To the hopeless question, Who were the Picts? there are two main schools of answering guesswork: one holding them an older stock, displaced or overlain by Gaels; the other taking them as a Celtic people, reinforced from Ireland or elsewhere. As to the Celts, ethnologists have a good deal to say and sing, but by no means in chorus. Shall we trust the Milesian tale of their coming from Spain, bringing their courteous manners and that watchword mañana, honoured in the Hebrides as in Iberian lands—a consideration for Buckle’s handling of Scottish and Spanish characteristics? Did their race flourish in Etruria when the Romans were still kilted in wolf-skins? Are we to look for their ancestors in Greece, as Professor Blackie would have liked to believe? Were they not rather Phœnicians, a race notoriously given to emigration? Did they start farther back in the blessed Mesopotamia, perhaps walking straight out of the Garden of Eden, since the purest Gaelic has been seriously defined as “that spoken by Adam”?
I wonder that no more has been made of a kinship between Gaelic and Arab customs—the proud independence of clans living in ancestral feuds chequered by rules of scrupulous hospitality, the division of work among men and women, the raids in which young swash-bucklers win their spurs by booty of black cattle and camels; there are several such points likening those Bens to Macs a little mummified by a dry climate, who would soon learn to skip over bogs and to abuse factors instead of pashas. The Wahabi sect of Arabia has some correspondence with Scottish Presbyterianism as kept pure in the Highlands. The Arab burnous could easily be tinted as a plaid; and in some parts of Arabia, it appears, a kind of philabeg is worn. In the Highlands there is a stunted love for a horse; and the seaside Arab can manage a dhow as well as our West Islanders. The matter of language of course presents some difficulty, but ethnologists are skilled in getting over difficulties.
Egypt and Scythia are other cradles suggested for the Celt, for whom also has been claimed a filial interest in the mysterious traces of the Hittites. Descent from Chaldean or Accadian sages had better be reserved for the Lowland Scots, so prominent as law-givers or instructors in the modern world. Speculators of past generations always had the lost Ten Tribes to draw upon. Joseph, certainly, is recorded as wearing tartan in his youth, and being carried off to market in Egypt by Macgregors of the period. Higher criticism, on the other hand, has quenched the pretensions of those chiefs who fondly looked back on their ancestors as using a private boat at the flood, that may well have affected this land of Ararats. A Highland tourist of a century ago tells how his host entertained him with a boastful tale of the antiquity and grandeur of the clan Donnachie, known to ignorant Sassenachs as Robertson. The bored guest tried to change the subject with, “I am of the clan Adam, which I believe is the oldest of them all.”—“So are the Hottentots!” quoth the offended chieftain, and went on with his long genealogy.
Turning in quite another direction for an ancestry, might one not make out much in common between those bellicose clans and the Red Indian tribes of America? But when it comes to facts and figures, one is not sure that the Highlanders can boast any clearer title than that of “Children of the Mist.” And if this seem an unworthy pedigree, let them remember the proud Roman whose fabled ancestor brought little but legends to cement a foundation of Latins, Sabines, and Etruscans, that became built so high by materials from all the ends of the earth.
To travel through Scotland, it has been well said, is to travel through the Waverley Novels. The north end of the kingdom, however, makes an exception, which lay beyond Sir Walter’s ken, but for one swoop he took round the islands. Perhaps because it was frame for none of his stories, this region from Caithness to Kintail is less visited by tourists, though it contains such grand scenes as the Cave of Smoo, Loch Maree, and the worn-down mountains of Torridon. It is a smaller edition of the rest of Scotland, its sea-bound lowlands facing to the east, its highlands to the west, where their jutting promontories and deep fiords seem made to dovetail into the opposite island shores, with which this side was long closely connected in peace and war, bringing about an interfusion of enterprisingly restless neighbours. On the other side, landward, a remarkably sharp division marks the province of the Gael from that of the ex-Goth.
Horace himself would be puzzled to find a lucid order for the history of the North-Western Highlands, so obscurely entangled are its thickets of legend and so dim often its clearings of chronicle. We catch vague glimpses of a struggle between the mainland power of the Earl of Ross and that of the Macdonald Lords of the Isles. More than once these titles became fused, till their rival powers died out, and they were both merged in the crown. The famous battle of Harlaw was not so much a struggle between Highlander and Lowlander as an attempt on the part of the Lord of the Isles to seize the Earldom that had invaded his water-walled domains. When adventurous James V., sailing in person to Stornoway, had been able to over-awe but hardly to master those quarrelsome western Rodericks, Red and Black, the task of training or exterminating them was offered in turn to Huntly, to Argyll, and to the company of Fife gentlemen, who in the Lewis imitated the enterprise and the failure of Elizabeth’s Virginia colonists. Then out of the welter of anarchy arose one dominant name, to play over the northern islands and mountains the same absorbing part as the Campbells in the south.
KYLE OF TONGUE AND BEN LOYAL
Who were those Mackenzies of Kintail, that, passing over to Lewis, grew to be better known by the title of Seaforth? Like the Campbells, they were at one time fain to claim descent from a Norman family, that of the Irish Fitzgerald. But this clan has had the fortune to possess an historian on the premises, so to speak, in the person of the late Alexander Mackenzie, one of the most zealous and industrious of Highland antiquaries. He declares the Fitzgerald origin “impossible,” and takes back the “sons of Kenneth” to one O’Beolan, or Gilleoin, who married the daughter of Rollo, the pirate earl, before Norsemen became Normans. This origin is admittedly nebulous; but when the epoch gets into its teens, sons and daughters of the line appear as clearly intermarrying with Bruces, Grahams, St. Clairs, and other Lowlanders, some of whom were little better than English barons, the Plantagenet blood of Normandy and the MacAlpine royalty being among their infusions, which also filter down from kings of Norway, France, and the Isle of Man. Through a shadowy ancestral Gillanders, “servant of St. Andrew,” in the far background, the Clan Ross, alias Andrias, is made out a senior branch of the same stock; and there is a less famed Clan Matheson that would have itself known as the original tree.
Not to give the reader a headache over genealogical tables more involved than the story of the “Ring and the Book,” one may ask him to consider if the youths and maidens of those names were alabaster grandsires all through the centuries when Viking Jarls ruled the islands and swept their raids over half Scotland. Such considerations go to bear out the comparison of Highland purity of race to an old knife well provided, in the course of time, with another handle and more than one new blade. A fitter metaphor would be a faded and partly re-dyed tartan, whose intricate pattern of crossing stripes is hardly distinguishable without spectacles. Unless in metaphors, at long range, I am not disposed to argue with Celtic historians, who, from Dr. Johnson perhaps, have learned his trick of knocking you down with the butt end of a pistol when it misses fire. But surely enough has been said to show how these much-vexed questions of genealogy give footing no firmer than the bogs of Gaeldom and Galldom.