These inaugurations would have been Christian ceremonies, whatever ancient pagan traditions may have been reflected in them. And that brings us to a consideration of the impact of Christianity on early Scotland.
The coming of Christianity
Before the Romans officially declared an end to their occupation of Scotland, in 410, the south-west of Scotland may already have been Christianised; early in the fourth century the Emperor Constantine had declared Christianity to be the official religion of the Roman Empire, and this may have led to the establishment of some kind of ‘sub-Roman Church’ in Pictland.
The Venerable Bede wrote that, after Constantine made Christianity official, ‘faithful Christians who during the time of danger had taken refuge in woods, deserted places and hidden caves, came into the open and rebuilt the ruined churches. Shrines of the martyrs were founded and completed and openly displayed everywhere as tokens of victory. The festivals of the Church were observed, and its rites performed reverently and sincerely.’
The one name which emerges from the scanty sources about south-west Scotland during this period is that of St Ninian. Ninian (Nynia) is the first Christian missionary in Scotland’s history who is known to us by name. Bede called him ‘a most reverend and holy man of British race’, and recorded a tradition that he had been trained in Rome and that his see was at St Martin’s Church at Candida Casa (the ‘White House’), identified as Whithorn in Galloway. He was, apparently, the son of a converted British chieftain, who began his mission in the south-west late in the fifth century as the bishop of a Romanised community which had been Christian for some time. By the seventh century Ninian had become a cult saint, and many churches were dedicated to him in different parts of Scotland in the ensuing centuries.
In the west of Scotland, St Kentigern, or Mungo,1 founded a church beside the Molindinar Burn; it was in a ‘green hollow’ (glascu), which gave the city of Glasgow its name. By 600, Kentigern/Mungo was established as the first bishop of the kingdom of Strathclyde centred on Dumbarton; his shrine lies in the crypt of Glasgow Cathedral.
The man most closely associated with the spread of Christianity in the sixth century, however, is Columba (Colum Cille, ‘Dove of the Church’, c.521–97). He was a scion of the Uí Néill, the most powerful royal family in Ireland at the time. Columba was a vigorous and hot-blooded warrior-monk who was banished after a particularly bloody battle and, as a penance, chose to lead a mission to the Scoti of Dalriada. In 563 he set sail in a coracle with twelve companions to do God’s work. After some years on an island which Columba called Hinba (perhaps Jura), the king of Dalriada gave him the island of Iona, off the west coast of Mull, probably in the early 570s. Here he founded a large monastic community which was to become the spiritual powerhouse of Christianity in northern Britain. It also became a renowned centre of learning and artistic excellence, and owned an extensive library of books: many claim that the magnificently illustrated Book of Kells, now in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, was produced in a scriptorium on Iona. Columba’s biographer, Adomnán, wrote that he was engaged in making a new manuscript of a psalter on the day of his death.
The major impact of the Church was the introduction of writing, and the close and mutually beneficial relations between Church and state. The Church was both client and patron of the monarchy. Columba himself ordained one of the kings of Dalriada (Áedán mac Gabhráin) on Iona in 574. Another graphic impact was on Pictish art: following the advent of Christianity the Pictish symbol-stones were shaped into slabs with a dominant cross carved on one face, and Biblical figures like David were introduced to symbolise kingship, alongside the characteristic ornamentation of spirals, snakes, dragons, birds and fish.
Although both the Picti and the Scoti were ethnic Celts, the Picts were not the same kind of Celts as those incomers who came from Ireland around 500 to found the kingdom of Dalriada. The language the Picts spoke was ‘British’ or ‘Brittonic’ Celtic, akin to Welsh, Cornish and Breton (scholars call it ‘P-Celtic’), whereas modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic descend from Goidelic Gaelic (which is classified as ‘Q-Celtic’). The eventual assimilation of the Picts into the Gaelic culture of the Scots was made much easier through the influence of Christianity. Having been converted by Columban missionaries, the Picts looked to Iona as the head of their Church. Differences between Picts and Gaels began to be reduced, through intermarriage and the exchange of church personnel. So it is reasonable to assume that it was the rise of the Gaelic Church in Pictland which laid the foundations for the ultimate unification of the Picts and Scots as a new kingdom.
But before that could come about, there was another threat to be faced, in the shape of an enemy who would serve to bring the Picts and the Scots even closer together – the vikings.
The vikings
The vikings have long been considered the bogeymen of history. For centuries they were cast in the role of Anti-Christ – merciless barbarians from Scandinavia who plundered and burned their way across the known world, heedless of their own lives or the lives of others, intent only on destruction and rape and pillage. In fact it was never quite as one-sided as that – history seldom is – but it made a good story at the time. Today there is emerging a much more balanced version of the story which depicts the vikings in a less lurid and more objective light. It is mainly a matter of emphasis: less on the raiding, more on the trading; less on the piracy and pillage, more on the poetry and artistry; less on the terror, more on the technology of the Norsemen and the positive effect they had.
Politically as well as militarily they had a profound effect on the shifting, unstable kingdoms which were developing in what was to become Scotland. The historical record of their incursions into Scottish waters and territory began in 795 with a raid on Iona (the first of three such raids in ten years), and Scotland was then engulfed in the turmoil of what has come to be called the Viking Age (800–1050). While Danish raiders attacked the Continent and southern England, Norwegian invaders established a Norse earldom in Shetland and Orkney which was to last for more than three hundred years, from the middle of the ninth century to the thirteenth.
The Orkney earldom was a semi-autonomous fiefdom of the Norwegian crown, theoretically a Norwegian possession but frequently a recalcitrant one which displayed a large degree of independence. The main source for our knowledge of the Northern Isles during this period is an Icelandic saga, Orkneyinga Saga (‘The Saga of the Earls of Orkney’), written early in the thirteenth century. It is a sprawling, dynastic chronicle of the lives of the earls of Orkney, a vivid narrative pageant of clashing personalities and dramatic events – not so much a history as a historical novel. It is the only medieval chronicle which has Orkney as the central place of action, but the story has much to say about the Norse impact on the northernmost counties of mainland Scotland, Caithness and Sutherland (which to the Orcadian Norsemen was ‘South-land’!).
Today the people of Shetland celebrate their Norse heritage on the last Tuesday of every January with an exhilarating, night-long viking fire-festival called Up-Helly-Aa, which culminates in the ceremonial burning of a viking galley in Lerwick, the capital town of Shetland. It is not an ancient ritual by any means. It was invented by a blind Shetland poet in the 1880s, an aspect of the Victorian ‘rediscovery’ of the Viking Age by literary figures like Thomas Carlyle and William Morris – and, before them, Sir Walter Scott with his novel The Pirate (1821), which was inspired by a fleeting visit to Shetland in 1814 and a glimpse of the ruined medieval baronial building at Sumburgh which he named, romantically, Jarlshof (‘Earl’s Temple’).
From their base in the Northern Isles the Norsemen ruled