Origins of the Kingdom of Alba - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Origins of the Kingdom of Alba pertains to the origins of the Kingdom of Alba

Kingdom of Alba

The name Kingdom of Alba pertains to the Kingdom of Scotland between the deaths of Donald II in 900, and of Alexander III in 1286 which then led indirectly to the Scottish Wars of Independence...

, or the Gaelic

Gaels

The Gaels or Goidels are speakers of one of the Goidelic Celtic languages: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx. Goidelic speech originated in Ireland and subsequently spread to western and northern Scotland and the Isle of Man....

Kingdom of Scotland

The Kingdom of Scotland was a Sovereign state in North-West Europe that existed from 843 until 1707. It occupied the northern third of the island of Great Britain and shared a land border to the south with the Kingdom of England...

, either as a mythological event or a historical process, during the Early Middle Ages

Scotland in the Early Middle Ages

Scotland in the early Middle Ages, between the end of Roman authority in southern and central Britain from around 400 and the rise of the kingdom of Alba in 900, was divided into a series of petty kingdoms. Of these the four most important to emerge were the Picts, the Scots of Dál Riata, the...

Medieval version

The conceptualisation of the past as the standard of the Middle Ages is perhaps best encapsulated by the German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

term Völkerwanderung. In this model, the Scots are portrayed as making their way from Egypt

Egypt

Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...

via Ireland

Ireland

Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...

to Scotland, annihilating their enemies on the way. The legitimacy therefore derives from conquest, and purity of racial/royal descent. The tradition in Scotland was influenced by the Historia Regum Britanniae
Historia Regum Britanniae
The Historia Regum Britanniae is a pseudohistorical account of British history, written c. 1136 by Geoffrey of Monmouth. It chronicles the lives of the kings of the Britons in a chronological narrative spanning a time of two thousand years, beginning with the Trojans founding the British nation...

, the Lebor Gabála Érenn
Lebor Gabála Érenn
Lebor Gabála Érenn is the Middle Irish title of a loose collection of poems and prose narratives recounting the mythical origins and history of the Irish from the creation of the world down to the Middle Ages...

and the Historia Brittonum. Ultimately, such conceptualizations can be derived from Virgil

Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...

's Aeneid
Aeneid
The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It is composed of roughly 10,000 lines in dactylic hexameter...

and the Bible

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

, but were just as much an organic and original product of the medieval Scots themselves.

In the Life of St Cathróe of Metz, the hagiographer

Hagiography

Hagiography is the study of saints.From the Greek and , it refers literally to writings on the subject of such holy people, and specifically to the biographies of saints and ecclesiastical leaders. The term hagiology, the study of hagiography, is also current in English, though less common...

recounts the mythological origin of the saint's people, the Gaels. The hagiographer recounts that they landed in the vicinity of Cruachan Feli - called the Mountain of Ireland. He recounts that the Gaels conquered Ireland after a series of battles with the Picts

Picts

The Picts were a group of Late Iron Age and Early Mediaeval people living in what is now eastern and northern Scotland. There is an association with the distribution of brochs, place names beginning 'Pit-', for instance Pitlochry, and Pictish stones. They are recorded from before the Roman conquest...

(here Pictanes). They followed up their conquest of Ireland by invading Britain, conquering Iona before conquering the cities of Rigmonath (=Cennrigmonaid; i.e. St Andrews

St Andrews

St Andrews is a university town and former royal burgh on the east coast of Fife in Scotland. The town is named after Saint Andrew the Apostle.St Andrews has a population of 16,680, making this the fifth largest settlement in Fife....

) and Bellathor (=Cinnbelathoir; an unidentified Scoto-Pictish palace

Palace

A palace is a grand residence, especially a royal residence or the home of a head of state or some other high-ranking dignitary, such as a bishop or archbishop. The word itself is derived from the Latin name Palātium, for Palatine Hill, one of the seven hills in Rome. In many parts of Europe, the...

). Afterwards, their commander - a Spartan called Nel (=Niall) - named the land and people after his Egyptian wife Scota

Scota

Scota, in Irish mythology, Scottish mythology, and pseudohistory, is the name given to two different mythological daughters of two different Egyptian Pharaohs to whom the Gaels traced their ancestry, allegedly explaining the name Scoti, applied by the Romans to Irish raiders, and later to the Irish...

. The tale is astonishingly important, because it dates to about 980, an extremely early date, and has Scottish sources. Indeed, the saint himself is Scottish, born of royalty. According to the Life, he was educated in Armagh

Armagh

Armagh is a large settlement in Northern Ireland, and the county town of County Armagh. It is a site of historical importance for both Celtic paganism and Christianity and is the seat, for both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of Ireland, of the Archbishop of Armagh...

, before returning to Scotland

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

and entering the service of King Constantine II

Constantine II of Scotland

Constantine, son of Áed was an early King of Scotland, known then by the Gaelic name Alba. The Kingdom of Alba, a name which first appears in Constantine's lifetime, was in northern Great Britain...

(Causantín mac Áeda). Constantine gave Cathróe conduct to the court of King Dyfnwal of Strathclyde

Kingdom of Strathclyde

Strathclyde , originally Brythonic Ystrad Clud, was one of the early medieval kingdoms of the celtic people called the Britons in the Hen Ogledd, the Brythonic-speaking parts of what is now southern Scotland and northern England. The kingdom developed during the post-Roman period...

, and from there made his way to Viking England, and finally, the continent.

Medieval Scottish genealogies

Genealogy

Genealogy is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history. Genealogists use oral traditions, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members...

trace the origin of the Scots to Fergus Mór mac Eirc, the legendary founder of Dál Riata

Dál Riata

Dál Riata was a Gaelic overkingdom on the western coast of Scotland with some territory on the northeast coast of Ireland...

. The Senchus fer n-Alban
Senchus fer n-Alban
The Senchus Fer n-Alban is an Old Irish medieval text, believed to have been compiled in the 10th century. It may have been derived from earlier documents of the 7th century which are presumed to have been written in Latin...

also contains the myth of Fergus. This is an older document, perhaps dating to the seventh century, that has been heavily interpolated with later material, probably including the mythological parts. Appended to the Míniugud Senchasa Fher nAlba in many manuscripts is the Genelaig Albanensium, a list of genealogies relating to Gaelic rulers of Scotland going up to at least Constantine III (995-7) (it goes later in some of the manuscripts). It is likely that this material was inserted into the Míniugud in the early eleventh century.

In the Duan Albanach
Duan Albanach
The Duan Albanach is a Middle Gaelic poem found with the Lebor Bretnach, a Gaelic version of the Historia Brittonum of Nennius, with extensive additional material ....

, this tradition is re-enforced. It is known to have been written in the reign of King Malcolm III

Malcolm III of Scotland

Máel Coluim mac Donnchada , was King of Scots...

(Máel Coluim mac Donnchada) (one line reads "Maelcoluim is now the king"). It recounts the earliest histories of the Picts, and then celebrates the conquest of the Picts by the Gaedhil. It calls the Scottish Gaels the children of Conaire and the traces the descent of the Scottish kings from Fergus mac Eirc. It does not trace their descent any further, because in the manuscript the Duan Albanach follows from a companion piece, the Duan Eireannach (i.e. Irish Poem), which had already recounted the history of the Gaels from Scythia

Scythia

In antiquity, Scythian or Scyths were terms used by the Greeks to refer to certain Iranian groups of horse-riding nomadic pastoralists who dwelt on the Pontic-Caspian steppe...

via Egypt to Ireland.

These mythical traditions are incorporated into the Declaration of Arbroath

Declaration of Arbroath

The Declaration of Arbroath is a declaration of Scottish independence, made in 1320. It is in the form of a letter submitted to Pope John XXII, dated 6 April 1320, intended to confirm Scotland's status as an independent, sovereign state and defending Scotland's right to use military action when...

, and in that document origins from Ireland are omitted for the first time. They were believed in the early modern period and beyond, and even King James VI

James I of England

James VI and I was King of Scots as James VI from 24 July 1567 and King of England and Ireland as James I from the union of the English and Scottish crowns on 24 March 1603...

traced his origin to Fergus, saying, in his own words, that he was a "Monarch sprunge of Ferguse race".

Goth versus Gael

The Goth

Goths

The Goths were an East Germanic tribe of Scandinavian origin whose two branches, the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths, played an important role in the fall of the Roman Empire and the emergence of Medieval Europe....

versus Gael

Gaël

Gaël is a commune in the Ille-et-Vilaine department of Brittany in north-western France.It lies southwest of Rennes between Saint-Méen-le-Grand and Mauron...

model was developed in the context of a vast cultural and linguistic chasm which existed in Scotland in the early modern period, and was invented in the context of the Anglo-Scottish Union and the Jacobite risings in the eighteenth century. The model originates ultimately in the later Middle Ages

Middle Ages

The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...

, when the Germanic

West Germanic languages

The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three traditional branches of the Germanic family of languages and include languages such as German, English, Dutch, Afrikaans, the Frisian languages, and Yiddish...

-speaking subjects of the Scottish king began to think of themselves as Scots, and began the ethnic and cultural disassociation of Scottish and Gaelic, previously two identical concepts, by calling their own brand of English Scottis and renaming Scottis as Erse
Erse
Erse can be:*an alternative name for any Goidelic language, especially Irish, from Erische.*a 16th-19th Century Scots name for Scottish Gaelic...

. Also important was the impact of the Reformation

Scottish Reformation

The Scottish Reformation was Scotland's formal break with the Papacy in 1560, and the events surrounding this. It was part of the wider European Protestant Reformation; and in Scotland's case culminated ecclesiastically in the re-establishment of the church along Reformed lines, and politically in...

and the Union. Scots

Scots language

Scots is the Germanic language variety spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster . It is sometimes called Lowland Scots to distinguish it from Scottish Gaelic, the Celtic language variety spoken in most of the western Highlands and in the Hebrides.Since there are no universally accepted...

imported English prejudices about the Irish Gaels, and in turn adapted them for the Scottish Gaels.

The Goth versus Gael debate centred on which part of Scotland's past is the more important, the Germanic or the Celtic. Germanicists, or Gothicists as they are sometimes called, attempted to disassociate Gaels and Gaelic from the Scottish past. One extreme example was John Pinkerton

John Pinkerton

John Pinkerton was a Scottish antiquarian, cartographer, author, numismatist, historian, and early advocate of Germanic racial supremacy theory....

, who believed passionately that the people and language of lowland Scotland derived from a Gothic

Gothic language

Gothic is an extinct Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. It is known primarily from the Codex Argenteus, a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizable Text corpus...

dialect

Dialect

The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...

spoken by the Picts. John Pinkerton even invented ancient tales to give substance to this fictional ancient people. The main thrust of the Germanicist model was destroyed in the nineteenth century when William Forbes Skene

William Forbes Skene

William Forbes Skene , Scottish historian and antiquary, was the second son of Sir Walter Scott's friend, James Skene , of Rubislaw, near Aberdeen....

and others brought medieval Scotland into the frame of serious, recognisably modern scholarship. Nevertheless, this model has had a lot of impact on popular understandings of medieval Scottish history. It explains, for instance, why some popular historians believe that English became the language of Lowland Scotland in the reign of Malcolm III, owing to the influence of his wife, the Anglo

Anglo-Saxons

Anglo-Saxon is a term used by historians to designate the Germanic tribes who invaded and settled the south and east of Great Britain beginning in the early 5th century AD, and the period from their creation of the English nation to the Norman conquest. The Anglo-Saxon Era denotes the period of...

-Hungarian Saint Margaret

Saint Margaret of Scotland

Saint Margaret of Scotland , also known as Margaret of Wessex and Queen Margaret of Scotland, was an English princess of the House of Wessex. Born in exile in Hungary, she was the sister of Edgar Ætheling, the short-ruling and uncrowned Anglo-Saxon King of England...

, when in fact no such thing happened for another few centuries.

Multiculturalism

A third paradigm used to understand the origins of the Scots is multiculturalism

Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism is the appreciation, acceptance or promotion of multiple cultures, applied to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the organizational level, e.g...

. This idea is currently in popular vogue. Under this paradigm, Scottish history is understood as a Union of many peoples, ideally as many as possible. Picts

Picts

, Gaels/Scots, Britons

Britons (historical)

The Britons were the Celtic people culturally dominating Great Britain from the Iron Age through the Early Middle Ages. They spoke the Insular Celtic language known as British or Brythonic...

and Northumbrian Angles

Angles

The Angles is a modern English term for a Germanic people who took their name from the ancestral cultural region of Angeln, a district located in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany...

usually provide the core, but sometimes Normans

Normans

The Normans were the people who gave their name to Normandy, a region in northern France. They were descended from Norse Viking conquerors of the territory and the native population of Frankish and Gallo-Roman stock...

, Norse

Norsemen

Norsemen is used to refer to the group of people as a whole who spoke what is now called the Old Norse language belonging to the North Germanic branch of Indo-European languages, especially Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, Swedish and Danish in their earlier forms.The meaning of Norseman was "people...

and Flemings are added.

Gaelic and Pictish kings

That Pictland had Gaelic kings is not in question. One of the earliest, if not the earliest, was Nechtan mac Derile

Nechtan IV of the Picts

Nechtan mac Der-Ilei or Nechtan mac Dargarto was king of the Picts in the early 8th century. He succeeded his brother Bridei in 706. He is associated with significant religious reforms in Pictland. He abdicated in 724 in favour of his nephew and became a monk...

, the son of a petty Gaelic lord named Dargart

Dargart mac Finguine

Dargart mac Finguine was a member of the Cenél Comgaill kindred, after which Cowal in Scotland is named. The only event directly connected with him in the Irish annals, based on a chronicle then being kept on Iona, is his death....

and the Pictish princess Derile. Pictish kings, moreover, were probably patronising Gaelic-speaking poets. There exists a Gaelic elegy to the Pictish king, Bridei, Bili's son. The poem is attributed to his contemporary, Adomnán of Iona

Iona

Iona is a small island in the Inner Hebrides off the western coast of Scotland. It was a centre of Irish monasticism for four centuries and is today renowned for its tranquility and natural beauty. It is a popular tourist destination and a place for retreats...

, but this is tenuous. It is however probably contemporary, dating to the late 7th or early eighth century. Another poem, attributed to Riagail of Bangor

Riagail of Bangor

Riagail of Bangor, aka Reghuil, Abbot of Bangor, died 881.Canon O'Hanlon says of himSt. Reghuil, Abbot of Bangor, County of Down. - At the 11th of June, the Martyrology of Tallagh records a festival, in honour of Riagail, Bennchair. He flourished in the ninth century, and at a time when Bangor had...

, celebrates the same ruler's victory of the Northumbrians, at the Battle of Dun Nechtain on 20 May 685.

In the early eighth century, the great King of the Picts was Óengus mac Fergusa

Óengus I of the 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.Óengus became the chief king in Pictland following a period of civil war in the late 720s...

, conqueror of Dalriada. It is possible, as has been pointed out by some linguists and historians, that Óengus and Fergus are just Gaelic versions of native Pictish names, namely, Onuist and Urguist, the names recorded in one strand of the Pictish king lists. However, these names are rare in the larger P-Celtic

Brythonic languages

The Brythonic or Brittonic languages form one of the two branches of the Insular Celtic language family, the other being Goidelic. The name Brythonic was derived by Welsh Celticist John Rhys from the Welsh word Brython, meaning an indigenous Briton as opposed to an Anglo-Saxon or Gael...

world, and largely out of place in the context of previous Pictish kings. Furthermore, an inscription relating to Causantín son of Fergus reads:
This inscription is from the Dupplin Cross

Dupplin Cross

The Dupplin Cross is a carved, monumental Pictish stone, which dates from around 800A.D. It was first recorded by Thomas Pennant in 1769, on a hillside in Strathearn, a little to the north Forteviot and Dunning...

, and was found in the heart of southern Pictland, near Forteviot

Forteviot

Forteviot is a village in Strathearn, Scotland on the south bank of the River Earn between Dunning and Perth. It lies in the council area of Perth and Kinross...

. It dates from the late 8th or early ninth century. If the name in question really were the Pictish Urguist, then it is odd that a contemporary Pictish description gave the Gaelic form, form beginning with the unmistakably Goidelic

Goidelic languages

The Goidelic languages or Gaelic languages are one of the two branches of the Insular Celtic languages, the other consisting of the Brythonic languages. Goidelic languages historically formed a dialect continuum stretching from the south of Ireland through the Isle of Man to the north of Scotland...

F. It is thus likely that several of the later Pictish Kings spoke Gaelic as their first language.

Fortriu to Moray

The St Andrews

University of St Andrews

The University of St Andrews, informally referred to as "St Andrews", is the oldest university in Scotland and the third oldest in the English-speaking world after Oxford and Cambridge. The university is situated in the town of St Andrews, Fife, on the east coast of Scotland. It was founded between...

historian Alex Woolf has recently put forward a case for relocating the Kingdom of Fortriu north of the Mounth (the Grampians). Previously, it had been located in the vicinity of Strathearn; but as Woolf pointed out, this is based on one passage saying that the Men of Fortriu fought a battle in Strathearn. This is an unconvincing reason, because there are two Strathearns - one in the south

Strathearn

Strathearn or Strath Earn is the strath of the River Earn, in Scotland. It extends from Loch Earn in Perth and Kinross to the River Tay....

, and one in the north - and, moreover, every battle has to be fought outside the territory of one of the combatants. By contrast, a northern recension of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a collection of annals in Old English chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons. The original manuscript of the Chronicle was created late in the 9th century, probably in Wessex, during the reign of Alfred the Great...

makes it clear that Fortriu was north of the ‘‘Mounth’’, in the area visited by Columba

Columba

Saint Columba —also known as Colum Cille , Colm Cille , Calum Cille and Kolban or Kolbjørn —was a Gaelic Irish missionary monk who propagated Christianity among the Picts during the Early Medieval Period...

. The case has to be accepted, and there can be little doubt that the core of Fortriu lay to the north of the Grampian Mountains - in Moray, Ross and perhaps Mar and Buchan too.

Relocating Fortriu north of the Mounth increases the importance of the Vikings. After all, the Viking impact on the north was greater than in the south, and in the north, the Vikings actually conquered and made permanent territorial gains.

Pictland to Alba

There remains the possibility that Alba

Alba

Alba is the Scottish Gaelic name for Scotland. It is cognate to Alba in Irish and Nalbin in Manx, the two other Goidelic Insular Celtic languages, as well as similar words in the Brythonic Insular Celtic languages of Cornish and Welsh also meaning Scotland.- Etymology :The term first appears in...

is simply a Gaelic

Goidelic languages

translation of the Pictish name for Pictland. Both the Welsh

Welsh language

Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...

and the Irish

Irish language

Irish , also known as Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now spoken as a first language by a minority of Irish people, as well as being a second language of a larger proportion of...

use archaic words for Briton to describe the Picts. It is very likely therefore that the Picts did so themselves; or if they did not originally, they came to do so. In which case the Pictish for Pictland would have been either the same as their word for Britain, or an obsolete term. Alba was exactly this kind of word in Old Irish

Old Irish language

Old Irish is the name given to the oldest form of the Goidelic languages for which extensive written texts are extant. It was used from the 6th to the 10th centuries, by which time it had developed into Middle Irish....

. It is therefore plausible that Alba is simply a Gaelic translation. The name change is first registered at the very beginning of the tenth century, not long before Constantine II

Constantine II of Scotland

Constantine, son of Áed was an early King of Scotland, known then by the Gaelic name Alba. The Kingdom of Alba, a name which first appears in Constantine's lifetime, was in northern Great Britain...

is alleged to have Scotticised the "Pictish" Church, and at the height of Viking raids. Later records, especially the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba

Chronicle of the Kings of Alba

The Chronicle of the Kings of Alba, or Scottish Chronicle, is a short written chronicle of the Kings of Alba, covering the period from the time of Kenneth MacAlpin until the reign of Kenneth II . W.F...

and other documents in the Poppleton Manuscript

Poppleton manuscript

The Poppleton Manuscript is the name given to the fourteenth century codex likely compiled by Robert of Poppleton, a Carmelite friar who was the Prior of Hulne, near Alnwick. The manuscript contains numerous works, such as a map of the world , and works by Orosius, Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gerald...

, tell us that the Picts were simply conquered and annihilated by king Kenneth MacAlpin

Kenneth I of Scotland

Cináed mac Ailpín , commonly Anglicised as Kenneth MacAlpin and known in most modern regnal lists as Kenneth I was king of the Picts and, according to national myth, first king of Scots, earning him the posthumous nickname of An Ferbasach, "The Conqueror"...

(Cináed mac Ailpín). This is the traditional explanation, and the one repeated by many historians. The only thing which is certain is that before 900, the Cruithentuath (Gaelic for Pictland), and perhaps Fortriu, became Gaelic-speaking Alba.

Primary sources

Anderson, Alan Orr, Early Sources of Scottish History: AD 500-1286, 2 Vols, (Edinburgh, 1922)
Skene, William F.
William Forbes Skene
William Forbes Skene , Scottish historian and antiquary, was the second son of Sir Walter Scott's friend, James Skene , of Rubislaw, near Aberdeen....

(ed.), Chronicles of the Picts and Scots: And Other Memorials of Scottish History, (Edinburgh, 1867)

Secondary sources

Anderson, Marjorie O., Kings and Kingship in Early Scotland, (Edinburgh, 1973)
Bannerman, John, Studies in the History of Dalriada, (Edinburgh, 1974)
Broun, Dauvit "Defining Scotland and the Scots Before the Wars of Independence," in Image and Identity: the Making and Remaking of Scotland through the Ages, in. D. Broun, R. Finlay & M. Lynch (eds.), (Edinburgh 1998), pp. 4–17
Broun, Dauvit, "Dunkeld and the origin of Scottish identity", in Innes Review 48 (1997), pp. 112–24, reprinted in Spes Scotorum: Hope of Scots, eds. Broun and Clancy (1999), pp. 95–111
Broun, Dauvit & Clancy, Thomas Owen (eds.),Spes Scottorum: Hope of the Scots, (Edinburgh, 1999)
Clancy, Thomas Owen, "Philosopher-King: Nechtan mac Der-Ilei", in the Scottish Historical Review, 83, 2004, pp. 125–49.
Clancy, Thomas Owen, "The real St Ninian", in The Innes Review, 52 (2001).
Clancy, Thomas Owen, "Scotland, the ‘Nennian’ recension of the Historia Brittonum, and the Lebor Bretnach", in Simon Taylor (ed.) Kings, Clerics and Chronicles in Scotland, 500-1297, (Dublin/Portland, 2000), pp. 87–107.
Clancy, Thomas Owen (ed.), The Triumph Tree: Scotland's Earliest Poetry, 550-1350, (Edinburgh, 1998)
Driscoll, Steven, Alba: The Gaelic Kingdom of Scotland AD 800-1124, (Edinburgh, 1996)
Dumville, David N., "Ireland and North Britain in the Earlier Middle Ages: Contexts for the Míniugud Senchasa Fher nAlban", in Colm Ó Baoill & Nancy R. McGuire (eds.) Rannsachadh Na Gáidhlig, (Aberdeen, 2002)
Dumville, David N., "St Cathróe of Metz and the Hagiography of Exoticism," in Irish Hagiography: Saints and Scholars, ed. John Carey et al. (Dublin, 2001), pp. 172–6
Ferguson, William, The Identity of the Scottish Nation: An Historic Enquiry, (Edinburgh, 1998)
Foster, Sally, Picts, Gaels and Scots: Early Historic Scotland, (London, 1996)
Forsyth, Katherine
Katherine Forsyth
Katherine S. Forsyth is a British historian who specializes in the history and culture of Celtic peoples during the 1st millenium AD, in particular the Picts...

, Language in Pictland, (Utrecht 1997)
Jackson, Kenneth H. (ed), The Gaelic Notes in the Book of Deer (The Osborn Bergin Memorial Lecture 1970), (Cambridge (1972)
Jackson, Kenneth H. "The Pictish language", in F.T. Wainwright (ed.), The Problem of the Picts, (Edinburgh, 1955), pp. 129–66
Hudson, Benjamin T., Kings of Celtic Scotland, (Westport, 1994)
Pittock, Murray G.H., Celtic Identity and the British Image, (Manchester, 1999)
Watson, W.J.
William J. Watson
Professor William J. Watson was a toponymist, one of the greatest Scottish scholars of the 20th century, and was the first scholar to place the study of Scottish place names on a firm linguistic basis....

, The Celtic Place-Names of Scotland, (Edinburgh, 1926) reprinted, with an Introduction, full Watson bibliography and corrigenda by Simon Taylor (Edinburgh, 2004)
Woolf, Alex, "Dun Nechtain, Fortriu and the Geography of the Picts", (forthcoming)

Medieval version

Goth versus Gael

Multiculturalism

Gaelic and Pictish kings

Fortriu to Moray

Pictland to Alba

Primary sources

Secondary sources

External links

See also