Bring On The Barbarians

-Depicting The Picts Onscreen

Having recently been travelling around Scotland, which is currently launching its national independence campaign, I thought it might be an appropriate time to have another look at the recent big-screen depictions of early Scotland and its earliest-known native people, whom the Romans loosely referred to as Caledonians and then a confederation called Picti, Picts.

As I write, Pixar has just released its animated feature Brave, and Scotland’s First Minister has just been on a tie-in junket to California to promote Scotland to American investors. I haven’t seen Brave, but given the characters have cod-names like Lord Dingwall and Lord MacGuffin, it doesn’t seem to be based on anything authentic. (Dingwall is a later Norse name for a town outside Inverness, while MacGuffin is a made-up joke name Hitchcock famously adopted as a term for any film’s central plot device.) The title of course evokes Braveheart, a film which though historically inaccurate connected with modern audiences by means of a simplistic portrayal of history. There, the Scots are freedom fighters (complete with blue-painted ‘Pictish’ faces) and the English are cruel oppressors exercising droit-de-seigneur ‘first night’ (jus primae noctis) conjugal rights over any bride in the vicinity. ( “We’ll breed them out,” as the smirking English king puts it.)

I say ‘another look’ as in an earlier post (Those Pictish Blues Again), I commented on how unenlightened screen depictions of the Picts generally were, and noted that, from their advance publicity, the recent round of big-budget feature films set in Pictland sounded no better. Now that these films are all out on DVD, complete with director’s commentary or behind-the-scenes docu, we can look at their actual depictions of this obscure Celtic domain, portrayals which I now reckon to be at least an improvement on earlier ones.

The one thing the films I’ve seen have in common is that the natives tend to be Fanatical Barbarians while Rome or Roman Britain is the Civilising Influence. Their citizens get to speak modern English while the natives at best are subtitled, and often just scream for blood, including human sacrifice. That is such a travesty of history (even using the history written by the Romans themselves) that I’m pleased to say that this hard-line approach is starting to melt away. However this thaw has been a long time coming.

The Picts were not a tribe of bloodthirsty savages who fought the Romans and then disappeared as the Irish Scots took over. They were not a tribe but an inter-tribal alliance of ‘free’ Britons, who survived the incursions of the Romans, English and Vikings to amalgamate peacefully with the Scots (Irish colonists) in the 9th C. under King Kenneth MacAlpin (Alpin is a Pict royal name). Though the Pictish language is lost and only a couple of codex manuscripts have survived, their artwork, including contributions to illuminated manuscripts, shows them to have been a creative, sophisticated society.

The murderous-northern-barbarians depiction goes all the way back to Shakespeare (who had the excuse of catering to a narrow-minded Scots king), with his unhistorical Macbeth, depicting a king (Mac Bethad mac Findlaích) who actually had a fairly peaceful 17-year reign and his wife as self-destructing murderers who didn’t last out the year. The Scots king presumably did not object to this depiction on the basis the real Macbeths were more Pictish than Scots. (Lady Macbeth’s real name was Gruoch, a Pictish name, and Pict noblewomen held real power, their royal succession being matrilinear. Macbeth’s crowned successor Lulach was in fact her son, but not his. See Macbeth: A True Story by Fiona Watson, 2010; there is also a 2010 RSC-stage and Radio-3 radio sequel play, Dunsinane, by David Greig, on Gruach and son’s continuing claim to the throne.) In 2004, the Scottish Parliament debated a motion to have 2005 declared the ‘Year Of Macbeth’ to redress this misrepresentation. The debate may have been prompted by the then latest portrayal of the Picts as howling barbarians (cf “Picts wrongly painted as a race of barbarians,” Glasgow Herald 20 Sept 2004) - the 2004 film King Arthur, of which more anon.

The ‘Pictish problem’ is also part of a larger tendency to see heroism as imposing an authoritarian ‘order’ on those deemed barbarians or savages. This is an atttitude that has pervaded western thinking and arguably led to much worse problems (such as war and colonialism). Filmically, it’s not limited to making the Picts the barbarians the forces of law and order must fight. The Arthurian equivalent of the American western would on occasion use other tribes, such as Boudicca’s Iceni-led alliance, as almost interchangeable barbarians. “Bring on the Barbarians,” was the command that went back to Roman-arena times. Filmically, the approach flourished in the postwar era when Hollywood was making Technicolor historical adventure films in Britain for tax reasons: in the early 1950s, the Government's blocking export of sterling revenues from Hollywood box office takings in England led to a cycle of costume adventure-dramas set here. The Picts made their big-screen debut then, along with various other unkempt and uncouth native ‘barbarian’ tribes in films like Knights Of The Round Table (1953), The Black Knight (1954) and Prince Valiant (1954), where the Scottish picture-postcard castle Eilean Donan made its first screen appearance as Prince Val' s home castle, while nearby Dornie became a Viking village.

These costume dramas had a certain comic-book sweep, but no real feeling or even respect for period, applying an American moral code alien to the period depicted. The use of British scriptwriters to create authenticity did not, under such circumstances, help. In his autobiography Notes For A Life British film industry veteran (actor, writer, director) Bryan Forbes tells of being hired by telephone out of the blue, as a “fast rewrite man,” for Warwick Films' Arthurian adventure film The Black Knight, starring Alan Ladd, scripted by the award-winning multi-talented Australian-expat writer Alec Coppel, directed by Hollywood veteran Tay Garnett and produced by Irving Allen and Cubby Broccoli (who would become famous as producers of, respectively, disaster films like Earthquake and the James Bond films). The project sounded interesting, though he was quickly disillusioned.

Forbes: “What's the film about?”

Broccoli: “What do you care what the film' s about? Can you start work today, this afternoon?”

On arrival, Broccoli told Forbes they had shot action exteriors in Spain (a then-popular cost-saving practise) and had begun filming around Pinewood, where they had built a fake Stonehenge (whose megaliths all get pulled down in the climax) where the Druids could burn prisoners alive in a wicker cage, as was their wont. However the producer had belatedly realised they needed some dialogue to explain the plot to the audience, which in summary was that Alan Ladd, as a village smith named John, saves England from invasion.

He then proceeded to detail one of the most unlikely plots in the history of motion pictures... England had been invaded by Saracens disguised as Vikings. Against these improbable forces King Arthur had given battle on a Spanish field. The said bogus Vikings had sacked Camelot and now convention demanded that Alan Ladd somehow become a Knight Of The Round Table and single-handed achieve final victory.... In addition ... the Druids at Stonehenge ... had somehow imported a bevy of Vestal Virgins ... and were intent on sacrificing them as the sun came up over Pinewood Studios, thus posing yet another problem for King Arthur and Alan Ladd. And just in case the audience might feel it wan't getting value for money, the Christian 'Bishop' of Stonehenge (one of the more inspired and endearing conventions of the script) was scheduled to consecrate a new abbey to replace the edifice destroyed by the aforementioned Saracens inadequately disguised as Vikings… it was at this cliff-hanging point that the existing script came to a full stop. Irving finished his digest of notable events. He seemed remarkably calm for a men in the process of changing film and constitutional history on such a heroic scale. There was no real problem in his view. My task, for which I was being suitably rewarded [fast-rewrite-man fee of £600], was to resolve all the loose ends by Monday morning...

Forbes then discovered script approval was in the hands of the star’s wife. Mrs Ladd at once rejected Forbes's first idea for Ladd' s escaping captivity by grabbing a horse from his guards: “This Limey writer you got here, he's got Alan Ladd stealing a horse. He steals a horse, we lose the Boy Scouts Association of America. So unless you change it we're catching the next plane out of here.” A line was duly added to Forbes' s script, of Ladd saying 'Is this the horse I ordered?' Explained Mrs Ladd later to Forbes, “It's never a waste of time to get things right.” When the climax at Stonehenge was finally shot with the entire Westminster Choir singing a Te Deum and the Abbot reading from the King James Bible [pub. c1610], Forbes told Allen that “within this hallowed scene he had brilliantly encompassed six hundred years of history and managed to get every single detail wrong.” Riposted Allen, “So who cares? They won't know the difference in Little Rock, and that's where it's going to take the money.”

Says it all, really.

Anyway, as a starting point, we can compare the recent films (four made in the last five years) with the last big-budget feature that had a north-of-Hadrian’s-Wall setting, King Arthur (2004), since issued on DVD in a longer ‘Director's Cut’ version together with making-of documentary.

Although there are indications the Arthur of native tradition fought north of the Wall (references to battles in the Caledonian Wood and at Din Eidyn, Edinburgh), the setting north of the Wall may seem surprising, partly because Arthur’s floruit - however you measure it exactly - was in the Dark Ages after Roman Britain (and the Wall) fell into ruin. It may be that Spielberg’s announcement in 2002 he was making a £85m, 8-hour Arthurian miniseries for American audiences, using key personnel from his HBO Band Of Brothers series, caused King Arthur producer Jerry Bruckheimer to look elsewhere for a differentiated approach. Spielberg’s HBO project was to be set in Somerset, and was to “de-evolve” the legend, making Arthur into Artos, a humble Romano-British blacksmith (shades of Alan Ladd in 1954’s The Black Knight) at a ‘Roman’ fort around AD 500, who discovers the steel-forging secret behind Excalibur. Spielberg’s plan was criticised for its English-Arthur setting by Welsh Arthurian proponents, including a Welsh MP, after a dozen English MPs had welcomed his project in Parliament when it was announced as to be shot in the West Country. Unfortunately the Treasury tax breaks that attracted Band Of Brothers had already been withdrawn, making filming in Britain unlikely - more probably in Ireland like Saving Private Ryan and Bruckheimer’s rival project; the upshot was Spielberg shelved his plan (which sounded desperately unimaginative in any case).

King Arthur went ahead, with an American scriptwriter (who also co-wrote Gladiator) and director, based on a theory that would put the setting north of the Wall, something that had been done in novels, but not Arthurian films. The theory was one formulated by anthropologists the Arthurian legend was based on campfire tales of a Sarmatian contingent of 5,500 heavy cavalry patrolling Hadrian’s Wall, led by a Roman officer whose middle name was (wait for it) Artorius. The anthropologists observed the Sarmatians had folktales of warriors called narts, a magic sword thrown in the water as the hero lies dying, and a few other evocative details [summary here]. The thesis was the leader’s name transmuted from the Batradz of Sarmatian folktale into Arthur (somehow with the un-Roman ‘th’ dipthong) after Lucius Artorius Castus their onetime officer. It’s just as likely the Celtic Iron Age inherited it from an earlier substratum of Indo-European legend and folktale, but English historians and novelists have always been keen on any theory that makes Arthur a Roman-trained cavalryman, and in this scenario he is also an ‘ethnic’ figure, which gives the theory appeal to both authoritarian and liberal sensibilities. There has long been a notion among English historians and novelists that Arthur’s association with knights means he could not simply be a British warrior, but had at least to have been Roman-trained to use cavalry tactics. Various Arthurian novels make Ambrosius, a historical figure, Arthur’s mentor. 

Of course it’s not true the Celts or Britons did not know how to use horses in battle; they did not have stirrups for a medieval-style ‘jousting’ type of battle-charge, which you need for true cavalry. (The stirrups are adjustable so you can stand rather than sit in the saddle, which, believe me, is a lot less bumpy when cantering etc; the setup is still used with western-style or ‘cowboy’ saddles, which when properly adjusted will have one handspan of free space between your crotch and the saddle.) But neither in the main did the Romans. Their forte was heavily armoured infantry in shield-wall formations (seen in all the recent Romans-in-Pictland films). I’ve previously characterised this notion as like creating a western-genre scenario where kindly old patrician General Custer trains Crazy Horse and his Sioux warband how to use horses as a military tactic, so that they can then go off and defeat their mutual enemies. (On the natives’ use of cavalry, one of the Vindolanda inked-wooden-leaf tablets recovered in the 70s from a fort near the Wall has a 2nd C. description of their mixed cavalry / mounted infantry / infantry tactics: "The British are unprotected by armour. There are lots of cavalry. They don't use swords nor do these dreadful British people mount their horses to throw javelins at us.”) Note that the Britons here would be Caledonians or Britons from lowland provinces based around Edinburgh or Strathclyde rather than the later Picts.

The film opens with a prologue saying that recent archeo discoveries have shed light on Arthur’s true identity. This is incorrect: the basis of the scenario is in folklore studies, not archaeology; nor is the theory recent. I recall reading an article in a folklore journal in the early 1980s on this theorised Sarmatian source. Sarmatia was a sub-division of Scythia, which was a general-purpose Greek and Roman name for Eastern Europe, in this case the more open lands north of the Black Sea – horse country. Hadrian’s Wall figures in the story, though it is set well after the fall of Rome. The film introduces Clive Owen in the lead role of weary Romano-British cavalry commander Artorius Castus, here also given a Sarmatian heritage like his troop of 6 survivors; this contradicts the historical background - the Romans didn’t trust such colonial contingents without a proper Roman officer, rather like the British Indian Army with its British officers and native troops; Lucius Artorius Castus is not a Sarmatian name, but a Roman one. To add to the confusion, producer Jerry Bruckheimer announced the concept was that "Arthur was really Roman and the Knights of the Round Table were Russian and great horsemen." Although the film claims a respectable academic theory setup as its starting point, it’s already getting muddled, and soon only serves to demonstrate how unwieldy this approach is, either as history or an Arthurian realist scenario showing how the legend might have come about.

For decades, historians and authors tried to come with a Dark Ages historical basis for the later elaborate mediaeval legend we read in the Arthurian romances, but these draw on so many traditions, from ancient folk-tales onward, that the reality is obscured and the romances appeal because they are a synthesis of western heroic and fabulous traditions, not because they dramatise some obscure Dark Ages source. It’s just a wish-fulfilling academic fantasy to try and reconcile the vast Arthurian mythos with a single piece of history. I’ve sometimes been impressed by the sheer ingenuity of novelists (both English and American) who have imposed Roman place names and practices onto a Dark Ages Britain to come up with a credible prototype framework for the legend, so that you could see the kernel from which the mighty Romance legends would grow. But King Arthur, with its awkwardly over-reaching title, is proof how clunky the process of rationalising legends can quickly become, and soon makes little sense as either realist tale or as legend prototype: it simply falls down between the two.

Apart from a battle on the ice which has more to do with 13C Russian (cf Alexander Nevsky) than Arthurian legend, the battles, the tactics, the leadership depicted are nothing special, certainly not convincing as a shining inspiration. The story setup has a small troop of Sarmatian youth impressed into the Roman Army, 452-467 AD, in order to better fit the chronicle dates of the First Saxon War. The problem is Rome fell in 405 AD, the Western Empire and Roman Britannia collapsing soon after. Hadrian’s Wall, built around 120-133 AD and abandoned soon afterwards, belongs to a much earlier era, and the 5,000 Sarmatians who patrolled the border there in the 2nd C would have been reassigned long before Rome fell. What these 7 unkempt-looking lone survivors are still doing there centuries later is not explained.

The other problem is there is a set of native-British legends about Arthur, preserved in Welsh, which are different from the Breton-French ones; in the former he is not a king at all, but a huntsman or warband leader (or to use the English historians’ favourite disdainful expression, a warlord) who is not the least interested in waging war as an extension of Roman empire building. Of course, one could argue the native version is the ‘vulgar’ form which developed among the common people, while the Breton-French one was developed at court into something aspirational, with moral lessons for the aristocracy of the mediaeval era. Then there is also a bare-bones chronicle version listing some of his battles, like Badon (which is dramatised in at least two of the recent films), in the monkish historical records of west Britain. But there seems no way to reconcile the three strands of folk-hero, romance, and chronicle, and that remains the essential problem for Arthurian adaptors who want to have their cake and eat it.

The action begins with our Artorius (who calls himself “Arthur Castus”) and his troop of 6 Sarmatian cavalry foiling an ambush by those nasty howling natives the Picts, here referred to throughout by the contemptuous name Woads. (One of the music tracks is named ‘Woad To Ruin’.) I suppose the scriptwriters got the idea from American natives being called Redskins originally after the red-ochre paint they marked their bodies with. Woad however is probably not the dye used for Pictish tattoing - tests have shown it is impractical. Although not visibly dyed, the Woads are described as blue demons that eat Christians alive. The 7 defeat the Woads by shooting arrows from horseback like Parthians (as in ‘Parthian shot,’ modernised as ‘parting shot’), and then, in an unconvincing fight scene, defeat the more numerous Woads in hand to hand combat. The long-haired wild-eyed Woad leader turns out to be Merlin, and the story now also quickly works in Excalibur. The 7 arrive at Hadrian’s Wall, which is somehow still being maintained and even has a Round Table in the officers mess. Arthur’s 6 ‘knights’ for reasons unexplained (beyond more legend-stuffing) have proto-Arthurian French or Welsh rather than Sarmatian names: Lancelot, Gawain, Galahad, Tristan, Bors etc. They remain completely undeveloped characters, there to provide Arthur with a trio of sidekicks on each side of his horse every time he poses on some vantage point. (Though the actors playing the six are somewhat more lively in demeanour than Clive Owen as Arthur, who looks glum throughout.)

Some real figures from history are now introduced, in ways that contradict what is known about them. Bishop Germanus (an actual Gaulish bishop who visited Britannia in 429 and 445 AD), arrives - here somehow a Roman military commander in AD 467. Arthur claims he is a Pelagian (a ‘heretical’ largely British school of Christianity), though nothing further is made of this. (There is vague talk in a cut final scene about making your own fate.) Germanus tells him the north ie Scotland is to be taken over in “a massive incursion” by the Saxons, led by Cerdic (the 5th-6th C founder of Wessex according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). It’s implied this has been authorised by the Pope, though why he would want to give land to pagans is unexplained, and why the Saxons would want to invade from the wrong end of the country is also not explained. (In one early source, the Saxons were brought in and given land to fight the Picts raiding from the far north, and the land the Saxons were given was in the south.) Arthur and his 6 knights are told to head north, instead of going home to Sarmatia (having finished their 15 years indentured military service), to rescue a Roman official from the Saxons, by order of the Pope. (My viewing notes may have got slightly muddled here, as having the Pope in charge of ‘papal armies’ conflates the Roman Empire with the Holy Roman Empire not founded until the 10th C AD.)

The less-than-magnificent 7 ride north and are ambushed by the cunning Woads who have set the usual fallen-tree traps on the road, but they are spared by Merlin for some reason. Arthur turns on the Bishop’s protege as a tyrant when he discovers he has imprisoned Guinevere, here a Pictish warrior-princess in a fetching leather-and-wickerwork bikini outfit. She lectures Arthur about being a Roman collaborator killing Britons. They pass a massacred Roman unit (”Saxons!”), whose presence so far north of the Wall - and so many decades after the Romans abandoned Britain - is also unexplained. Soon they must do battle with the Saxon army, on a frozen lake (guess who falls through the ice in great numbers). Back at the Wall, with the help of Merlin’s Woads, they wipe out the Saxon army at a spot which turns out to be called Badon Hill (the famous Arthurian victory dated in the chronicles to AD 495 or later). Arthur slays Cerdic (who presumably never gets to found Wessex in this alternate reality - or is he meant to be a different Cerdic?). Lancelot is also killed in battle, and as this is before he can have his famous affair with Guinevere, the legend as well as history is being confounded. Luckily Guinevere has turned out to be not just a wilful queen (as in the romances) but an expert archer who leads the Woads, now also painted blue like Braveheart, using longbows, mediaeval crossbows and giant catapults. (There is no record the Picts ever used these.) Afterwards, Arthur and Guinevere wed as the Woads shoot flaming arrows over the sea and all hail him as ‘King Arthur.’ (On the commentary, the director laments that this was a new ending to satisfy complaints from a preview audience; the original ending included on the DVD has Arthur involved in an awkward legend-stuffing talk about Fate, with a boy who is presumably the next-generation Arthur figure.) Merlin hails Arthur as he announces that from now on, all Britons will be united in one common cause. Even the most idealistic mediaeval romance was never that politically naive. The ‘Britannia’ that a ‘Roman’ Arthur represents of course was ruined and split into provinces (the only near-contemporary source is Gildas’s 6C tract titled “The Division And Conquest of ‘Britannia’”); these were overrun one by one until they all became part of a new German state called Angle-land - England. There is also an epilogue narrated by someone with a RADA accent, who according to the commentary is (the already-dead) Lancelot. “There’s a King Arthur in all of us,” lamely concludes the director’s commentary, as the moral of the tale.

King Arthur is really the nadir of this pretentious have-your-cake-and-eat-it school of attempting to rationalise mythmaking, a production that would have likely attracted no interest had it not been backed by such a big-money producer as Jerry Bruckheimer. As in that witless 1950s Alan Ladd film, the main story elements belong to different time periods; centuries of history and legend are opportunistically ransacked for dramatic elements in a way that CB DeMille would have found cynical. (See Scots author/scriptwriter George Macdonald Fraser’s Hollywood History Of The World, on how they did try in the old days to work from source materials and research.) Both history and the legend are confounded by an approach that continually shoots itself in the foot. Even the standard Hollywood defence “it’s only entertainment” would be misapplied here, due to the film in its publicity and prologue insisting this is the true story, finally told. This attempt to capture the high ground falls flat due to an inability to combine history and legend in any convincing way.

Next time, we’ll look at the 4 more recent film productions set north of Hadrian’s Wall, wherein a certain disillusion with the simplistic and prejudiced depiction of the Romans as heroes and the Picts and Scots as scary shouty hairy barbarians is finally manifesting itself.

2009 In Review

-- A look at the key trends and events of the year just past.
To keep this to manageable length, I’m focussing this year-end review on the main developments, those clustered around Scotland’s official ‘Year Of Homecoming.’ For, by more than coincidence, this nexus led to press stories about King Arthur, the ‘original’ Merlin, the controversial Stone Of Destiny, the ‘Pictish’ mystery, the Knights Templar, and their supposed successors the Scottish Rite Freemasons of America - background subject of Dan Brown’s latest ‘factually based’ novel The Lost Symbol.

The cornerstone historic exhibit of Scotland’s ‘Year Of Homecoming’ national celebration was of course the Stone Of Destiny – coronation stone of the ancient kings of the Picts and Scots, kept at Scone Palace, where excavations of the area were finally begun in 2009. Stone Of Destiny is also the title of a famous book by Ian Hamilton QC, who was one of the nationalist students from Glasgow U who in December 1950 ‘recovered’ the stone from its place under the coronation throne in Westminster Abbey. (Edward I, after he defeated William Wallace in the 1290s, ordered the Stone sent to Westminster for all future English kings to be crowned on, to show they were also kings of Scotland.) The story of the daring stunt was made into a film in 2008, and this (not much seen on its cinema release) was released on DVD in April 09, together with behind-the-scenes items relating the background events, in which Ian (still going strong in his 80s with his own nationalist blog) appears. Today, there is considerable suspicion the Scone monks sent Edward a substitute (probably a sandstone cistern lid), as ancient codex descriptions suggest the stone is not the original. (For details, see earlier post on this: MacCamelot Revisited.)

Of course, some see the Homecoming Year (so designated as it was Burns’s 250th anniversary) as a way of rallying broader support for the now hotly topical issue of Scottish independence, with cultural representations that show more finesse than the main modern ‘touchstone,’ the crude ‘Jocksploitation’ film Braveheart, which depicted nationalism as defiant exhibitionism, protesting against English tyranny, on the level of a chanting football crowd.

In 2009, Scotland continued to be depicted on screen as a barbarian province, with several films going into production set in the North but with non-native heroes - invading Romans, or Viking raiders. This is an old problem which can be seen in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which a new study, Fiona Watson’s Macbeth: A True Story, revealed once again was historically a travesty. The actual Macbeth was a long-serving popular (and probably Pictish) ruler; historians say Shakespeare was trying to feed the anti-Scots prejudice of the time. (For details of these invading Romans/ Viking raiders films, see earlier post Those Pictish Blues Again.)

Braveheart itself was in the news again [Oct.] when Gibson admitted he knew from historical research that William Wallace was no Mr Nice Guy but ‘a monster’ akin to a Viking berserker. When the film came out in 1995, Gibson had reportedly tried to distance himself from the way it was used as a recruitment aid [leaflets handed out in cinema queues etc] by militant nationalists, who have since continued to paint their faces a ‘Pictish’ blue like Gibson’s - which like much else in the film is historically wrong. (Scots-born Wallace was from a Norman-Welsh family, his surname ‘le Wealeas’ meaning The Welshman, the family being from Shropshire.) Its American scriptwriter Randall Wallace (no relation) defended his screenplay on the grounds it was based on a 15C codex source, a verse epic by a minstrel called Blind Harry. Gibson has announced he is making a blood-and-thunder epic about the Viking berserkers, which will have Leonardo DiCaprio speaking subtitled Old Norse and ‘chronicle the Viking raids on England and Scotland in the ninth century.’

This was the background to another film produced last year (out March 2010), the Danish film Valhalla Rising shot in Scotland, Scandinavia and Canada, about a Viking escaping from slavery among the Highland clans. The idea Viking raiders might end up as slaves to the fierce Highlanders they tried to raid got some wry press coverage in 2009 when an academic conference promoted it to emphasise how the Vikings weren’t as fearless as believed to be by Mel Gibson. (Apparently Icelandic codex sources warned them to avoid Scotland as dangerous!)
(Earlier post here.)

It was these Vikings raids on Celtic monasteries which destroyed an untold number of codex manuscripts dating back into the Dark Ages. A priceless one which did survive, the Celtic Psalter, nicknamed ‘Scotland’s Book Of Kells,’ was the subject of an Edinburgh exhibition designed to conclude the 2009 commemorations. The exhibition of this long-unseen codex seems to have been caught in Scotland’s self-consciousness over image, the modern artist’s contemporising framework commissioned being rejected [Dec.] by the University library which was to exhibit it. The artist had wanted a motto warning about the fragility of a codex volume, “Every time you turn a page, it dies a little,” which Edinburgh University library thought ‘not celebratory enough’ for the 11C exhibit, which is illustrated with Pictish symbols.

Perhaps we should be using the terms Pictland and Pictish here rather than Scotland and Scottish, as stories concerning the earlier Pict inhabitants dominated those concerning the later Scots i.e. Irish colonists who with the help of the church began to colonise the country from the 6th C on. A number of these stories concerned a series of archeo finds this year which helped fill in a heretofore largely blank early history. One example of a find was of a “£1m golden hoard” near Stirling Castle, of pre-Roman era gold torcs which display similar artisanship to that found in Gaul. The press inevitably resorted to the phrase that this ‘rewrites the history of ancient Scotland’, but it was more a case of the finds indicating Keltic Pictland was not the impoverished backwater it later became under English rule. (The Stirling area, part of the same tribal kingdom as Edinburgh [and Rosslyn], that of the Gododdin, is covered in a separate web-page, here.)

Several films featuring the Picts were produced last year, mostly to be released in 2010 (again, discussed earlier in ‘Those Pictish Blues Again’ ). Since then, Bran Mak Morn - 30s pulp author and ‘Conan’ creator Robert E. Howard’s name for the supposed last king of the Picts - is now being filmed by Universal Studios, with Peter Berg [?] as director, and John (Intolerable Cruelty) Romano as scriptwriter. A pair of rival Romans-versus-Picts films are set for release in autumn 2010. Centurion, filmed on location in Scotland, has 7 survivors from the legendary Ninth legion, sent north ‘to wipe the Picts from the face of the earth’ (this is not at all historical re the 9th) being pursued by Amazonian-style Pictish women led by Olga Kurylenko as a warrior princess who has ‘had her tongue cut out by the Romans.’ Director Neil Marshall has said (I’m guessing in response to some early criticism) “It’s not meant to be historically perfect. I’m picking up on a legend and exploring it … it’s an action thriller.” (It’s a Gladiator-lookalike - trailer here.)

There is in reality no such legend of the IX Legion going north into Pictland; the legion simply vanishes from official accounts; if was defeated by British tribes, it was more likely by the Iceni of Norfolk some 60 years before. The story seems conflated with that of Boudicca [misspelt Boadicea by 19C English antiquarians] queen of the Iceni, who rose against Roman occupation in AD 60-1 after she was flogged by the Romans who looted her estate and raped her daughters. So many Roman ‘collaborators’ were massacred and butchered (women’s breasts stuffed in their mouths etc) by her rebel army that the Romans were later unable to take the usual Nazi-style mass-killing reprisals, as there would be insufficient population left to maintain the tax base. (Or so Churchill says in his The Birth Of Britain).

This rebellion indeed is or was (before his current Viking project) to be the subject of a long-planned Mel Gibson produced bloody-mutilation-and-suffering drama, work-titled Warrior but nicknamed by the industry ‘Braveheart in a bra.’ (Even its primitive ‘bandeau’ form, the bra of course was one item of clothing legendary women warriors like the Amazons didn’t wear; supposedly their name meant ‘no breast’, referring to the belief they cut off their breasts as these got in the way when drawing a bow.) Gibson’s was one of 3 rival such projects at the time, including one from Spielberg's Dreamworks (called Queen Fury), and another titled Warrior Queen [also the title of 2 novels on Queen B., plus a 1978 BBC TV series with Sian Philips]. All these may have been abandoned since being pre-empted by a TV movie starring Alex Kingston as earthy queen of a pack of beer-swilling Celts. Some of the major-studio interest here may have been prompted by a speculative (not much is known) 2006 biography, Boudica by Vanessa Collingridge, plus an imaginative trilogy of novels by M.C. [Manda] Scott, who originally trained as a veterinary surgeon at Glasgow University before switching to a teaching ‘shamanic’ dreaming and writing novels, notably her 'Boudica Dreaming' quartet, 2001-6.

This seems part of a Hollywood trend we’ve mentioned in earlier posts towards ‘women warrior’ heroines, something that works in this setting, especially among the Picts who (Bede says) practised matriarchal descent, their noble women ( a Roman historian says) consorting openly with the bravest warriors, and also (Irish legend says) employing women weapons trainers in places like Skye. A new novel published by Penguin last year, Warrior Daughter, by award-winning Scots poet and novelist Janet Paisley, depicts such a sexually-liberated (and bisexual) Iron Age people on Skye led by the orphan daughter of a warrior queen.

The 2nd film being made about the IX Legion was probably the first work of popular fiction to promote the notion it vanished in Scotland: Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 young-adult novel The Eagle Of The Ninth, about “a wounded Roman soldier and his loyal Celtic slave who try to solve the mystery of the Ninth Legion.” This is not another action adventure but a tale of friendship and personal discovery amidst a strange culture, a framework the director of the current film, Kevin Macdonald, is adhering to – adding a layer of deliberate contemporary political allegory about ‘cultural imperialism’ by having the Romans played by Americans in their native accents to emphasize a parallel with Iraq etc. Macdonald has said the ‘natives’ will speak Gaelic, though in the story they are a pre-Celtic Inuit-like relict population, The Seal People whom even the Celtic-Britonnic interpreter cannot understand. (More details in earlier post here.)


Although the ‘natives’ were historically portrayed as barbarians, a number of individuals who had previously been considered non-Scots were ‘repatriated’ or re-claimed as being ‘really’ Scotsmen. Columbus was claimed, on the basis of re-examining some old codex evidence, to have been a blond freckled Scot. This was a claim by a Barcelona historian [A.E. de Villalonga], so can’t be put down simply to Scots nationalist fervor.

As I discussed in an earlier post (see North To MacCamelot) , a proposed relocation of the Arthurian legend to Scotland was in the news. It was suggested Scotland's Southern Uplands rather than Wales were the likely locale of the original Merlin, Myrddin, such as Hart Fell near the source of the Clyde. In this post, I included a photo taken as I flew over the area in May, showing the old Caledonian Wood had been replaced by farmland and modern conifer plantations. Since then, Galloway Forest Park (near where The Wicker Man was part-filmed) because of its relative remoteness from built-up areas has, as part of International Year of Astronomy 2009, been named Britain’s first ‘dark sky’ site, where a view of the night skies can best be had free from urban light pollution. (Instead of the 200 or so stars you can see in cities, it is dark enough there to see up to 7,000 stars.) This is perhaps worth mentioning here, as the starscape was an important feature of life which inspired some of the stellar and lunar myths the ancients wrote of, and whose calendric alignments are also thought to be the basis of megalithic sites like Callanish, rather than just the solar events [solstice etc] celebrated by today’s popular New Age gatherings.

A Scots provenance for legendary Arthur was also proposed, which I won’t go into here as it was covered before in two earlier posts North To MacCamelot and MacCamelot Revisited. Since then, the only headline announcement I’ve seen is ‘King Arthur Was A Genocidal Warlord, Claims New Book’ - which turned out to be advance PR for The Celtic Revolution : In Search of 2000 Forgotten Years that Changed Our World by Dr Simon Young, whose interesting attempt at simulating a lost travel-guide codex, A.D. 500: A Journey Through the Dark Isles of Britain and Ireland, I reviewed 2 years ago [here].

This slighting approach to Arthur by English historians is in itself not new. But instead of “He wasn’t real, just a myth propagated by Welsh and Scots nationalists (and later woolly-minded Romantic Celtophiles overseas),” we typically get “Ok, we’ll agree he was real, provided you agree he wasn’t a proper king, just a Dark Ages warlord, a murderous tyrant.” (You can almost hear the unspoken coda – “a typical bloody Celt.”) The Telegraph article [27-Sep-09] painted Young’s Arthur as a "genocidal warlord whose deeds would have been the stuff of Nuremberg trials today." This didn’t encourage me to order the book, though from the Telegraph’s actual book review I see Arthur is only discussed in an Appendix, where “two sixth-century warlords, one called Arthur and another named Artur” are suggested as main inspiration. The review goes on to outline the thesis of the book’s subtitle, indicating Young does regard ‘Celtica’ as a real culture which made a major contribution to western civilisation. So it may be worth ordering when the paperback comes out.

On the other hand, the claim that one famous historical figure was half-Scots was debunked by a Scottish historian, Neil Hooper. The idea, which has made its way into tourist guidebooks over the years, that Pontius Pilate was born of a Scots mother and Roman father, at Fortingall in Perthshire, where a famous old yew stands, was attacked [Dec.] by Hooper as lacking any documentation before 1899. Hooper argued the new local laird, who entertained the likes of Kipling and Tennyson there, ‘invented the story as a prank with the help of his literary friends.’

As to the perennial Holy Legend, referenced in the famous Blake verse, that Jesus himself visited Britain, there is a long-standing belief in a visit to Scotland. This goes back at least to William Comyns Beaumont (1873-1956), a Daily Mail staff writer. In books with titles like Britain, The Key To World History and After Atlantis: The Greatest Story Never Told, he argued that Jesus was born in Glastonbury, and lived in Somerset, Jerusalem being really Edinburgh etc. – all this being covered up by a gigantic conspiracy by the Romans, who had the Bible rewritten. Since then, others (like Barry Durnford) have concentrated more on folktales of Holy Visits by Jesus and/or Mary to the Hebrides (Iona etc.) This past year, Scottish scholar Dr Gordon Strachan did provide the research basis for a new documentary film on the legend, called [what else?] And Did Those Feet?, which debuted in late November at the British Film Institute. (No sign of it since.) This was based on Dr Strachan’s theories, which for anyone interested, are largely given in his book Jesus The Master Builder. (They’re mainly mathematical arguments based on the idea of cross-cultural commonalities found in ‘Pythagorean’ geometry, and gematria.) For details, see our earlier post prompted by the film’s press release, here.

Scotland’s claim to independence was built partly around Robert the Bruce’s 1314 victory at Bannockburn, with the date figuring on nationalist flags. One of the recurring motifs in recent years in regard to Scots independence is that Bannockburn, would not have been won if it were not for a handful of English Templars who had fled here from the purge of their order in France and England which the Scots king refused to take part in. (The last part is not true, as I’ve mentioned before.) This it-was-really-the-English-Templars-who-won-it claim returned in 2009 [Dec.], based on a ‘statistical’ analysis that a certain percent of Templars would’ve wound up here, and this total is then added to Bruce’s forces. An analysis by a Californian lawyer claimed to demonstrate that, as 335 Templars went missing in France, 29-48 logically would have fought alongside the Scots. It was endorsed by the "Grand Prior of the Scots" Templars, then denounced in the Times as "rubbish" insulting to Scots by British Templar historian Helen Nicholson, who teaches mediaeval warfare at Cardiff U. Inevitably, the claim turned out to be promoting a new book, The Knights Templar And Scotland, and the author a Knight Commander in a modern Scots Templar order. Coincidentally, Helen Nicholson published an article for BBC History Magazine earlier this year on the fate of the English Templars, which provided me with one new item of info on the Knight Templar I had researched as a case study (see England’s Last Templar): the knight in question had, with others, disappeared not to Scotland but to Ireland. (There’s probably another book in that.)

There were also press stories about the Templars owning mediaeval estates in lowland Scotland, east and west. I’m assuming here (this is not clearly spelt out in the coverage) that Scots post-1314 independence allowed survivors of the purge and their descendants there to openly profess Templar affiliation. Gravestones found [Oct.] under a gateway by a ruined medieval church in the village of Temple, Midlothian carried strange carvings called by the press 'Pac-Man' markings. As its name indicates, this was a Templar property (some say the Templars’ Scottish headquarters), seized in the purge. To the west, Kilwinning in Ayrshire was proposed [cf article by AJ Morton in Fortean Times Mr 2010] as an overlooked Templar centre, with dozens of identifiable properties around its ruined Abbey, plus another score nearby at Irvine. Some of these properties were owned by key individuals with titles like High Constable Of Scotland and Guardian of Scotland, and who apparently included both Wallace and Bruce. Over a century before England’s Grand Lodge was founded [1717], Kilwinning also became in 1599 the ‘mother lodge’ of Scottish Rite Freemasonry – the name Kilwinning Lodge being used in the USA, when Scottish Rite Freemasonry was exported to the Colonies. (Unlike the English variety, Scots Freemasonry was opposed to an Established i.e. state church like the Church Of England - a Scots Presbyterian idea that soon found its way into the US Constitution as the separation of church and state.)

In America, Dan Brown’s long-awaited Da Vinci Code followup finally appeared, years behind schedule. Originally announced as about the idea the US capitol was founded according to a secret Masonic masterplan, nonfiction guidebooks had already ‘outed’ some of this historical background, about which he had given pointed clues. (This was still better from Brown’s viewpoint than books attacking his bad research, as with TDVC, and would have helped him establish his background claims of “Fact.”) The appearance of his latest thriller [Sep.] provided the amusing highlight of the year, as well as the biggest mystery of the year. The amusing highlight was when he switched the title at the last possible moment, leaving all those who had already published books with titles like ‘The Guide To Dan Brown’s The Solomon Key’ racing to reissue their works as ‘The Guide To Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol.’ There was also a seeming mystery behind the delay. TDVC’s cover had clues pointing to US Freemasonry as the basis of Brown’s next conspiracy thriller. Inevitably, stories soon went around the novel would attack the Masonic order the way TDVC had with secretive Roman Catholic orders. This would set up a revisionist take on US history, portraying Freemason George (‘I cannot tell a lie’) Washington as a traitor who left a deathbed-confession manuscript, buried with him by conspiring fellow Masons in a sealed coffin at Mount Vernon, to avoid scandal.

There was also speculation the novel would deal with the fact the founding-father Masons were not orthodox Christians but Deists – hence the symbol of the Egyptian pyramid with the all seeing eye put on the dollar bill etc. Freemasonry as 'a unique system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols' seemed a natural choice of topic for Brown. Scotland’s leading writer on matters Masonic [he is curator of the Grand Lodge of Scotland], Robert Cooper, said Brown’s title change was due to Cooper’s 2007 nonfiction book Cracking The Freemason's Code – The Truth About Solomon's Key, and while on a US lecture tour, he heard from ‘an inside source’ that Brown was using the tale about George Washington’s buried confessional manuscript as his plot hook.

However, when the novel appeared, all of this, which had been written up in advance in guidebooks by Dan Burstein and David A. Shugarts (whose books I have), was missing. No ‘ancient secrets rewriting western history’ were proferred: the plot was just another solve-the-puzzle-quick chase thriller, not based on any conspiracy theories. Brown did depict a few Masonic ‘bad apples,’ but gave out in PR releases how much he admired the order, and would even like to join himself [hint, hint], his book then being adopted as a recruiting tool by US lodges. One can only wonder if he decided he had had enough of controversy and threats in his life, and decided to play it safe from now on.
Of course, as usual, we’re unlikely to be able to establish the truth of the matter ….

2010 - A Screen Odyssey?

Last post, I said we’d look at films about ancient odyssey-type voyages that sailed closer to home than the upcoming cycle of films about Jason, Hercules et al which we covered last time.
The Danish film Valhalla Rising now filming in Scotland, Scandinavia and Canada (for a March 2010 release) does bring us closer geographically, with a voyage showing relations between Scots and Vikings.
This is something that has been in the news headlines. Earlier this year, the papers carried articles with headlines like "The Vikings: it wasn't all raping and pillaging" (The Independent), "Spotlight on the cuddly side of the Vikings" (Guardian), "Vikings 'were not barbaric'" (The Press Association), "Those nice Vikings did a lot for us, says experts" (Independent, Ireland), and "Don't mention the pillage as academics explore the nice side of the Vikings" (Irish Times). The press stories were about the 'Between The Islands' conference organised by Cambridge University's Dept of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic Studies, presenting Viking raids as an example of ‘positive immigration’ from which we could learn ‘important lessons’ today. It was convened with 20 ‘cutting edge’ research papers to “celebrate the gentle side of the invaders: the town planners, shipbuilders, farmers, coin-minters and stonecarvers who were forever swapping songs, stories or advice on a better way to rig a mainsail with their Gaelic neighbours.” (As Basil Fawlty might put it, we're all friends together now, eh, and no need to Mention The War - or in this case, the centuries-long Viking terror contemporary sources write of.)
A more recent story outlined the older view more representative of the people at the time, as indicated by the source materials, the ancient codices containing Icelandic sagas, navigation guides etc, “set down on yellowed calf vellum eight centuries ago.” The comments gleaned from these on Scots-Viking relations by a historian at Reykjavik University, Gisli Sigurdsson, were summarised by the Telegraph [20-Sep-09] as: “Vikings 'were warned to avoid Scotland' - Scotland is full of dangerous natives who speak an incomprehensible language and the weather is awful. That was the verdict of a series of 13th century Viking travel guides that warned voyagers to visit at their peril.”
The sources quoted were one-sided, only representing the Nordic view, complaining the Scots made a dangerous prey: "Icelanders who want to practise robbery are advised to go there. But it may cost them their life." There is unintended irony here, with the historian saying the Vikings were ‘nervous’ about the wild Scots and Irish Gaels. The word Scot, like Vikingr, is thought to mean raiders, and the residents of the Western and Northern Isles had been raiding by sea since at least Roman times, when their population was beefed up by refugees from the new ‘Pax Romana,’ and raiding took on a nationalist-political appeal.
Well, all this promises rich dramatic possibilities, but what of this latest film, Valhalla Rising? This has a giant mute Viking (Mads Mikkelsen again) called One-Eye escaping longterm slavery among the Highland clans, joining up with a boy-companion/interpreter, some other Vikings and Scots missionaries en route south to the Crusades, who get turned around in the fog, and end up coming ashore on what they believe to be Valhalla, the warrior paradise of Nordic myth, which proves to be their accidental discovery c1000 AD of America. (Quite an odyssey that, setting out for Jerusalem and ending up discovering North America). There, their companions meet a gruesome fate at the hands of the local denizens, while 'One-Eye discovers his true self.' (YouTube trailer here.) From this synopsis, it sounds a bit like The 13th Warrior, the Beowulf-inspired spinoff (via an obscure Michael Crichton novel called Eaters Of The Dead) of a few years ago - a reworking of various existing strands of history and legend, set amidst brooding northern landscapes where unknown foes lurk.

It also sounds sadly similar to director Marcus Nispel's previous epic, Pathfinder, which in turn is a remake of a 1987 Scandinavian native epic from an old Saami folk tale, authentically filmed by a Saami filmmaker, which was nominated as Best Foreign Film. (Beware the video version, evidently taken from a badly dubbed 16mm US TV print.) The 1987 Pathfinder, a 70mm epic originally titled Veiviseren or Ofelas, recounted how a youth helped defeat an incursion by murderous neighbours in remote Lapland. The 2007 remake has a youth, himself a Viking left behind among the natives as a boy, leading the fight against an incursion by murderous Vikings landing in North America. (Apparently, the locals are the Beothuks of Newfoundland - the original 'Red Indians', who used red-ochre war paint, and were one of the first native tribes to be exterminated). The director is best known for the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and had extra gore added for a special 'unrated' version of the remake.

Historically, the Norse and Picts (as opposed to the western Scots and Irish Gaels) were also rivals and neighbours, until the Norse colonised Pictish bases in northern and eastern Scotland, but nobody has made a film about this yet. One writer who tried to work close to this area in pulp-fantasy terms was the American Robert E Howard, with his Conan and other stories. As reported previously, his Bran mak Morn stories, about the last king of the Picts, are being filmed. Now we also have both a new feature and a new British TV series of 90 minute episodes, on Conan. As I mentioned before, author Robert E Howard was a Romantic Celtophile, and took the name Conan from Celtic legend. The movie began shooting in late August in Bulgaria, after a long wrangle over rights, while the Brit TV series is being prepared by some of those behind the HBO/BBC series Rome. It uses some short stories fallen into the public domain since Howard's death by suicide in 1936, not using the name Conan in the title. (Unlike a lot of REH's other motifs, it's a genuine Celtic name, usually spelt in early sources such as The Gododdin of c600 AD as Cynon). The bad news is the film has the same director as the Pathfinder remake, Marcus Nispel, whose interview comments have fans worried about its 'authenticity.'

The 'world's most famous barbarian' was a Cimmerian, from an historically attested tribe originating in the area of the ancient Crimea, but which is often presented as a land of mist and fog, suggesting a northern Atlantic-coast setting closer to home. Some writers identify them with the Cimbri of Jutland, who abandoned their homeland due to flooding. REH apparently thought the Cimmerians were the ancestors of the Celtic peoples of the British Isles. Ironically, the Picts are excluded from this, treated as the enemy, of both Conan and REH's predecessor-hero Kull of Atlantis. REH was one of many who held to the Romantic 19C belief the British Isles were remnants of once-mighty Atlantis. He used the name Hyboria, adapted from the Greek name for the dwellers-beyond-the-North-Wind (controlled by the god Boreas), the Hyperboreans, who some identify with the residents of the North Sea area, including Britain.

What about the two new screen versions announced of The Odyssey? For there is a theory going back to Roman times that Homer's Odyssey is not set anywhere in the Med, but somewhere beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar Strait), closer to home, among the mythical Hyperboreans. (The Odyssey's foggy weather and remarks about the constellations and the nights being twice as long as the days in winter have suggested a northern voyage.) Well, one filmization, to star Brad Pitt (the recent film Troy's Achilles), is actually an S-F adaptation to be directed by George "Mad Max" Miller and set in outer space. This may not be an isolated case - there's a claim that the current Battlestar Galactica TV series is "a retelling of The Aeneid"

Since the success of the 1956 SF classic Forbidden Planet (the template for Star Trek), widely accepted as an adaptation of Shakespeare's Mediterranean-island fable The Tempest, such cross-genre adaptation has become quite accepted and overt. With its classic opening line "Of arms and the man I sing," Virgil's Aeneid, intended as Rome's "founding" epic, remains a highly influential work, originally translated into English by Dryden and later by Poet Laureate C Day Lewis in 1963, by Allen Mandelbaum (1973 National Book Award), and US Poet Laureate Robert Fitzgerald (1981). In the past few years, there have been four recent translations by American scholars: by Penguin's own 'Aeneid' translator, Robert Fagles of Princeton, by Frederick Ahl of Cornell, by U of Kansas classics professor Stanley Lombardo, and the first by a woman, poet and classicist Sarah Ruden of Yale. And there are reportedly two more versions in the works, one by poet and translator David Ferry, and one by classical literature professor Jane Wilson Joyce. So it isn’t a ‘dead’ work by any means, just a difficult one.

Despite a finale so violent the dying Virgil ordered the manuscript burnt, it has not had a proper film adaptation (as far as I know), though the Italian sword-n-sandal cycle no doubt drew on it. (Obviously the title would be changed as it merely means "concerning Aeneas," the Trojan prince who flees west carrying the 'sword of Troy'. (This is a ‘cameo’ moment at the end of the 2004 film Troy, as if setting up a possible spinoff.) The story is that after a suitably epic period of odyssey-like wanderings, Aeneas founds Rome.)

Disappointingly, the other 2010 Odyssey film will omit Ulysses' ten-year epic voyage and concentrate on his return home and bloody revenge against his wife's suitors back on Ithaca, and looks set to be another gorefest. (it's directed by South African filmmaker Jonathan Liebesman, best-known for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning.) Yet there is still hope here for a mature film of Homer's Odyssey - the bestselling UK paperback till 1962 (the year of the Lady Chatterley's Lover censorship trial victory). It's had major English translations into both verse (Alexander Pope) and prose (TE Lawrence), and the influence it still holds among writers, together with recent archaeo-historical theory, may turn the tide.

In the late 19C, Heinrich Schliemann, insisting the Iliad was fact-based, confounded the scoffers of the archaeological establishment by digging down into a great mound near the Hellespont and discovering traces of 7 citadels, one built atop the other. Sceptics said it was too small to fit Homer's account, but a German team of several hundred archaeological staff led by the late Manfred Korfmann have since patiently uncovered a moated outer city, of suitably 'Homeric' size. Since then, there have been similar attempts to rationalise the Iliad's sequel The Odyssey, and its cousin the Argonautica, at least in terms of questing 'in-the-wake-of' style travel books and Discovery Channel documentaries. The account of Jason's Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece is postulated to have been inspired by an early voyage east through the Black Sea to the Caucasus. There, gold was (and still is) traditionally 'panned' out of mountain streams by putting a sheep fleece in the shallows to trap the gold flakes, while rams' skins were royal paraphernalia. (Archaeo-historian Michael Wood, author of In Search Of The Trojan War: “Recent discoveries about the Hittite Empire in Bronze Age Anatolia show celebrations where fleeces were hung to renew royal power.”)

However, with Homer's Odyssey, a similar rationalising theory has not found similar acceptance, partly as earlier books traced out Ulysses' wanderings around the Western Med without reaching any consensus. Since then, it's been argued none of the geography proposed really fits the story 1:1. More recently, a fringe theory has developed that scholars have been trying the fit the inspiration for the tale onto the wrong map, and that they should get their noses out of maps of the Med and look farther afield. That is, the 2nd part of the Odyssey at least was inspired by sailors' “tall tales” from long-distance early Greek voyages to visit actual Bronze Age peoples dwelling on the North Atlantic coast - principally the British Isles.

This is a thesis which is as far as I know is yet untapped by a film industry always on the lookout for 'new' theories, or rather for some twist or spin on orthodox history (like King Arthur having been 'really' a Roman commander). None of the screen Odysseys I've come across to date have had anything but a Mediterranean setting. And we've no had no Discovery Channel type documentary which might document the idea, and thus pave the way. (I’m thinking of the likes of Shaun Trevisick of Atlantic Productions, akin to his 2004 documentary The Real Jason And the Argonauts - inspired ironically by his seeing the 1963 fantasy epic Jason And The Argonauts.) Any film-maker who came across the “Northern Odyssey” thesis via various speculative books, and looked into it may have been put off by the sharply conflicting claims in these books, with no agreement at all on geographical identifications etc. So to do it justice, it's best if we devote a separate blog post to it – next time.

Those Pictish Blues Again

While we’re in the area of Pictish history [see previous entry], it might be the time to mention this elusive, neglected people are to feature in several upcoming screen epics.
The first screen epic is Bran Mak Morn, being made by British mini-major Working Title (Atonement, Elizabeth, Fargo, United 93), for 2010 release. Bran Mak Morn was a series of fantasy tales about the supposed last king of the Picts by ‘Conan’ creator, the 30s pulp author Robert E. Howard, a Texan self-conscious about his Celtic roots. The fansite rumour is that the chosen story will be “Worms Of The Earth” wherein let’s just say (I read it years ago) fearsome underground denizens are called up to rid the Pictish kingdom of the Romans.
As Howard’s work sprang from his fevered brow and has almost nothing to do with the actual Picts, there’s not much to say, except for their use of the idea the proto-Picts were a stunted underground race, surviving in hiding from the superior warrior race who invaded from Atlantis. This is one of several problems in the traditional depiction of the Picts – their identification with a dark dwarf-like ‘aboriginal’ race. This remains a source of irritation to anyone trying to give the historical Picts their due.
The second film project, now in post-production, is writer-director Neil Marshall’s Centurion, whose plot synopsis is given as follows:

AD 117. The Roman Empire stretches from Egypt to Spain, and East as far as the Black Sea. But in northern Britain, the relentless onslaught of conquest has ground to a halt in face of the guerrilla tactics of an elusive enemy: the savage and terrifying tribesmen known as the Picts. Marcus Dias, sole survivor of a Pictish raid on a Roman frontier fort, marches north with General Titus Virilus’ legendary 9th legion, under orders to wipe the Picts from the face of the earth and destroy their leader Gorlacon. But when the legion is ambushed on unfamiliar ground, and Virilus taken captive, Marcus faces a desperate struggle to keep his small platoon alive behind enemy lines, evading remorseless Pict pursuers over harsh terrain, as the band of soldiers race to rescue their General, and to reach the safety of the Roman frontier.

The IMDB tags it as a war-adventure drama/thriller, and it does sound like a plot setup familiar from WW2 dramas about the platoon or patrol cut off behind enemy lines trying to make their way back to their base. As the stoic title implies, the heroes are Romans, played by Michael Fassbender and Dominic West (of The Wire). Olga Kurylenko is Etain, which is at least a Celtic name, even if more Irish than Pictish. None of the other names in the IMDB list sound Pictish or even Celtic - Bothos, Macros, Thax, Gorlacon. The synopsis paints the Picts as ‘savage and terrifying tribesmen’ (“Cue the Pictish Hordes, and .. Action!”)
It sounds as if we’re in a similar treatment as in the 2004 film King Arthur with Clive Owen as a Roman Arthur (Artorius), venturing north of Hadrian’s Wall. There, the natives are called “Woads”, sort of angry peasants living in the bushes, who need Roman leadership to oppose the invading Saxons (who for reasons best known to themselves are here invading several centuries too early, and from the wrong end of the country). The script’s patronising designation of the natives as ‘Woads’ is no doubt is inspired by Caesar’s description of c54 BC how British men used the woad plant to paint their bodies blue all over. ("Omnes vero se Britanni vitro inficiunt, quod caeruleum efficit colorem, atque hoc horridiores sunt in pugna aspectu" - "In fact all the Britons dye themselves dark blue with woad, making themselves all the more terrifying in battle.")

(Hence Mel Gibson’s blue face [pictured] in Braveheart, which is completely ahistorical, but became a Scots nationalist rallying point – Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond said Braveheart had “given the Scots back their history”.)
The idea the Picts of succeeding centuries also painted themselves blue with woad seems to be a confusion with later Roman accounts of Pictish warriors tattooing themselves with blue marks, the woad being presumed to be the ink (though I’ve read of a modern investigation which found it to be useless, even dangerous, as tattoo ink). One account says they used iron to draw the shapes of animals on their faces and arms. Indeed, the name ‘Briton’ (as in Ancient Briton) has been parsed as People Of The Shapes or Designs. Anyone who thinks they were uncultured only needs to look at their artwork, which appears on so-called symbol stones. It’s almost a language of its own, and they symbolism remains obscure, just as the Pictish language, surviving only in written fragments such as memorial inscriptions, has never been deciphered.
The 3rd upcoming screen epic is the £15m production The Eagle Of The Ninth, an adaptation which we mentioned in a previous post, of a well-regarded 1954 young-adult novel by Rosemary Sutcliff OBE, CBE (1920-92), which begins filming this month, in Scotland and Hungary.
Though the IX Legion merely ceases to be mentioned by name in Roman imperial records, English writers have been trying to depict its ‘vanishing’ as British history’s equivalent of the 1876 Custer ‘Massacre’, with the Picts playing the role of those other painted savages, the Red Indians. (Novelist John Fowles’s reference to the Kelts as ‘the Red Indians of ancient Europe’ seems apt here.) No such battle is in fact known to history. (In fact, one 2007 film already had the IX legion as being not 'lost' but 'last': The Last Legion, starring Colin Firth and Ben Kingsley, has the characters trying to find the 9th, in 460 AD as the last one still loyal in Britain!)

The real Pictish confederacy, which probably arose as an anti-Roman alliance, was the foundation of a kingdom which eventually merged with their western neighbours the Scots, the kings being crowned at Scone using the Stone of Destiny as sacred relic. But even peaceful kings like Macbeth (now considered of Pictish descent) have been depicted as villains (even Shakespeare is guilty here).
Until recent times (Dances With Wolves etc), Hollywood’s depictions of the North American native peoples have been crude, or worse. With film treatments of the natives of ancient Europe, we seem to be still in the stage where the natives are similar savages, always looking to make trouble for ‘civilised’ types (here the Romans and Romano-Britons). English historians quite shamelessly use the word barbarians to describe all those societies outside the Greco-Roman ‘classical’ civilisation (which was of course built on slavery), i.e. the native peoples of Europe.
The story setup here concerns “a wounded Roman soldier and his loyal Celtic slave who try to solve the mystery of the Ninth Legion, a brigade of Roman soldiers that vanished after heading into the untamed Highlands of Scotland 15 years earlier.”
The title refers to the fact the hero actually wants to recover the legion's lost eagle-motif standard. (If this sounds familiar, it's probably as an actual incident mentioned by Caesar in his Gallic Wars became the means whereby two 'plebian' characters were introduced into plotlines normally confined to imperial types for the BBC/HBO miniseries Rome - which may be returning to the screen.) The two young heroes (played by Hollywood’s Channing Tatum and ‘Billy Elliot’ star Jamie Bell) are a Roman citizen, Marcus Aquila, and his ‘Celtic’ freed-slave/sidekick, Esca, who Aquila rescued from a gladiatorial arena.
Hopefully, the depiction of the Picts will not be so backward - children’s literature and drama are carefully vetted for racial stereotyping etc. The talented and prolific Sutcliff, who was confined to a wheelchair for most of her life due to Still's Disease, was a dedicated historical novelist, whose work for children and young adults is largely still in print. The Eagle Of The Ninth (1954) was her first success, the start of a 6-book series, of which the two follow-ons are available together as a Puffin omnibus paperback [pictured].
It tells the story of a trek beyond the Roman Wall into the Pictish lands (up the W side of Loch Lomond towards Kintyre), where the duo must dwell among the Picts to obtain what they want by patience and guile. This type of story, classed as Captivity Narrative, is a venerable genre that has evolved from 17th-C shock-horror accounts of humiliations of Christians at the hand of benighted heathen savages, to a more enlightened approach where the two cultures are balanced out by having the ‘civilised’ one shown as repressive and unhealthy, as in Dances With Wolves.
But although there is also a tame wolf cub in this story, Sutcliff was still a product of her background and her era. That is, like other English historical novelists, she sympathised with the Roman invaders rather than the native British. In these works, the story of early Britain becomes the story of the Roman occupiers and their Romano-British successors. The Romans are always honourable and sensible, while the natives are ignorant and superstitious. (In the series followon Sword At Sunset, Arthur is a Roman-trained soldier who tells his story – the basis of the Arthurian legend - in the first person as a Roman military memoir.) Here, the legionary Eagle the heroes want to recover is predictably being guarded as a captive sacred icon (“the Red Crests God”), and they have to recover it to stop it being used to whip up anti-Roman hatred. (As if that would be necessary, with the Romans enslaving their families and sowing their fields with salt.) In a 1986 interview, Sutcliff admitted, “I think that I am happiest of all in Roman Britain. I feel very much at home there... The more level-headed viewpoint of the Romans is nearer to our own way of looking at things.” The story offers up as a guide a helpful blue-tattooed Pict, but he turns out to be an ex-Legionary survivor, now living among a southern Pict tribe.
The film’s Oscar-winning director discussed the project in a recent [3-Aug-09] article by Magnus Linklater in The Times, headlined as “Kevin Macdonald Will Bring To Film Pre-Celtic Clash Of The Cultures”. This raises the issue, an ongoing debate, as to whether the Picts are indeed pre-Celtic, even pre-Indo-European – hence their inscriptions remaining indecipherable. Here, the filmmakers are stuck with Sutcliff’s original story, and for reasons best known to herself Sutcliff has the Pictish Caledonian tribe called by the Romans the Epidii refer to itself as The Seal People. (Epidii is usually taken to be from the same root as the Celtic horse goddess Epona, pony - the Q-Celtic equivalent of what became equus in Latin - and would more likely mean Pony People.) Macdonald says the ‘natives’ will speak Gaelic (Pictish is a lost language – unlike the Lakota-Sioux speech in Dances With Wolves, it can’t be reconstructed). The Romans “will be played by American actors” to “achieve a little contemporary symbolism.” As to the mysterious Seal People, he says he has a theory who they might have been. “They were a more indigenous folk than the Celts, who were from further south. They were probably small and dark, like the Inouit, living off seals and dressed in sealskins. We are going to create a culture about which no one knows much, but which we will make as convincing as possible. We are basing it on clues gained from places like Skara Brae.”
The novel does refer to them as small and darker than most, but portraying the Epidii of Kintyre as remote Stone Age maritime seal-hunters like the Inuit seems to be more of the same stereotyped approach. It’s not a new theory, but rather a discredited 19th-C one that the Picts were small and dark as they were related to the Eskimos [Inuit], Basques, and Lapps [Sami people].
To use a cinema-going figure of speech, it sounds like where we came in.