| of
Viking-Celtic ancestors. In fact, these Hebridian Gaels were still under Norwegian rule,
and defended their semi-independent Viking status for another 150 years: Clearly then, to
be a Gael was to be a Gaelic-speaker, and as the political situation in the Hebrides and
in Ireland itself makes evident, linguistic identity did not infer political unity. Only
in the resurrected classical epithet "Caledonia" does any name dignify the
separate identity of the Picts, and the limiting of this name to a strictly poetic context
may have contributed to romanticizations about the mysterious Picts. The name of Scotland
had in any case taken on a political meaning by 1124, which pointedly encouraged the
conception of a Scot as a subject of the Scottish royal house, thus taking advantage of
the blurred memory of previous political diversity.
The matrilineal system, since it passed
hereditary authority through the female line, might seem on the surface to have invited
political disaster. For instance, by the time of the merging of the two kingdoms under
Kenneth MacAlpin in 843, there had alredy been a long tradition among the Picts of
providing their royal women with husbands from powerful tribal dynasties to the West and
South. Such exogamy might appear to invite political takeovers by jealous or power hungry
sons of "foreigners" unwilling to embrace an inheritance system which
disinherited them as soon as their own sisters had children who would be kings by other
fathers (in the Pictish system, a son of the princess would rule, but the kingship would
pass through his sister to her offspring). There is little reason to assume that such an
exogamic union was anything more than a sacral marriage to a visiting prince. In any case,
the system had its positive side, in that it was less prone to dynastic in-feuding than
the Gaelic derb-fine system, since the competition among rival male cousins vying for the
throne was effectively bypassed by matrilineality. Also, exogamy had its diplomatic side:
It may have been as effective as hostage taking in helping the Picts maintain good
relations with the neighboring Heroic kingdoms. Furthermore, the matrilineal system was
never in a position to be threatened by outside forces before it was forced into close
cooperation with the Dal Riada Scots during the ninth century. At that point, the uniting
of the two kingdoms under one king who was heir to both was a natural occurrence. After
centuries of royal intermarriage on both sides, and once the union was a political
reality, the dynasts of both groups would naturally hasten to cement similar intermarriage
arrangements in order to advance their position in the new order. Under Viking pressure, a
warlord-dominated society emerged that probably continued to speak Gaelic as a lingua
franca for the new kingdom.
The sociolinguistic pressures for a common
Celtic tongue had grown stronger with the merger of the royal kindred of the Cineal
nGabrain with the royal matrilineage of the Pictish Ard Ri. However, the identification of
a Celtic tribal-cultural continuum with Ireland was also growing stronger because
tribalism south of Alba and Strathclyde was gradually losing its vitality, and any
P—Celtic continuum with Wales had been cut off by Northumbrian |
