General Notes

Name: Brude Macbile King Of The Picts
Sex: M
Birth: ABT 670 in Southern Picts
Death: Deceased
Note:
The origins of the Picts are clouded with many fables, legends and fabrications, and there are as many theories as to who the Picts were (Celtic, Basque, Scythians, etc.), where they came from, what they ate or drank, and what language they spoke, as there once were Pictish raiders defying the mighty legions of Rome. Legend tells us that Rome's mighty Ninth Legion, the famous "Hispana" legion, which had earned its battle honors in Iberia, conquering Celtic Spain for Caesar is never heard of again when faced against the Picts (they actually surfaced years later in Israel). We do know that the Picts may have spoken a non-Celtic language, (although many Celtophiles feel the Picts spoke a Brythonic-Gaulish form of Celtic language) as St. Columba's biographer clearly stated that the Irish saint needed a translator to preach to the Pictish King Brude, son of Maelchon, at Brude's court near the shores of Loch Ness. At other times the Pictish king lived at Scone, and we know there often were two separate Pictish kingdoms of Northern and Southern Picts. We know that they were mighty sailors, for the Romans feared the Pictish Navy almost as much as the wild men who came down from the Highlands to attack the villages along the wall. We also know that as far as the 9th century they wrote in stone a language which was not far in design from the Celtic "Ogham" script but was not Celtic in context. By the legacy of their standing stones, we know that they were great artists as well. It is also well known that the Picts were one of Western culture's rare matrilinear societies; that is, bloodlines passed through the mother, and Pictish kings were not succeeded by their sons, but by their brothers or nephews or cousins as traced by the female line in (according to the scholar Dr. Anthony Jackson) a complicated series of intermarriages by seven royal houses.

The Celts arrived in Britain around 500 B.C. A nomadic people whose culture spread from Eastern Europe to Iberia, they were sometimes described as as fair headed, tall, fierce warriors by the Greeks (Since many Celts dyed their hair with lye, some historians believe that this is what the Greeks meant by fair-headed) althought the Britannic Celts encountered by the Romans were usually described as dark haired and short. As a warrior culture, it was a Celtic army which nearly destroyed Rome in her early days and thus forever made themselves an unforgivable enemy of the Latin empire. Because the first historical reference to the Picts appears in 297 A.D., when they are mentioned as enemies of Rome in the same context as the Hiberni (Irish), Scotii (Scots) and Saxones (Saxons), many historians assume that the Picts were simply another Celtic tribe. Although is quite probable that there was much Celtic stock in some of the southern tribes in the loose federation of tribes which eventually made up the Pictish nation, it is my opinion that the vast majority of the Pictish peoples north of the Forth were made up mostly from the earlier, pre-Celtic people of northern Britain. Some historians use Ireland as an example, and Michael Lynch eloquently states that "Whatever the Picts were, they are likely, as were other peoples either in post-Roman western Europe or in contemporary Ireland, to have been an amalgalm of tribes, headed by a warrior aristocracy which was by nature mobile. Their culture was the culture of the warrior... ." More on this later.

The bottom line is that so little is known, that most Pictophiles need to make huge leaps and prodigious interpretations of the "facts" to state their views. The explanations migrate to this core of "facts" in a futile effort to explain this mysterious people.
The Romans came to Scotland, often defeated the Picts in battle, but they never conquered them or the land on which they lived. By the third century A.D. the Roman general Agricola sl