Celtic Mythology and Religion

224 CELTIC MYTHOLOGY AND RELIGION.
barrows, chambered cairns, and rude stone circles.
They were probably also the builders of the brochs.
The theory that brochs are of Norse origin arises
from ethnological confusion ; for the Norse were
Aryans possessing iron implements, and builders,
like the Germans and Celts, of wooden and not of
stone buildings. The Picts were Finnish. Mr.
Joseph Anderson says that stone circles attain their
principal development in Pictland proper, and are
most abundant in the district between the Moray
Firth and the Firth of Tay.
" Those of the Scottish
circles that have been examined," he says, " have
yielded interments of the Bronze Age."
This better
development of the circles in Pictland goes to prove
that the circle builders lasted longer in Pictland
than anywhere else, and, in fact, that the builders
were the ancestors of the historic Picts, and possibly
the historic Picts themselves.
Mr. Fergusson, from
quite another standpoint, suggests that Clava is the
burial place of the royal family of Brude Mac
Maelchon, the king whom Columba visited on the
banks of the Ness. The suggestion is not at all
a bad one.
We shall now draw the threads of our argument
together. In our process of elimination we discovered
that the Aryan races built no stone circles ;
the Celts, therefore, and their Druids, had nothing
to do with them ;
they are pre-Celtic as well as prehistoric
; the circles are so often connected with
burial that we may take it
for granted that they all