Harkfast Q3
Q3 The Picts were portrayed as stunted, dark, primitive people. Why did the author do this? Was it simply some odd anti-pict racisim? Or was there another reason?
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Historically, that's how picts were often betrayed. I've read quite a few pieces of folk literature that depicted them this way. (and the early Irish, too, who were thought to be descended from the same stock as the Portuguese (Portugal = port of the Gaels).
One example:
The king sat high on his charger,
He looked on the little men;
And the dwarfish and swarthy couple
Looked at the king again.
https://thoughtco.com/heather-ale-by-robert-louis-stevenson-4077751
Yes, this is fairly standard - the picts are either short and nasty or short and clever, but they're always short...
Interesting! The historical references to Picts do not mention this, so probably it is a manifestation of English racism. Thank you.
Like a lot of racism, I think it has its roots in a lack of knowledge of and fear concerning "the other". Plus a feeling that the culture and motives were so different as to be incomprehensible and fearful. This would be in contrast with any and all of Celts, Romans and Saxons, none of whom seem to have gelled with the Picts to any meaningful extent.
Well Pictland + Dal Riada == Scotland, so they definitely gelled with the Celts there!
Here's a photo from a book I collected years ago called Rambles in Galloway by Malcolm Harper (1896). There's an inscription inside dated 1896 dedicating the book as an Xmas gift, and a different hand with small writing has gone through the book and left notes here and there at some unspecified later time.
One of the notes is on this image of Alexander Murray, who was a distinguished professor of languages at the University of Edinburgh, and he's mentioned in the book because a monument was erected to him on a Galloway hill in 1835 (the Galloway hills are chock-a-block with monuments to local people).
Here beside the image, the precise hand (which seems to belong to a Frederick G. Gurney, Claridges, Egginton, Beds.) has written: "A head who [scofts?] & a face like a halfwits, I wonder if this tall sort of cranium, without much occiput, is really that of a pictish 'aboriginal' of Scotland. It is entirely unlike the lowland or English (Angle) head, & quite a unlike the heads of the Gaelic speaking races of Western Scotland farther north."
So yeah, if they look like a halfwit - must be a pict!
Hm, not so sure! Dal Riada seems to have been basically the west coast and islands, plus a bit of what is now Northern Ireland, and was at its greatest extent around 600AD. After that it declined and was successively defeated by sundry other folk, firstly Northumbria and then the Picts... until the Vikings arrived around 800 and worked at mopping the whole lot up! So far as I can tell, folk disagree as to whether the Gaelic faction and the Pictish one came to an agreement, or whether the Gaels were just subordinate to the Picts.
There was one interesting snippet I came across in Wikipedia which might have relevance to Harkfast "Some scholars have seen no revival of Dál Riatan power after the long period of foreign domination (c. 637 to c. 750–760), while others have seen a revival under Áed Find (736–778). Some even claim that the Dál Riata usurped the kingship of Fortriu." (the latter kingdom is one that @Apocryphal and I read about in a Goodreads book a while back). So maybe Hugh C Rae decided to pitch the book in this uncertain interval, and was angling for Ruan actually being Áed Find, and making something of a success of rebuilding the kingdom?
But this is much later than the events in Harkfast.
The earlier book in the same series: From Caledonia to Pictland, Scotland to 795, deals more with the post-Roman time of Harkfast. It covers the late Roman period, origins of the picts, saint ‘Ninnian’ (who was supposedly converting the southern picts in Galloway), and Columba/Iona.
Then it jumps to the kings of Bamburgh (576-692), and finally the rise of the picts (692-789)
I think for there to be a Roman character and seemingly no Christians, this book would need to be pretty early, like in the 400s maybe. But as I’ve said, it doesn’t feel like a serious historical novel to me.
The Kingdom of Dal Riada and the Kingdom of the Picts united under Kenneth MacAlpin to form the Kingdom of Alba in the mid-800s, though Mac Alpin was still styled King of the Picts. MacAlpin then began the process of assimilating the other components of what became Scotland: the Angles to the south and the various Viking lands. So it is the core of Scotland. The area east of Dal Riada was Fortiu, or Pictland.
This sounds like an interesting idea. Pity we will never know!
Cross posted with Apocryphal!
MacAlpin became King of Dal Riada first, then the Picts, but he ruled as King of the Picts. Perhaps he was a scion of both royal families, and inherited the titles at different times. It's rather murky...
IKR? I too believe it to be alt- or a-historical.
I wonder (and it's an unanswerable question, of course) how much of the anti-Pict racism was the province of writers like Bede rather than the general population at large? Bede, as we know, had a strong agenda to his writing, and was naturally going to be dismissive of the Picts (until they were converted, and so long as they accepted the Roman interpretation of certain doctrinal points). He's almost equally dismissive of the Britons who he castigates for a) not adhering to the Christian faith and b) being lazy and uninclined to look after themselves "There [at the Roman wall] the Britons deployed their dispirited ranks along the top of the defence and, day and night, they moped with dazed and trembling hearts. On the other hand the enemy with hooked weapons never ceased from their ravages. The cowardly defenders were wretchedly dragged from the walls and dashed to the ground". Here, of course, when Bede says "Britons" he essentially means "Celts" as opposed to Saxons.
Now, Bede was of the opinion that the Picts hailed from Thrace, a position that I don't think anyone adheres to nowadays, and as I'm sure we all know his writings are now regarded as basically polemic. But... they have had a huge and often unrecognised influence on a lot of later presentation of these times, and since he lived a whole lot closer to those days than we are, I guess we need to take his opinions seriously as representing what people thought back then.
But it would be nice to know how ordinary people in (say) Cumbria or Dumfries and Galloway thought about their Pictish neighbours to the north on a daily basis.
That looks an interesting site though very extensive