Pagan Symbols of the Picts by Stuart McHardy sampler

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the pagan symbols of the picts Morocco, underlining the reality that Scotland was never a completely isolated place, her location at the edge of the ocean making her accessible and not the opposite. And, as noted above, recent genetic research points to the fact that at least some of our ancestors arrived from northern Norway over 6,000 years ago. We should also remember that there have been suggestions that the Megalithic culture itself originated in Orkney. Roman sources tell us that attacks were mounted from the North of Britain against them by barbarian tribes during the entire period of their occupation of southern Britain. Such attacks were frequent and at the very least show a capacity for working together amongst peoples, the Picts and Scots, whom we have been accustomed to understand as distinct ethnic groups and, essentially, enemies. We find them working together to attack Rome, there are clear instances of intermarriage, and it was these two tribal peoples who eventually merged to become the nation state of Scotland. In the ‘barbarian conspiracy’ we can perhaps see a convenient alliance between indigenous peoples and some of the Germanic-speaking troops brought into Britain from Europe by the Romans themselves. Another possibility, given the ages-old contacts over the North Sea, is that this alliance was founded on established links between the tribal peoples of Scotland and north-western Europe. Perhaps the situation was more like a combination of these two positions. The possibility that there were settlements of Germanicspeaking peoples on the east coast of Scotland during, or even considerably before, the Roman period, can no longer be ruled out. Such Celtic–Germanic linkage is distinctly possible given that we know that the great flowering of Gaelic culture under the Lordship of the Isles was based on a society that was truly Gall-Gael – a combination of Germanic- and Gaelic-speaking peoples. To this day many Scottish clans still claim descent from Norse ancestors. Probably because the British Empire was essentially monoglot – people from Jamaica to Jawalpindi, from Ontario to Adelaide all learned to communicate through English – there has been general acceptance in the United Kingdom that in the past people lived in 24
who were the picts? monoglot cultures. From this it is an easy step to defining peoples by the language they speak – so we have Gaels, Britons, Anglo- Saxons etc. However, in many parts of the world, multi-lingualism is the norm and we cannot state with any certainty that this was not the case in Dark Age Scotland. After all, we know that there was contact between Ireland and the Baltic, and the Megalith builders were part of a culture that stretched as far as North Africa. In this respect, an interesting Lewis tradition speaks of the Calanais stones having been raised initially by men who were black. Similarities in weaponry, hill fort building and pottery-making techniques between Britain and adjoining Europe have been noted by archaeologists, and if one leaves out the question of language, there were a great many similarities indeed between all of the tribal peoples living round the coasts of the North Sea. Although nowadays we use words like Celtic and Anglo-Saxon as if they had an ethnic component, we should remember that these words are effectively descriptive only of language. The people of the Dark Age tribes and earlier would have had no over-arching sense of community beyond their own kin and would in all likelihood be as liable to form alliances with people who spoke a different language as with those who spoke a dialect of their own, depending on circumstances. In his work The Atlantic Celts, Professor Simon James makes the salient point that the term Celtic would have meant nothing to any Welsh or Gaelic speaker before the 18th century. The notion of the Celtic nations is entirely a 20th century construct. That there were close relationships between Scotland’s west coast tribes and those in Ireland is however indisputable; people from both sides of the North Channel have probably been inter marrying for much of the last four or five millennia – and both comm unities were clearly part of the 3rd millennium bce megalithic tradition. Communication between Scotland’s west coast, the Isle of Man and Wales were a regular fact of life. The fact that Galloway, Kintyre and Ulster are all in sight of each other in fair weather, and that we know people were sailing these waters since at least the 4th Millennium bce, underlines this. 25
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Pagan Symbols of the Picts by Stuart McHardy sampler

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