Fw: [Pictish] Cruithni, Picti, etc.

Alright, here's some more from Paul Wagner's book, I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts: "In 1955 Kenneth Jackson determined that Pictish belonged to the Brythonic branch of Celtic languages, with features found in Gaulish but not in British, and suggested a pre-Indoeuropean substratum based on a few indecipherable ogham inscriptions. There has been little advance on this analysis since, except a refutation of the non-Celtic element. There are also a number of diversions that have confused scholars. For instance, Irish chroniclers refer to both the non-Gaelic inhabitants of early Ireland and the Picts as Cruithni. Some have used this to support the argument that the Picts were aboriginals, whereas in fact Cruithni is simply the Goidelic rendering of Pritani or 'Briton'. This has, in turn, been used to identify the Picts as the Caledonians. Unfortunately, on closer inspection the early Irish authors use the name Cruithni only to refer to the Northern Irish, and use Picti for the North British. The Cruithni of Ireland were defeated in the battle of Brae Slieve in 627 and are not mentioned again after 774, while the name Cruithni is not used to refer to the Picts until 865, by which time the Picts had lost their seperate identity. The confusion seems to have arisen partly because the Scotti were themselves Cruithni, and because the legendary 'Father of the Picts' bore the personal name Cruithne. In fact the earliest identifiable evidence of Pictish culture comes from the broch-dwellers of the north. While the earliest Pictish symbol stones date from the 6th or even 7th century AD, at Pool in Orkney a 6th-century Pictish building was built with re-used stones which already which already had Pictish symbols on them...... Written history also favours the brochs as the cradle of the Picts. Like the Vikings, the broch-dwellers found Orkney an ideal staging post for piracy, and during the Pictish raids of the 4th century the Roman fleet targeted the Orkneys and Shetland for reprisals, not the south. Chroniclers like Nennius, Bede and Gildas all indicate that Orkney was the first centre of Pictish power, and the Pictish place-name element pit is widely found in the broch-lands, despite the later obliteration of place -names by Norse settlers. The VIkings named Orkney terra Petorum ('Pict land') and her channel the Pettaland fjord ('Pictland Firth', now Pentland Firth). Oral tradition also links the brochs to the Picts, and they are called 'Picts' houses' in Scotland to this day. After Mons Grampius, brochs even began to appear around the Firth of Forth, marking an expansion south by the broch-dwellers, perhaps under Roman invitation." -Michael ________________________________________________________________ The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today!

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