Pictish female names

The king-lists in the Pictish Chronicle provide quite a few Pictish male names, such as Alpin/Elpin, Drust, Talorc(an), Cinad, Bridei/Brude and Nechtan. Unfortunately, there is no comparable source for Pictish female names. Very few Pictish women are recorded in surviving documentary sources. Given that the Picts practiced a form of matrilineal succession according to contemporary writers such as Bede (see article on Pictish matriliny), it seems surprising that so few royal female names were recorded. Can we infer anything useful about the likely form of Pictish female names?

Evidence

Symbol stones

Pictish symbol stones are found in Scotland, mainly north of the Forth and Clyde, and are generally dated to the period of the 6th to 9th centuries AD. The frequency distribution of the common symbols is a fair match for the frequency distribution for the Pictish names recorded in the Pictish king lists, which is consistent with the theory that the symbols may represent names (Cummins 1995). Ross Sansom (1995) has suggested that a specific symbol, a stylised comb and mirror, may indicate that the person named on the stone was a woman. If true, this may shed some light on Pictish female names.

If a special comb and mirror symbol was needed to indicate the sex of a person named on a symbol stone, this implies that the symbols themselves did not convey this information. In other words, if the symbols represent names, either these names could be borne by either sex (i.e. there were not specifically ‘male’ and ‘female’ names), or male and female names were sufficiently similar that they could be represented by the same symbol, perhaps differentiated by adding a male or female ending.

A system of differentiating male and female names by means of a specific ending is familiar from Latin, where the ending –us indicates a male name and –a indicates a female name, e.g. Julius / Julia, Claudius / Claudia. If Pictish names followed a similar pattern, the main symbol would represent the masculine form of the name (e.g. Julius, in the analogy with Latin) and the comb and mirror symbol the element required to turn it into the feminine form (something like –ia or -a, in the Latin analogy).

Annals of Ulster

The Annals of Ulster mention one Pictish royal lady by name, a Pictish princess who died in the late eighth century:

778. Eithne, daughter of Cinad, dies

--Annals of Ulster

The death of Cinad, king of the Picts, is recorded in the Annals of Ulster in 775.

Eithne is, however, an Irish or Gaelic name. This may indicate that the Picts routinely used Irish names for girls, which would be consistent with the colourful origin legend of the first Picts having obtained wives from Ireland (see article on Pictish matriliny for the legend). If the Pictish language (about which little is known) contained a sizeable component of Irish Gaelic, Irish names may have fitted readily into Pictish culture. However, this possibility is not easy to reconcile with the suggestion from the symbol stones that female names were the same as male names, differentiated by a specific feminine name element or ending.

Another possible explanation is that Eithne may be exceptional in having an Irish name, perhaps indicating that this particular Eithne had important Irish ancestry or other connections that the family wished to signal when choosing her name. This would be consistent with her presence in the Annals of Ulster, as strong Irish connections could explain why the Ulster annalist(s) thought it worth recording her death. Unfortunately, with a sample of one it is pretty well impossible to tell whether it represents an exceptional or typical situation.

Interpretation

So, did female Picts use Irish names, like Eithne daughter of Cinad, or did they use the same names as male Picts (such as those recorded in the king-lists), perhaps with a specific element to indicate the feminine form, or indeed something else altogether? I don’t think the available evidence is sufficient to be able to say. The meaning of the symbols on the symbol stones is unknown, and the comb and mirror symbol might convey some other meaning that has nothing to do with gender. Indeed, the symbol stones may not be personal memorials at all. As for Eithne daughter of Cinad in the Annals of Ulster, we know her name but arguing from the particular to the general is perilous at the best of times and doubly so on the basis of a small sample.

For what it is worth, I think it is fair to say that high-ranking Pictish ladies could have Irish names, since Eithne daughter of Cinad did; and that the symbol stones can be interpreted in a way that is consistent with Pictish female names being the same as or similar to Pictish male names. These are not mutually exclusive, of course, since there is no reason to assume that Pictish female names were all of the same type. Name choices could have varied according to region, family, prevailing fashion at the time or simple personal preference.


References

Annals of Ulster, available online

Cummins WA. The Age of the Picts. Alan Sutton Publishing Ltd, 1995, ISBN 0-7509-0924-2.

Sansom R. Power to the Pictish ladies. British Archaeology 1995, available online

Pictish symbol stones – the comb and mirror symbol

Pictish symbol stones are found in Scotland, mainly north of the Forth and Clyde, and are generally dated to the period of the 6th to 9th centuries AD. They are usually interpreted as personal memorials although few remain in their original locations. They are characterised by striking ‘Pictish’ symbols, some of which are realistic representations of animals and/or objects and some of which appear to be purely abstract. The example shown here is a drawing of a stone in Aberlemno, and shows the very common arrangement of two symbols above a comb and mirror. The top symbol is recognisably a serpent, the one in the middle is an abstract design looking like a ‘Z’ combined with a pair of discs, and at the bottom is a round hand-mirror next to a small comb. Presumably the symbols carried a clear meaning to the people who erected the stones, but what might it have been?

There are about fifty different ‘Pictish’ symbols, of which some are far more common than others (Cummins 1995). The frequency distribution of the common symbols is a fair match for the frequency distribution for the Pictish names recorded in the king lists, which is consistent with the theory that the symbols may represent names. This is also consistent with the pattern observed on Welsh inscribed stones from the same period, where the most common elements in the inscriptions are names. Most Pictish symbols occur in pairs, which could plausibly be interpreted either as a single name containing two elements, or as a name plus a patronymic (“X son of Y”). The names in the Pictish king lists do not look obviously like two-element names to me, but are mostly in the form “X son of Y”, so I would tend to favour the patronymic interpretation. No doubt others are possible.

The one exception to this pattern of Pictish symbols is the comb and mirror symbol. This is a clearly recognisable line drawing of a comb and a round hand-mirror, and can be seen clearly at the bottom of the stone in the drawing. A similar symbol, in which the comb’s teeth are shown as lines instead of as a few points, can be seen on the Dunnichen stone. (There are many more stones with the same symbol, but this was the clearest image I could find on the web). Occasionally the mirror appears without the comb, but they usually appear together and tend to be treated as a single symbol. The comb and mirror symbol occurs on about a third of Pictish symbol stones, almost always at the bottom of the stone beneath a pair of other symbols, as in the drawing and in the Dunnichen stone in the above link (Cummins 1995). So this would suggest that the comb and mirror does not represent a name, but has some other function. What might this be?

The comb and particularly the mirror are traditionally associated with females. Pope Boniface in the seventh century (contemporary with the Pictish symbol stones) considered an expensive comb and mirror appropriate diplomatic gifts to send to a Christian queen in northern England (Bede Book II Ch. 11). A 3rd century AD statue from Roman Asia Minor shows the goddess Venus holding a hand-mirror and comb, and in later astrology the symbol of Venus was a stylised mirror (still used to this day to indicate the female gender).

So if the comb and mirror is associated with females, what might this signify on a Pictish symbol stone?

One suggestion is that the pairs of symbols represent two-element names, such as those familiar from Old English records (e.g. Aethelstan = Aethel (noble) + stan (stone)), and that the mirror and comb symbol indicated that the person commemorated on the stone was a woman. The author of this article comments that this could indicate that women in Pictish society had unusually high status, given the high proportion of symbol stones carrying the comb and mirror symbol. In his sample, 20% of the stones have the comb and mirror symbol, whereas in early Ireland only about 200-300 female names are known compared with 10,000 male names, about 2%. So if he is correct that the comb and mirror symbol means the stone commemorates a woman, this would imply that women in Pictland were ten times more likely to be commemorated in this way than their counterparts in Ireland.

Another theory was put forward by WA Cummins in his book The Age of the Picts (Cummins 1995). He observes that the only two common elements on Welsh inscribed stones that are not names are “son/daughter of” and “Here lies”, which occur on 40% and 30% of a sample of 170 Welsh inscribed stones, respectively. Analysing a sample of 66 complete Pictish symbol stones, he finds that the mirror and comb, or the mirror by itself, occurs on 36% of the sample. This could match either the occurrence of the patronymic indicator or “Here lies” on the Welsh sample. Cummins argues that the common occurrence of symbol pairs without the mirror and comb implies that the relationship between the symbol pairs could be understood without needing a special symbol, perhaps by reading the symbols from top to bottom. If this is correct, the mirror and comb could stand for something else, and by analogy with the Welsh sample he suggests that it might signify “Here lies”.

I don’t think one can tell these two theories apart on the available evidence; either could be true, or both could be wrong. On the whole, I like Cummins’ theory the better of the two, because it takes the Pictish symbol stones as being similar to inscribed stones of a contemporary neighbouring culture. If the inhabitants of what is now Wales were in the habit of writing "Here lies" on a third of stone markers, maybe the Picts were too, and just used a different style of writing. Cummins doesn’t mention the female association of the mirror and comb, and suggests that the mirror may represent the afterlife as a reflection of life on earth, or that it symbolised the afterlife as a time of peace when one would have leisure for grooming. I wonder if the traditionally female association of the mirror symbol might have some particular significance for “Here lies”.

Here’s a theory. Could the comb and mirror symbol represent a female deity, rather than a human woman? Perhaps the symbol suggests that the person commemorated on the stone, male or female, has gone to live with a goddess of the dead. This could represent a particular goddess out of a pantheon of deities, like Freyja in Norse mythology who took dead maidens and a share of the warriors killed in battle into her hall (Ellis Davidson 1964). Or it might represent some kind of mother goddess, who perhaps takes the dead back into her womb after their life on earth. The crouched position of Bronze Age burials has been argued as support for this idea of returning to the womb after death. Possibly some similar belief existed in Pictland at some stage in its history, and was either retained into the period when the symbol stones were being erected or survived as an abstract symbol for death and/or the afterlife.

If there was a tradition of belief in a powerful female deity in Pictland, either extant or only recently extinct, this may be connected to the contemporary belief among the Picts’ neighbours in 8th-century Northumbria that the Picts reckoned royal descent through the female line. Bede may or may not have been right about this facet of Pictish political organisation, but unless his account is an elaborate leg-pull, it was believed when he wrote the Ecclesiastical History in 731 AD. Perhaps Pictish royalty claimed or had claimed divine descent from a female deity, in the same way as the surviving English genealogies all claim descent from a god, nearly always Woden.

Does this make sense? Unfortunately, I’m not sure how one could test the hypothesis.

References:
Cummins WA. The Age of the Picts. Alan Sutton Publishing Ltd, 1995, ISBN 0-7509-0924-2.

Ellis Davidson HR. Gods and Myths of Northern Europe. Penguin, 1964, ISBN 0-14-030670-1.