The origin of the Scots: Lost in the mists of time

In any discussion about Scotland and her people, a couple of pertinent questions arise: What is a Scot? From whence did he come? These are very difficult questions to answer, to say the least, as the quest for answers spans great stretches of almost uncharted time.

In large part, the answers depend on a vast and ancient tradition and often doubtful written references, but there is some agreement among the academic community concerned with these subjects.

Let me first address the origin of the Scots. To put it succinctly and a wee bit facetiously, a Scot is an Irishman who left home and never returned.

Yes, that is correct - the Scots originated in Ireland. But you Irish folks knew that all the time, didn't you?

Before proceeding any further, I need to discuss the early and present names of Ireland and Scotland. Early writers from the pre-Christian era up until the 10th and 11th centuries habitually referred to Ireland as Scotia and called her inhabitants the Scoti. The name Hibernia was also used, but the choice for most was Scotia.

Irish historians aver that the name Scotia is derived from the wife of Milesius, King of the Celts who inhabited Spain. Her name was Scota, and she was reputed to be an Egyptian princess. It was Milesius who made the decision to emigrate to Ireland despite the hostile reception the Celtic reconnaissance parties received from the people who then lived in Ireland - the Tuatha De Danaan (people of the goddess Dana).

Milesius died before the actual migration occurred, so Scota and her eight sons led the move. The 16th-century Irish scholar O'Flaherty fixed the date at about 1000 B.C. This date is hotly disputed by many researchers, but numerous philologists and other authorities of modern times support O'Flaherty's assertion.

An even older source of the name Scotia is said to be from another Scota, also of Egyptian royalty, who married an early Celtic leader named Niul. He is said to be the grandson of a Celtic chief, Goadhal Glas. It is from this chief's name that the term Gael is thought to be derived. Niul is supposedly a contemporary of Moses, circa 1400 B.C.

In the 8th and 9th centuries, the Vikings began to refer to Ireland as Ir or Ire as they raided, traded, and sometimes settled in the Emerald Isle (they were the founders of Dublin, Limerick and Waterford). Scholars accept that Viking name as the origin of Eire, the present Gaelic name for the "Auld Sod."

Incidentally, the suffix "-land" in the name of a country (or other political divisions) is a Viking word that means "area" or "land." There is a much older source for the word in Old Celtic. In that ancient tongue, the word is "landa."

During most of this period, the country we now call Scotland was called Alba, a Gaelic name preserved in the later Dukedom of Albany.

Alba was inhabited by a mysterious people, now thought to have been Celtic or proto-Celtic. The Romans called them Picts.

The Picts were unparalleled warriors who successfully resisted penetration and subjugation by the battle-tested legions of Rome who occupied Celtic Britain beginning the 1st century A.D.

In the early part of the 3rd century A.D., a northern Irish tribe called the Feni began to raid the southwestern peninsula of Alba, now known as Argyll (from the Gaelic Earrann A'ghaidheal, "land of the Gaels").

They were led by their king, Carbri Riada, son of Conaire the Great, King of Munster.

The Irish adventurers established a shaky outpost in the Kintyre region. From time to time, military reinforcements came from the home kingdom across the scant 12 miles of the North Channel to help fend off Pictish attacks against the struggling little colony. While successfully resisting these hostile incursions, the tiny enclave (also called Dal Riada, "the tribe of Riada," after the realm in what is now County Antrim) remained primarily a very tentative foothold on an implacably hostile shore.

In the 4th century, the Scotic colony grew stronger, bolstered by a large contingent of kinsmen from Kerry, led by their chief, Fergus. The Picts, becoming more fearful of these strangers on their shore, increased their efforts to drive out the intruders.

Niall of the Nine Hostages, one of Ireland's greatest High Kings, came to the aid of the Scoti and their king, Gabhran.

Niall fitted out a large fleet and sailed to Argyll. Combining his forces with those of Gabhran, he marched against the Picts and soundly defeated them. The victory put the little colony on a solid footing. Niall is said to have forced the Picts to pay tribute.

All this occurred early in Niall's reign, about A.D. 390-395.

Tradition says that the greatest permanent influx of the Scoti took place late in the 5th century when a force of fighting men - said to have numbered 150 and to have been under the leadership of the three sons (some accounts say grandsons) of Erc, King of Dal Riada in northern Ireland - arrived in three warships.

The three men, leader Fergus Mor and brothers Lorne and Aongus, brought new blood, strength and leadership to Dal Riada of Argyll, and made it a power to be reckoned with.

Before the end of the 6th century, about A.D. 595, the colony achieved complete independence from the Irish mother kingdom. (Modern archaeology confirms that there was indeed an Irish stronghold and fortification at Dunadd on the Crinan peninsula in the Knapdale area of Argyll.)

There is good reason for the saying that Scotland was born fighting. Her national character was indeed hammered out, tempered and shaped on the anvil of centuries of almost constant warfare.

The Scoti kingdom grew and flourished in relative peace, marred by sporadic fighting, for many years. Near the end of the 8th century, a hungry giant stirred in the North Lands, and the Viking invasion began.

The Northmen, raiding from the sea, pushed the Scots eastward from their original holdings. The Scots in turn exerted pressure on the Picts - pushing them to the east and north.

Thus began a half century of bloody fighting - Scots against Picts and Vikings, Picts against Scots and Vikings, and Vikings against everybody - with each protagonist alternately winning and losing. The overall picture of this period is blurred by the bloody mist of endless battles.

In the year 839, when the tide of battle had been running against the Scots for some time, a great battle took place between the Scots, led by the King of Argyll, Alpin of the house of Gabhran, and the Picts under the command of their King, Eoghann. The battle is perhaps the battle of Fortrenn.

The Scots were losing. Alpin was killed and decapitated. Suddenly, a powerful force of Norsemen came upon the rear guard of the Pictish army. The Picts turned to meet this new and unexpected attack and were decimated, with appalling losses.

King Eoghann himself was either seriously wounded in the melee and died later, or was killed outright.

His sons were also killed, and the Picts were left leaderless.

Into this royal vacuum leaped Kenneth the Hardy - avenging son of Alpin. About 843, he became King of Scots and Picts, the first Gaelic - more accurately the first half-Gaelic half-Pict - monarch of mainland Scotland.

Seeking to guarantee his right to be High King of Scots (Ard-Righ Albainn), he set out to eliminate any possible competition for the throne.

Kenneth invited the seven Mormaors (equivalent of Earls) of the new kingdom - cousins all - to a great banquet, and there murdered them.

Kenneth moved the Coronation Stone (Lia Fail, the Stone of Destiny) eastward to Scone (near Perth), which was previously the Pictish center of power and sacred to them. There, he established his seat of government.

Now that the Scots had complete dominance over the land, and as Pictish resistance and culture seemed to vanish simultaneously, the land began to be called Scotia - Scotia Minor, at first, to distinguish it from Scotia Major, Ireland.

Gradually, the name Scotia fell into disuse in referring to Ireland and came to signify only Alba.

At this point, there arises a troubling question: What about the Vikings? They were powerful enough to often defeat the pugnacious Picts, who had in turn beaten the Scots all too often. Why did they apparently not oppose Kenneth MacAlpin's takeover of mainland Scotland? For the most part, history is silent on this issue, although there are indications that the Vikings were driven out of northern Scotland near the end of the 9th century and the beginning of the 10th.

At any rate, the Viking pressure in Alba seemingly disappears until the reign of Kenneth II (971-995), who defeated the Danes at the Battle of Luncarty (circa 990). He also put down the constant uproar in the Speyside area resulting from the fight of the native Scots for control with Norsemen who had settled there.

By the 11th century, all the present country of Scotland except for the Western and Northern Islands, which were still under Viking control, had been brought under the Gaelic sway (even to the exclusive use of the Gaelic tongue). It was then that other, external forces began to make themselves felt.

Many noble English families, fleeing the consequences of the Norman invasion of 1066, settled in southeastern Scotland, known as the Lowlands and borders area.

Finding themselves in favor at the court of King Malcolm III (Canmore), the English began to influence the king, who had defeated MacBeth in 1057.

Malcolm III took as his second wife Margaret, grand-niece to the English Saxon king, Edward the Confessor. The gentle and cultured Margaret (who would really have preferred to be a nun, except for her taste for lavish living, and who was later canonized) exerted a tremendous influence over Malcolm, who was considered by his peers to be a "savage brute." As a result of her efforts, the entire court became Anglicized to such a degree that when Malcolm's son Edgar attained the throne he was thoroughly English in name, manner and nature.

The fact that the Angles had controlled Edinburgh and the Lothian area from the 6th century until the mid-10th undoubtedly laid the groundwork for this departure from the ways of the Gaels, and set Scotland on the path to eventual union with England.

The last of the royal Irish line in Scotland, reaching far back to its Irish roots in pre-Christian times (the Irish have an oral tradition, strongly confirmed by research, of 125 kings) is said to have vanished with the death of King Alexander III, who died in 1286 without direct heirs. His death ignited the Wars of Succession between the houses of Bruce and Balliol that tore Scotland apart in the late 13th and early 14th centuries.

The actual fact was that both Bruce and Balliol were descended from King David I, great-grandfather of Alexander, and thus possessed equal eligibility for the crown of Alba. Hence, the royal Irish blood still flows in the line of Scotland's rulers right down to the present queen of Great Britain, albeit much diluted.

It should be apparent by now that today's Scot is a mixture of many different peoples: Irish, Briton and Pict (all Celts); Viking; Norman; and Anglo-Saxon. With the blood of so many warlike races surging through their veins, it is little wonder that the Scots achieved such renown as savage brawlers who would rather fight than eat or drink - well, almost. The wonder is that peace ever came to Scotland at all.

Well, now you know what a Scot is and where he came from - or do you?

The reader should know that many people do not accept this version of Scottish history, and offer their own theories on the subject.

In 1936, a paper delivered to the Gaelic Society of Inverness by the Rev. Dr. Neil Ross, an eminent scholar of the Gaelic language and literature, disputed the story of the Irish colonization of Argyll and made some very telling points. Ross was a commander of the British Empire, Bachelor and Doctor of Divinity, and Doctor of Literature - talk about being overqualified.

It was Ross' belief that the Celts came to Scotland many centuries before the Christian era, not after. He cited the clear differences in facial configuration between the typical Scottish-Gael and the Irish, the very disparate social structures of the two countries. He stated in his monograph that Scotland and Ireland shared only one aspect of the Irish culture: the Gaelic language. This opinion is strongly supported by the work of present-day researchers and archaeologists and is generally accepted as fact today.

Referring back to Ross' statement about the clear differences in facial configuration, let me cite the remark made by Scottish historian and anthropological researcher Andrew Lang (1844-1912). Dr. Lang, a graduate of the Universities of St. Andrews and Oxford, a prolific author and classical scholar, in his book, "Lost Leaders," said: "Golf is a thoroughly national game. It is as Scottish as haggis, cock-a-leekie, high cheek bones or rowanberry jam." On a personal note, my Scot-born father resembled an American Indian when he was thin, and high cheekbones run in the Campbell family.

The learned clergyman's most telling argument is one that has bothered this writer considerably: It seems unlikely that a few hundred Irishmen in Kintyre in the 6th century A.D. could have grown, in little more than 200 years, to such numbers and strength that they could overrun the entire western part of Scotland from the Mull of Kintyre to Cape Wrath and virtually exterminate the fierce, capable and numerically superior Pictish warriors who fought the highly trained veterans of the Roman legions to a standstill for three centuries.

As Ross dryly observed, this had all the earmarks of a modern miracle, especially when it is realized that the Picts probably outnumbered the Scoti at least ten to one.

Ross' contentions are further bolstered by the modern trend of thought that the Picts were of Celtic origin. As early as 1934, Professor Henri Hubert, a renowned French Celtic scholar and archaeologist, published a work in which he traced the Celtic migrations, assigning them to a much earlier time period than the consensus of his day.

It was his conviction, based on painstaking examination of burial sites in Europe and the British Isles, that Goidelic Celts (Gaels) crossed the North Sea from the area that is now Belgium and the Netherlands about 1700 B.C., moving across England into Scotland, where they settled. His conviction resulted from many years of detailed study of the form and decoration of the artifacts found in these graves.

Hubert's conclusions have been reinforced by recent archaeological digs in France that definitely reveal a Celtic presence there dated about 1200 B.C. This discovery certainly alters earlier estimates of the origin of the Celts as dating to a period between 1000 and 500 B.C. Obviously, the Celts gained their ethnic identity many years - possibly centuries - before they arrived in France. Their westward expansion was not the result of relatively rapid military conquests, but rather was a slow, gradual movement into areas nearly devoid of people or thinly populated at best. The moves were probably driven by the need for more land for grazing and farming as the Celtic population increased.

One of the most puzzling aspects of the ascension of Kenneth MacAlpin to the kingship of both Scots and Picts is the apparent complete disappearance of the Pictish culture within a relatively short time after Kenneth's takeover and the surprising lack of resistance to his rule on the part of the Picts, who were not known for docility. It is said that either Kenneth's mother or his grandmother - and perhaps both - were Pictish princesses, which partially explains this mystery, as Pictish royal succession was matrilinear. But the theories of Ross and Hubert would explain the enigma much more satisfactorily, with fewer loose ends. Ergo, the Pictish culture did not disappear for the simple reason that it was, and remained, the culture of Scotland itself. Incidentally, Kenneth (Coinneach) is a Pictish name.

Well, now, there is ample food for thought, and confusion as well. As the barkers in old-time carnivals used to say: You pays your money and you takes your choice.