The Misinterpreted History of Scotland

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In the first episode of Neil Oliver’s “A History of Scotland,” Oliver claims that Scotland’s history is overly romanticized and misrepresented. I believe that Oliver is correct in stating this. Some people are misrepresented or mislabeled. Most of Scottish history is recorded by outside sources, many times by the enemy, and possibly altered to make some parties seem more powerful than they were. With current knowledge on the picts we have discovered that they are not as barbaric as some people were led to believe. These reasons are why I believe that Oliver was correct.

Many people throughout Scotland’s rich history are misrepresented or seen as different as they really were. One such person is Kenneth MacAlpin. MacAlpin is usually referred to as the first king of Scotland, but to many sources, this is purely a false statement. According to the BBC article “In the power vacuum left as a result of the Viking slaughter of the Pict royal line MacAlpin sees off competitors to become King of Picts.” (Scotland’s History – Kenneth MacAlpin). Although MacAlpin united some of the clans of present-day Scotland, he did not unite all of them, in fact, the first Scottish king was not mentioned until long after his death.

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A large amount of early Scottish history is not recorded by the inhabitants of the area at the time, but by a roman scholar named Tacitus. Tacitus wrote of a man by the name of Calgacus, who may not have even existed to begin with. An Undiscovered Scotland article wrote: “Nothing else is known about him from any other source, and there has to be some question about whether he actually existed at all.”(Calgacus). Tacitus wrote about the battle of Mons Graupius, a battle in which his father-in-law was the leading general. The fact that the general had a family tie to him could give him a good reason to embellish and fictitiously expand upon the battle as a way to make his family seem stronger. Tacitus, in his writings about Julius Agricola, wrote a speech that was supposedly said by Calgacus to his troops. The problem with the aforementioned speech is that it was written in roman, not in the Caledonian native tongue, thus making the speech and possibly many other elements of the account fictitiously created to make the Romans seem even more powerful.

During the Roman rule of southern Brittania, the Romans viewed the Picts as savages or barbarians, this ideology continued forward to the present day. Structures built by the Pictish people, such as Crannogs, are very complex and would have required considerable knowledge in construction. Art and other artefacts from the Pictish people are well built and have survived in incredible shape. They also had some sense of military strategy considering where and how they built their forts. A large amount of people seem to have misunderstood a lot of Pictish history.

I believe that Oliver was correct in stating that Scotland’s history is overly romanticized and misrepresented. People like MacAlpin being mislabeled as kings put some stories credibility at risk, Followed by Tacitus and his possibly embellished and fabricated stories of his father-in-law, and the Romans calling anyone who wasn’t Roman a “barbarian,” there seems to be a lot of controversies intertwined into Scottish history. The previously mentioned arguments are my reasoning for believing Oliver’s claims.

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