Did the Vikings really wipe out the Picts?

The Picts usually enter our conversation quite early on a North Coast Explorer tour. North of Inverness, their carved stones and ancient sites give us plenty to explore, even when guests arrive having never heard of them. By the end, curiosity has taken hold, and one question keeps the story moving. Where did they go? The familiar answer has the Vikings arriving and the Picts disappearing. But an Orkney grave makes me hesitate before giving the Vikings quite so tidy a victory. At Birsay, someone is buried in Scandinavian fashion. On that evidence, we might reasonably place them among the incoming Norse population.

Then DNA research published in 2020 adds an unexpected complication. Their ancestry points towards Britain rather than Scandinavia. I find that much more interesting than another tale of invaders sweeping everyone away. Could someone descended from the people already here become part of the Norse world? The burial suggests that possibility, although it cannot tell us what this person calls themselves or how freely they embrace that world. We have to make room for people whose ancestry and customs cross the boundaries we draw around them. That helps us ask a better question about the wider disappearance.

Across much of the mainland Pictish kingdom, Gaelic language and identity become dominant during the ninth and tenth centuries as the kingdom develops into Alba, the predecessor of medieval Scotland. In the Northern Isles, Norse settlement brings a different transformation. There, descendants of the existing population can become part of Norse-speaking communities. Their children grow up belonging to a world their ancestors would recognise only partly. A kingdom can lose its old identity while families continue within it, and a language can fade as later generations learn another. None of this makes conquest harmless. It means that cultural loss and human survival can happen together.

Later stories make the Picts harder to recognise still. Folklore turns them into tiny underground inhabitants, an idea promoted by the Victorian writer David MacRitchie. After admiring their carvings, I would rather keep them among the people who help shape Scotland. Their descendants do not have to preserve every symbol, language or custom for that contribution to continue. When guests ask where the Picts go, that is the possibility I want us to explore. We may lose sight of them because we start looking for their descendants under different names.

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