Page:Chronicles of the Picts, chronicles of the Scots, and other early memorials of Scottish history.djvu/107

 PEEFACE. xcix All such legends, however fanciful or childish they appear to be, express some truth, or contain within them some ethnologic fact, and it is the existence of the peculiar truth or fact which creates, as it were, the legend which is supposed to ac- count for it. Such legends either express the popular explanation of some social or ethnologic peculiarity, or a genuine tradition is conveyed under the form of a symbolic or allegoric tale. This kind of legend of a colony of soldiers marry- ing wives from a population which preceded them in the country is not peculiar to the Picts, and its meaning is well indicated by the analogous case of the Britons of Armorica. Nennius, in relating the legendary settlement of the Britons in Armorica under Maximus, has this addition in some copies : " Acceptisque eorum uxoribus et filiabus in con- " jugium, omnes earum linguas amputavemnt, ne " eorum successio matemam linguam disceret ;" that is, in order to prevent their descendants speak- ing the language of their mothers' race, they cut out their tongues. According to the legend, if this had not been done, the colonizing Britons would have spoken the language of the people from whom they had obtained wives. The legend is based upon the con- ception that children learn their language from their mothers, and is conveyed in the popular expression " the mother tongue." As soon, therefore, as the idea took root that the Picts were not the old inhabitants of the country, but a foreign colony who settled