The Picts , the pre-Gaelic people of eastern Scotland, have frequently been represented in literature and popular culture.
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The Picts , the pre-Gaelic people of eastern Scotland, have frequently been represented in literature and popular culture.
Thematic Pictish history and imagery has been appropriated by multiple contemporary fine artists, most notably American ex-pat Marianna Lines, [1] [2] [3] British artists Lisa Wright [4] [5] and Jon Hodgson, [6] as well as American artist F. Lennox Campello. [7] [8] [9]
David MacRitchie was an outspoken proponent of the euhemeristic origin of fairies being the folk memory of Picts. [10] [11] He argued they were rooted in a real diminutive or pygmy-statured indigenous population that lived during the late Stone Age across the British Isles, especially Scotland:
"Postulations based on the premise that fairies constitute a folk memory of former races, conquered peoples who were pushed out beyond the periphery of settled areas, have fuelled the imagination of many scholars on this subject. Of particular significance was a theory advanced by David MacRitchie that fairies were an actual race of small or 'little' people, the original Pict[ish] peoples of Scotland." [12]
MacRitchie developed what became known as the "Pygmy-Pict theory" in his The Testimony of Tradition (1890) and Fians, Fairies and Picts (1893) regarding fairies to have been folk memories of the aboriginal Picts who in his view were of very small size, pointing to findings of short doors (3 – 4 ft in height) of chambers, underground dwellings, long barrows, as well as quoting old literature such as Adam of Bremen's Historia Norwegiæ which describe the Picts of Orkney as "only a little exceeding pygmies in stature". The folklorist John Francis Campbell, who MacRitchie cited, had also written in his Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1860–62):
"I believe there once was a small race of people in these islands, who are remembered as fairies [...] the fairy was probably a Pict." [13]
Robert Louis Stevenson described so the Picts in his Heather Ale poem:
Rudely plucked from their hiding,
Never a word they spoke:
A son and his aged father—
Last of the dwarfish folk.
Modern archaeological studies demonstrate that the Picts were not significantly different in height from the present-day occupants of Scotland.[ citation needed ]
On the road coming, five days' travel, a Pict woman
(big mouth and small bones) gave me shelter, and
laughed (part scorn, part pity) at my journey.
The Picts were a group of peoples in northern Britain, north of the Firth of Forth, in the Early Middle Ages. Where they lived and details of their culture can be gleaned from early medieval texts and Pictish stones. The name Picti appears in written records as an exonym from the late third century AD. They are assumed to have been descendants of the Caledonii and other northern Iron Age tribes. Their territory is referred to as "Pictland" by modern historians. Initially made up of several chiefdoms, it came to be dominated by the Pictish kingdom of Fortriu from the seventh century. During this Verturian hegemony, Picti was adopted as an endonym. This lasted around 160 years until the Pictish kingdom merged with that of Dál Riata to form the Kingdom of Alba, ruled by the House of Alpin. The concept of "Pictish kingship" continued for a few decades until it was abandoned during the reign of Caustantín mac Áeda.
Dál Riata or Dál Riada was a Gaelic kingdom that encompassed the western seaboard of Scotland and north-eastern Ireland, on each side of the North Channel. At its height in the 6th and 7th centuries, it covered what is now Argyll in Scotland and part of County Antrim in Northern Ireland. After a period of expansion, Dál Riata eventually became associated with the Gaelic Kingdom of Alba.
The Battle of Dun Nechtain or Battle of Nechtansmere was fought between the Picts, led by King Bridei Mac Bili, and the Northumbrians, led by King Ecgfrith, on 20 May 685.
David MacRitchie was a Scottish folklorist and antiquarian. He proposed that stories of fairies originated with an aboriginal race that occupied the British Isles before Celts and other groups arrived.
MacAlpin's treason is a medieval legend which explains the replacement of the Pictish language by Gaelic in the 9th and 10th centuries.
The Cruthin were a people of early medieval Ireland. Their heartland was in Ulster and included parts of the present-day counties of Antrim, Down and Londonderry. They are also said to have lived in parts of Leinster and Connacht. Their name is the Irish equivalent of *Pritanī, the reconstructed native name of the Celtic Britons, and Cruthin was sometimes used to refer to the Picts, but there is a debate among scholars as to the relationship of the Cruthin with the Britons and Picts.
Óengus son of Fergus was king of the Picts from 732 until his death in 761. His reign can be reconstructed in some detail from a variety of sources. The unprecedented territorial gains he made from coast to coast, and the legacy he left, mean Óengus can be considered the first king of what would become Scotland.
Bridei son of Maelchon was King of the Picts from 554 to 584. Sources are vague or contradictory regarding him, but it is believed that his court was near Loch Ness and that he may have been a Christian. Several contemporaries also claimed the title "King of the Picts". He died in the mid-580s, possibly in battle, and was succeeded by Gartnait son of Domelch.
Bran Mak Morn is a hero of five pulp fiction short stories by Robert E. Howard. In the stories, most of which were first published in Weird Tales, Bran is the last king of Howard's romanticized version of the tribal race of Picts.
"Worms of the Earth" is a short story by American fantasy fiction writer Robert E. Howard. It was originally published in the magazine Weird Tales in November 1932, then again in 1975 in a collection of Howard's short stories, Worms of the Earth. The story features one of Howard's recurring protagonists, Bran Mak Morn, a legendary king of the Picts.
Fortriu was a Pictish kingdom recorded between the 4th and 10th centuries. It was traditionally believed to be located in and around Strathearn in central Scotland, but is more likely to have been based in the north, in the Moray and Easter Ross area. Fortriu is a term used by historians as it is not known what name its people used to refer to their polity. Historians also sometimes use the name synonymously with Pictland in general.
Uuen son of Onuist, commonly referred to by the hypocoristic Eóganán, was king of the Picts between AD 837–839.
Bridei son of Beli ; died 692) was king of Fortriu and of the Picts from 671 until 692. His reign marks the start of the period known to historians as the Verturian hegemony, a turning point in the history of Scotland, when the uniting of Pictish provinces under the over-kingship of the kings of Fortriu saw the development of a strong Pictish state and identity encompassing most of the peoples north of the Forth.
The origins of the Kingdom of Alba pertain to the origins of the Kingdom of Alba, or the Gaelic Kingdom of Scotland, either as a mythological event or a historical process, during the Early Middle Ages.
Many writers have been drawn to the idea of the Picts and created fictional stories and mythology about them in the absence of much real data. This romanticised view tends to portray them as sometimes wearing the modern Kilt or as noble savages, much as the view of Europeans on Native Americans in the 18th century.
A list of prose works by Robert E. Howard. The works are sorted by genre, by series and then alphabetically. Untitled works and fragments are listed separately by their opening line.
Scotland was divided into a series of kingdoms in the early Middle Ages, i.e. between the end of Roman authority in southern and central Britain from around 400 AD and the rise of the kingdom of Alba in 900 AD. Of these, the four most important to emerge were the Picts, the Gaels of Dál Riata, the Britons of Alt Clut, and the Anglian kingdom of Bernicia. After the arrival of the Vikings in the late 8th century, Scandinavian rulers and colonies were established on the islands and along parts of the coasts. In the 9th century, the House of Alpin combined the lands of the Scots and Picts to form a single kingdom which constituted the basis of the Kingdom of Scotland.
"Men of the Shadows" is the title of a poem by American writer Robert E. Howard, published sometimes in itself and sometimes at the beginning of a 1926 story with the same title, dealing with the Pictish King Bran Mak Morn. The poem was first published in 1957 in Always Comes Evening, a collection of Howard poems.
The Battle of 839, also known as the Disaster of 839 or the Picts’ Last Stand, was fought in 839 between the Vikings and the Picts and Gaels. It was a decisive victory for the Vikings in which Uuen, the king of the Picts, his brother Bran and Aed son of Boanta, King of Dál Riata, were all killed. Their deaths led to the rise of Kenneth I and the formation of the Kingdom of Scotland, as well as the disappearance of Pictish identity. It has therefore been described as "one of the most decisive and important battles in British history."
Henderson, L.; Cowan, E. J. (2001), Scottish Fairy Belief: A History, East Linton: Tuckwell Press, ISBN 1862321906