Two Pictish princesses

In recent years a major archaeological project has unearthed evidence of an important Pictish monastery at Portmahomack in Easter Ross. The story of the site can be seen in the nearby Tarbat Discovery Centre and in Martin Carver’s book about the excavations (see reference below).

Visitors to the Discovery Centre are greeted by the life-size bronze image of a Pictish princess. Here she is….

Whenever I look at this evocative sculpture I consider how little we really know about Pictish noblewomen, many of whom were the wives, sisters, mothers and daughters of great warrior-kings. As a supporter of the matrilinear theory of Pictish royal succession I find it regrettable that the historical significance of these women was disregarded by the contemporary sources. Regrettable, yes, but not altogether surprising: such disregard was the norm in societies where literacy and the recording of history were controlled by patriarchal elites. Indeed, females of the Pictish royal kindreds would have been astonished if their names and deeds had appeared in contemporary chronicles.

Our main documentary sources for Pictish history are Bede and the Irish annals. Bede mentions Pictish royal women in passing but does not refer to any of them individually. To locate a specific female Pict we have to turn to the annals, where we find the following entry:

AD 778: Eithne, daughter of Cinadhon, died.

The name Eithne has a proud heritage. It was borne by a pagan lady whom Saint Patrick converted to Christianity and also by the mother of Saint Columba. These two women were Irish princesses and both were later elevated to sainthood. A famous bearer of the name today is the musician Eithne Brennan who uses the phonetic spelling Enya for the benefit of non-Gaelic speakers such as myself. But who was the Eithne of 778? Why was her death noted by the annalists?

The first question can be answered by going back three years to an earlier entry:

AD 775: The death of Cinadhon, king of the Picts.

In the Welsh Annals and in the Pictish king-list Cinadhon is called Ciniod, a variant of the name Cinaed (Kenneth). He is usually regarded as the Cinadhon mentioned in 778. His daughter Eithne was therefore a Pictish princess. She may have borne a Gaelic name because of her ancestry: her paternal grandfather was an exiled Scot from the Lorn dynasty of Argyll.

The second question is less easy to answer. Why did the Irish annalists mention Princess Eithne? The Picts had no ruling queens so she was certainly not mentioned because of some Boudicca-like achievement on the battlefield. She might have been the mother of a renowned king but so were other Pictish women and this would not have been enough to get her noticed by the annalists. Perhaps a solution can be found by considering the primary purpose of the annals?

First and foremost, the annalists were keen to record important events affecting the great monasteries of Ireland and North Britain. They were accustomed to note secular items such as major battles and the deaths of kings but they themselves were monks and their primary interests were therefore ecclesiastical. They rarely mentioned women but those whom they did identify by name were usually noted in religious contexts. An example is Kentigerna, daughter of an Irish king, who went to Scotland and who eventually became a devout Christian hermit on an island in Loch Lomond. The annalists noted her death in 734 and later Scottish tradition made her a saint. Could the Pictish princess Eithne have followed a similar path of religious devotion, perhaps as a nun renowned for her piety, and been accorded the honour of an obituary notice in the annals?

Book reference: Martin Carver, Portmahomack: Monastery of the Picts (Edinburgh, 2008)