Scottish Poetry - Early Middle Ages

Early Middle Ages

After the collapse of Roman authority in the early fifth century, four major circles of political and cultural influence emerged in Northern Britain. In the east were the Picts, whose kingdoms eventually stretched from the river Forth to Shetland. In the west were the Gaelic (Goidelic)-speaking people of Dál Riata, who had close links with Ireland, from where they brought with them the name Scots. In the south were the British (Brythonic-speaking) descendants of the peoples of the Roman-influenced kingdoms of "The Old North", the most powerful and longest surviving of which was the Kingdom of Strathclyde. Finally, there were the English or "Angles", Germanic invaders who had overrun much of southern Britain and held the Kingdom of Bernicia (later the northern part of Northumbria), which reached into what are now the Borders of Scotland in the south-east. To these Christianisation, particularly from the sixth century, added Latin as an intellectual and written language. Modern scholarship, based on surviving placenames and historical evidence, indicates that the Picts spoke a Brythonic language, but none of their literature seems to have survived into the modern era. However, there is surviving literature from what would become Scotland in Brythonic, Gaelic, Latin and Old English.

Much of the earliest Welsh literature was actually composed in or near the country we now call Scotland, in the Brythonic speech, from which Welsh would be derived, which was not then confined to Wales and Cornwall, although it was only written down in Wales much later. These include The Gododdin, considered the earliest surviving verse from Scotland, which is attributed to the bard Aneirin, said to have been resident in Bythonic kingdom of Gododdin in the 6th century. It is a series of elegies to the men of the Gododdin killed fighting at the Battle of Catraeth around 600 AD. Similarly, the Battle of Gwen Ystrad is attributed to Taliesin, traditionally thought to be a bard at the court of Rheged in roughly the same period.

There are religious works in Gaelic including the Elegy for St Columba by Dallan Forgaill, c. 597 and "In Praise of St Columba" by Beccan mac Luigdech of Rum, c. 677. In Latin they include a "Prayer for Protection" (attributed to St Mugint), c. mid-6th century and Altus Prosator ("The High Creator", attributed to St Columba), c. 597. What is arguably the most important medieval work written in Scotland, the Vita Columbae, by Adomnán, abbot of Iona (627/8–704), was also written in Latin. The next most important piece of Scottish hagiography, the verse Life of St. Ninian, was written in Latin in Whithorn in the eighth century.

In Old English there is The Dream of the Rood, from which lines are found on the Ruthwell Cross, making it the only surviving fragment of Northumbrian Old English from early Medieval Scotland. It has also been suggested on the basis of ornithological references that the poem The Seafarer was composed somewhere near the Bass Rock in East Lothian.