton marh, and the Old Cornish and Middle Welsh march. In the “Q-Celtic”, or Goidelic languages, it is marc.

I compared all of these words to my Pictish kings’ list and the limited male and female names we have in Pictish. And…zilch!

Except for one.

King Mark of Cornwall is a famous character in the Arthurian corpus. He is variously called Mark, Marc, Marcus, and, on the Tristan Stone in Cornwall – if it is in fact a reference to Mark at all – Cunomorus. (I get into that a great deal more in The Annals of Anavere; got to save something for the books)! Although not pulled from the Pictish kings list, King Mark does come straight from the pages of Arthurian legend. And, for me, from one other locale.

In my Irish research, I encountered Mark as the killer of several of my prominent characters in a strange, sociopathic Irish chieftain called variously Muircertach, MacErcae, MacErc, and Muircertach MacErcae, each with its own bevy of varietal spellings, (although no one ever seems to be able to explain why he had two surnames, or two “fathers”, or his surname was the same as his given name. I think the answer is in the questions: he doesn’t. The name was bastardized, probably through many retellings/rewritings, from something else).

MacErcae pops in and out of my stories, and his own tale (SPOILER ALERT) is wrapped up in Book 10 of The Annals of Anavere. But he cannot be avoided. MacErcae – and the legendary character, King Mark of “Cornwall”, who I believe was partially based on him – are the prototypes for my King Mark, or in this case, King Marc: horse.

In the legends, Marc suffers from multiple personality disorder. He appears to be two different people: the archetypal, benevolent “Good King Mark” of Cornwall, heartbreakingly betrayed by his beloved nephew and his beautiful, young wife, and…this other guy. The total opposite. Just a really bad guy. And, once you add MacErcae’s career path into it, a really, really BAD GUY.

(I’ve recently equated him with a third, historical character, and what a shock! During the course of thirty years of research, I apparently had three sociopaths sitting and staring at me the whole time and didn’t realize it. If you’ve ever had the misfortune to have to deal face-to-face with a live sociopath, you know how disconcerting and even terrifying it can be. This was, to say the least, unsettling).

So, was Marc Pictish? Well, here goes.

The Picts practiced a system of inheritance whereby the eldest sister was the primary heiress. Rule and title to the limited land passed through her to her eldest son. So, the king’s eldest sister’s eldest son was the heir apparent.

In this case, you see it in the Arthurian Romances with Marc’s nephew, Tristan, being his heir. I have identified Tristan as Drust I, son of Erp, in the Pictish kings list. That being said, Marc would have been Erp’s eldest living brother.

In the Irish tales of MacErcae, that chieftain operated almost equally between Pictish Scotland and Ireland, (which may or may not have had its own version of the Scottish Picts in the Irish Cruithne; scholars disagree). MacErcae’s time in both countries seems to have been spent constantly trying to drum up a kingdom for himself. He was ambitious, power-hungry, and ruthless, even for such an already brutal time as the fifth century AD.

Marc of “Cornwall” (I explain the quotation marks in The Annals of Anavere) also spent time claiming and disputing his right to kingdoms, land, and/or heiresses in both Scotland and Ireland. One of the legends has Blanchefleur/Erp and her young son, Tristan, having been run out of their rightful kingdom by her brother, Marc, fleeing for their lives and hiding in exile in the northern forests. The fortunes of both men – Marc and MacErcae – waxed and waned dramatically throughout their spotty careers.

It would appear that Erp was the Pictish heiress. Mark, or Marc, her eldest brother, bearing an Old Irish name, was the heir apparent. (Their mother would have been the original heiress). With the appearance of Tristan/Drust, his heir apparent, Mark felt threatened and took action to oust him and his mother, who represented physical evidence of Drust’s legitimacy. What we’re probably looking at here then is a “palace coup” amongst the ancient Picts.

Would Marc have had an Old Irish name, even if Pictish was not a Celtic language?

The short answer is “yes”. The longer answer is that Pictish women were reported to have consorted with the best men and with whomever took their fancy. They chose their mates freely, and they chose from among the best: likely those who possessed the greatest military prowess. That being said, they did not always choose from among their own. It seems that Pictish women often “married” Romano-Britons and Irish, and later, even Anglo-Saxon settlers.

Due to their value as heiresses, marriage-by-capture was commonly practiced in the fifth century. This heinous habit led to many landed women seeking sanctuary in the burgeoning Church and, in turn, to the growth of the Celtic Church in the Isles, as these beneficiaries endowed the Church – rather than their prospective “bridegrooms” – with their money and land. If Pictish women sometimes chose Irishmen as mates, and if the two languages overlapped or borrowed from one another, then it is believable that a Pictish heiress, having married an Irishman, might name their son in his father’s native language.

So, yes, Marc or MacErcae seems to have been an early Picto-Irish chieftain of some sort, bearing a name which looks exactly like the Old Irish word for “horse”: Marc. Therefore, we have a grand total of…drum roll, please…one Pictish horse name. But sometimes, one is all you need.

MLA Citations:

Babaev, Cyril. “Gaulish Glossary.” Gaulish Glossary, tied.verbix.com/project/glossary/gaul.html.

Charlton, T. “Caballus.” Wiktionary, 1879, en.wiktionary.org/wiki/caballus#Latin.

Jones, Heather Rose. A Consideration of Pictish Names: Index. Arval Benicoeur, 1996.

Wagner, Paul. Pictish Warrior, AD 297-841. Osprey Pub., 2002.