IX.
The Picts may or may not have been the British Kelts of Scotland: this depending upon the extent to which the gloss penn fahel is a word belonging to the Pict tongue, or only a word belonging to a language spoken within the Pict territory.
Why should it not be Pict? Why disturb the inference by suggesting that they may be Pict only as man or woman are Welsh, i.e., words other than Pict, but words used in a Pict area just as English is spoken in the Welsh town of Swansea? I admit that, if we look only to the plain and straight-forward meaning of Beda, this refinement is unnecessary. There are, however, certain complications.[229]
Daal=part, is suspiciously like the German theil, the English deal, the Anglo-Saxon dæl, the Norse del, dal; indeed, it is a wonder that Beda took it for a foreign word. Hence, gloss for gloss, it is nearly as good evidence for the Picts being German or Norse as penn fahel is for their being Briton. I say nearly, because it is expressly stated to have been Scotch. But this it is not. What, then, is our next best explanation? To suppose it to have been a word used by a population other than Scotch, but on the Scotch frontier. Now this population was Pict.
X.
The Dalriad Conquest may or may not have been real. Being real, it may or may not have given origin to the Gaelic population of Scotland.
This means that Beda's evidence, being exceptionable, may be wholly false—except so far as it is an inference from the existence of Gaels in both Ireland and the Western Highlands.
Even if true as to the fact, its ethnological importance may be over-valued, since the investigation of the origin of the Scotch Gaels inquires, not whether any Irish Scots ever appropriated any part of Scotland, but whether such an appropriation were the one which accounts for the Gaelic population of North Britain. This is the[230] difference between a conquest and the conquest—a difference too often overlooked.
I should not like to say that the Picts were not Scandinavians, a point which will be treated more fully in the thirteenth chapter. Hence—