“One recalls particularly those tales which relate in one way or another to the commerce that existed between east-Ulster and Scotland: for instance, the story of Suibne Geilt, whom the later evolution of his legend makes king of Dál Riata—by James Carney’s reasoning it must have passed from Scotland to Ireland before c.800; or the several thematically related tales which make up what one might call the ‘Tristan complex’ and which also link Irish and north British tradition.”
The ancient inhabitants of the British Isles had been known to the Greeks as the ‘Pretani’. Later ‘Pretani’ became ‘Cruthin’ and when medieval Irish writers referred to these people it is clear they considered them to inhabit both Ireland and Scotland. One writer stated that ‘thirty kings of the Cruthin ruled Ireland and Scotland from Ollam to Fiachna mac Baetáin,’ and that ‘seven kings of the Cruthin of Scotland ruled Ireland in Tara ’ (secht rig do Chruithnibh Alban rofhallnastair Erind i Temair) — thereby identifying, as T.F. O’Rahilly notes, “the Cruthin of Ireland with those of Scotland”.
Others refer to Scotland as the ‘land of the Cruthin’, while in a poem written in the eleventh or twelfth century the author tells us that the Cruthnig made up a section of the population of Scotland. The Annals of Tigernach, The Pictish Chronicle, St Berchan, the Albanic Duan, the Book of Deer and John of Fordun plainly show that the name Cruthin was applied to the inhabitants of both Scotland and Ireland. The term in Scottish Gaelic for a Pict is Cruithen or Cruithneach and for Pictland Cruithentúath. Furthermore, the Pictish Chronicle has the first King of the Picts as the eponymous “Cruidne filius Cinge, pater Pictorum habitantium in hac insula. C annis regnavit“. This is entirely cognate with the eponymous founder of Gaeldom, Goidel Glas. The seven sons of Cruidne son of Cinge, also give their names to the ancient divisions of Alba.
The word ‘Pretani’ is also the forerunner of the Welsh Prydain, still present in our modern British passports, which means primarily ‘Pict’ and secondarily ‘Pictland’ in Great Britain north of the Antonine Wall and Briton to the south of it. Eventually the Pretanic people of Scotland were to be more generally labelled Picts, though the Pretani of Ireland were never given this appellation by those writing in Latin (more modern writers, however, have quite freely interchanged the terms ‘Irish Pict’ and ‘Cruthin’). The Picts of Scotland did not disappear from history: as Liam de Paor points out: “The Picts undoubtedly contributed much to the make-up of the medieval kingdom of Scotland, forming probably the bulk of its population.”
Because the ancient Irish considered the older inhabitants of Scotland and the northern part of Ireland to be from the same ethnic stock, it would be fascinating to know just how close that kinship was. Certainly, many factors lend weight to the probability that it was very close. For a start, the geographical proximity of Scotland and Ulster would certainly facilitate the same people establishing themselves on both sides of the North Channel. Scholars also acknowledge that the older population groups of Europe, if they survived reasonably intact at all under the impact of the Indo-European invasions, would have done so mainly at the peripheral fringes of the Continent, such as Ireland and Scotand.
Further, archaeologists now believe that the inhabitants of the ‘Highland zone’ of the British Isles — which includes Ireland and Scotland — are primarily of pre-Celtic stock. There are even indications of language similarities — when St Columba went to Scotland to try and convert the King of the Picts, he took with him St Comgall, the Cruthin abbot of Bangor, and St Canice, “who, being Irish Picts, were the better able to confer with the Picts [of Scotland].”
So, even if the archaeological and historical evidence may not as yet allow us to establish the exact extent of the kinship between the pre-Celtic peoples of Scotland and Ulster, there is at the same time nothing that necessarily contradicts the assertion of the ancient writers themselves that “the Cruthin of both areas formed one people in remote times.”
As Liam de Paor commented: “The gene pool of the Irish… is probably very closely related to the gene pools of highland Britain… Within that fringe area, relationships, both cultural and genetic, almost certainly go back to a much more distant time than that uncertain period when Celtic languages and customs came to dominate both Great Britain and Ireland. Therefore, so far as the physical make-up of the Irish goes… they share these origins with their fellows in the neighbouring parts — the north and west — of the next-door island of Great Britain.”
Just as the ‘Cruthin’ of Scotland eventually became known as Picts, so in Ireland, as we have already seen, the name Cruthin also fell into disuse, to be replaced by the names of their dynastic households. Yet, in 784 the Annals of Ulster recorded the death of Coisenech ‘nepos Predeni’, King of the Iveagh Cruthin. The existence of this pre-Gaelic name, Predeni (Pretani), so late in Irish history is astonishing, and shows how tenacious the Cruthin were to the memories of their former greatness.
To be continued