Page:The Celtic Review volume 3.djvu/100

Rh finds Penny fuar on the map and turns it into Peighinn fhuar, ‘the cold penny land.’ The other two names cannot be manipulated so easily. The fùir in these three cases is none other than the fùir, foùr so common in Pictland, Bal-f(o)ùr, Pit-f(o)ùr, Doch-f(o)ùr. It may be added that the fùirs of Argyll, equally with the Pictish, are noted for their good pasture. Another name is Duntroon (xxii.), for which Dr. Gillies gives the impossible Gaelic combination Dun-an-t-sròin. The Gaelic form could only be Dun-na-sròine. The name is Dun-treòin, evidently the genitive, as the Gael would sound it, of the Welsh trwyn, ‘nose.’ These must be regarded as survivals of the British language in the purely Gaelic portions of the district, to which the Gael in later times prefixed suitable epithets from his own language and from Norse.

To come to a later period. Dr. Gillies will have nothing of the term Scot as a name for the Gaelic people of Scotland or their land. He doubts much whether the names Lorn or Cowall have anything to do with Loarn mòr or Comgall of the Dalriadlc immigration, although he must have known of the tract on the Scots of Dalriada (Chron. Pick and Scots, p. 308+). Now there is nothing more clearly known regarding these people in early times than that they called themselves by two names, Scot and Gael. Scot was the favourite term in older times, Gael in later. As Scots they were chiefly known to outsiders, and this was almost the only term used on the Continent for the monks of Columbanus’s mission. It was their own favourite designation when they wrote in Latin, witness Adamnan’s Vita Columbae. From the term Scot, Scotia was formed in Latin and Scotland in Norse and Saxon. The Argyllshire colonists used the name Gael, and their territory was at first known as Datriata, later Airer-gaidel, now Earra-ghàidheal. Dr. Gillies adopts the first sentence in Skene’s Celtic Scotland to the effect that the name Scotia was not used as a territorial designation in Scotland until about the tenth century, and adds on his own account that the word ‘got transferred from the north of Ireland to the present Scotland. . . . No such name as Scotia or Scotland is or was known to the Gaelic language or the Gaelic people.’ Skene’s statement can pass, but what of Dr. Gillies’s supplement? The Norsemen called the outer Minch Skottlandsfjord as distinct from Pettlandsfjord, the entrance to the land of the Scot as distinct from the land of the Pict. Did the Norsemen mean by Skottland Ireland or Dalriada? There can only be one answer. Again, who designated Kenneth ‘the Scot,’ when that enterprising Dalriad captured the Pictish throne? The territory which he and his descendants ruled came afterwards from this designation to be called Scotia in Latin, and Scotland in Saxon. But the ‘present Scotland’ was not, and could not be, so called, as Skene points out, until not the tenth but the thirteenth century. That Scotia and Scotland, the one a Latin, the other a Norse or Saxon formation, were and are not known to the Gaelic language is, etymologically, self-evident, and that only such Gaels as knew these languages knew the words is also a fact. In any other sense, such statements are meaningless or misleading.

Our author is, if possible, still farther astray in his Norse theories. No one has said that a Norseman never visited the Hebrides before 794 A.D.