| The
Cruithne were the first Celtic racio-tribal group to come to the British Isles, appearing
between about 800 and 500 B.C., and coming from the European continent. They were a
matrilineal people, tracing royal lineage and inheritance through the female line, and in
pagan times had worshiped the mother-goddess of fertility. By historical times they had
come to reckon descent patrilineally, by the male line, hence their traditional descent
from Conall Cearnach ("Conall of the Victories"), one of the legendary heroes
from early Irish literature. Such Gaelic ancestral heroes, being the ultimate ancestors of
all the ethnic groups of Gaeldom, are euhemerized deities ("gods made flesh")
from the ancient Celtic "Otherworld" of pre—Christian times. Conall
Cearnach is ultimately a male-manifestation of Brigid (later St. Brigid), the original
mother-goddess of the Cruithne (see Part I, Chapter IV).
The Cruithne of Scotland are the original
Albans, or natives of Albany (Scotland north of the Firth of Forth), and are commonly
referred to as Picts. The Picts were an equestrian warrior aristocracy of the classic
early Celtic type, in overlord status over a more numerous pre—Celtic population (see
Part I, Chapter III). They were the last of the Cruithne to lose their matrilineality.
This happened during the ninth and tenth centuries (the Cruithne of Ireland had lost
theirs centuries earlier), and came as a result of the merger of the Pictish kingdom with
that of the patrilineal Erainnian tribe of Dal Riada. This mixing resulted in kin groups
being equally of two ethnic groups, one Erainnian and tracing itself in the male line, the
other Pictish and at the point of transition from the female line to the male line descent
system. The Gaelic-speaking Erainnian half became linguistically dominant at the official
level, if only because, in the event of cultural influence from the rest of Gaeldom to the
south and west, the Gaelic language was more useful, as a matter of choice, over the
relatively isolated P—Celtic tongue of the Picts, especially where bardic literary
sharing and political negotiations were concerned (the P—Celtic speech of the
Strathclyde British was destined to undergo a similar decline concomitant with the loss of
Strathclyde autonomy in the eleventh century).
Gaelic also had obvious cultural
advantages and prestige, for it was Gaelicspeakers who first brought Christianity, Latin
learning and, significantly, |
