Note 36 — Chapter XII · Race in Folklore and Myth

Let me for a moment leave the little people, in order to call attention to another side of this question of race. It has recently been shown36 by Professor J. Morris Jones, of the University College of North Wales, that the non-Aryan traits of the syntax of our insular Celtic point unmistakably to that of old Egyptian and Berber, together with kindred idioms belonging to the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. He has thereby reduced to articulate speech, so to say, the physiognomical convictions of Professor Sayce (p. 665), to which the reader’s attention has been called. To the linguistic argument he appends a statement cited from a French authority and bearing on the question of descent by birth, to the effect, that when among the Berbers the king dies or is deposed, as happens often enough, it is not his son that is called to succeed, but the son of his sister, as in the case of the historical Picts of Scotland down to the twelfth century or thereabouts. Here I would add, that my attention has been called by Professor Sayce to old Egyptian monuments representing the Libyan chiefs with their bodies tattooed, a habit which seems not to be yet extinct among the Touaregs and Kabyles37. Lastly, Mr. Nicholson has recently directed attention to the fact that some princes of ancient Gaul are represented with their faces tattooed on certain coins found in the west of France so far south as the region once occupied by the ancient Pictones. We have a compendious commentary on this in the occurrence of a word Chortonicum in a High German manuscript written before the year 814: I allude to the Wessobrunn Codex at Munich, in which, among a number of geographical names connected with Gaul and other countries, that vocable is so placed as to allow of our referring it to Poitou or to all Gaul as the country once of the ancient Pictones. The great German philologist Pott, who called attention to it, brought it at once into relation with Cruithne, plural Cruithni, ‘the Picts of Britain and Ireland,’ a word which has been explained at p. 281 above38.