Bridei and the Northern Picts

Columba’s journey from Iona across the Druim Alban and up the Great Glen to the fortress of Bridei mac Maelchon, king of the northern Picts, near the head of the River Ness; the interpreter that Adomnán says he needed to preach to the Picts (VC 2.32); the contests of holy power with the king’s magus Broichan over a captive slave-girl and over the wind (VC 2.33–34); and the bolts of the closed royal gate reported to draw back of themselves at the saint’s approach (VC 2.35). The file narrates Adomnán’s account precisely, pins every wonder to him by book and chapter per METHODOLOGY §3.5, and weighs the central source-critical nuance: Bede credits Columba with the conversion of the northern Picts (HE 3.4), but Adomnán narrates neither the baptism of Bridei nor a national conversion, so the “apostle to the Picts” framing partly outruns the Vita’s own claims.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; apostle to the Picts)

The Land and the King

When Columba and his companions settled on Iona in 563 (see Founding Iona, 563), they planted themselves on the maritime frontier between two peoples. To the south and west lay Dál Riata, the Gaelic kingdom that bridged northeastern Ireland and the western seaboard of what is now Argyll — Columba’s own people, in the broad sense, and the soil from which Iona’s grant came. To the north and east, beyond the great mountain barrier the sources call Druim Alban (“the ridge of Britain”), lay the lands of the Picts, a Celtic-speaking but non-Gaelic people whose kings ruled from strongholds in the glens and along the eastern firths. The most powerful of these in Columba’s day, in Adomnán’s telling, was Bridei son of Maelchon (Brude mac Maelchon), whose royal seat lay near the River Ness, in the neighbourhood of modern Inverness (Adomnán, VC 2.33, 2.35; trans. Sharpe 1995; on the geography and the identification, Sharpe 1995, introduction and notes; Anderson & Anderson 1991).

The Irish annals corroborate the existence and the era of this king: the Annals of Ulster and the Annals of Tigernach record a Bridei son of Maelchon among the kings of the Picts in the later sixth century, his reign and death falling within Columba’s lifetime on Iona (Annals of Ulster, s.a. 580s; Sharpe 1995, notes to VC 2.33–35). That a real and powerful Pictish king of that name reigned in the north in this period is therefore not in doubt. What is at issue is the content of Columba’s dealings with him — and here we have, essentially, only Adomnán.

Adomnán himself signals that more than one visit to Bridei is in view. He refers in passing to “the first journey” of Columba to the king (VC 2.35; Sharpe 1995), which implies that the Vita knows of a sequence of journeys across the Druim Alban into Pictland, of which it narrates only selected episodes. The Pictish material is scattered, in Adomnán’s thematic manner, across his three books rather than gathered into a single missionary narrative: the beast in the Ness in the book of miracles (VC 2.27; see The Loch Ness Episode), the interpreter and the Broichan contests and the gate in the same book (VC 2.32–35), and further Pictish notices elsewhere (VC 1.37; 2.42). This dispersal is itself a fact about the source: Adomnán did not write a “mission to the Picts,” and the modern reader who assembles one is performing an act of synthesis the Vita does not perform.

The Interpreter and the Language Barrier

One short chapter carries a disproportionate weight of historical implication. Adomnán records that when Columba preached to a Pictish family, “through an interpreter” (per interpretem), the word of God was received and a household baptized (VC 2.32; trans. Sharpe 1995; Anderson & Anderson 1991). The detail is almost incidental in Adomnán’s narrative — his interest is in the conversion and a wonder attached to it — but its evidential value is large precisely because it is incidental: a hagiographer magnifying his saint had no motive to invent a linguistic limitation.

The implication is that the Picts did not speak the Gaelic of Columba and his monks. The nature of the Pictish language is debated — the dominant scholarly view holds it to have been a Celtic tongue of the Brittonic (P-Celtic) branch, akin to British and Welsh rather than to Gaelic (Q-Celtic), though the evidence is thin and a minority has argued for a non-Indo-European substratum surviving in some names (Sharpe 1995, notes; Forsyth and others on the Pictish question). Whatever its precise affiliation, Adomnán’s testimony that an interpreter was required tells us that Columba came to the northern Picts as a genuine foreign missionary across a language frontier, not as a preacher to people who already understood him. This single chapter is one of the firmer pieces of historical ground in the whole dossier, and it quietly conditions everything else: a mission conducted through interpreters is a slower, more partial, more household-by-household affair than the sweeping national conversion that later tradition would remember.

The Contests with Broichan the Magus

At the heart of Adomnán’s Pictish narrative stands not a sermon but a duel of powers. Bridei’s household included a magus — a figure Adomnán presents as the king’s wizard or druid and as Columba’s antagonist — named Broichan, who is also described as the king’s foster-father (nutricius) (VC 2.33; trans. Sharpe 1995). The Vita relates two linked contests, and both must be received as what they are: Adomnán’s testimony to the saint’s holy power, reported by the Vita and pinned to it per METHODOLOGY §3.5, not facts this account independently asserts.

In the first, Columba asks Broichan to release a captive Irish slave-girl (an ancilla) whom the magus held; Broichan refuses, stubbornly and “with a harsh and obstinate” will. Columba warns him that if he will not free the captive before Columba leaves Pictland, he will die. Departing for the River Ness, Columba takes a white pebble from the river, declares to his companions that through it the Lord will work a healing, and predicts the sequence of events: at that very hour Broichan is struck down, falling as if dead, and the king sends messengers to Columba pleading for help and promising the girl’s release. Columba sends two of his company back with the blessed pebble, instructing that if Broichan will first promise to free the captive the stone is to be dipped in water and the magus given it to drink, but that if he refuses he will die at once. The girl is freed, the pebble is dipped, and Broichan — against nature, for the stone floats rather than sinks — drinks and is restored (VC 2.33–34; trans. Sharpe 1995; Anderson & Anderson 1991). Adomnán adds that the pebble was afterwards preserved among the king’s treasures and worked further cures, but that when the hour came for a man fated to die it could never be found, however it was sought — a characteristic hagiographic flourish on the limits of even a holy relic before death’s appointed term (VC 2.33–34; Sharpe 1995).

In the second contest Broichan threatens that he will raise a contrary wind and a darkness of mist to prevent Columba sailing on the loch (the long water of the Great Glen). Adomnán reports that the magus did indeed call up a storm and a great darkness, but that Columba, “calling upon Christ the Lord,” embarked into the teeth of the adverse wind, which then — to the astonishment of the watching crowds — turned and bore his vessel swiftly on its way; and when the wind soon shifted again to favour the return, Broichan and his fellows were confounded and “God was glorified” (VC 2.34; trans. Sharpe 1995; Anderson & Anderson 1991). The shape of the episode is deliberate: it is a contest between the magus who claims command of the elements and the holy man who commands nothing himself but calls upon Christ, and the lesson Adomnán draws is the powerlessness of the heathen art before the name of the Lord.

Read source-critically, the Broichan episodes belong to a recognizable hagiographic type — the holy man versus the court magician, with deep roots in the biblical contest of Moses and Aaron against the magicians of Pharaoh and in the Christian vitae of the desert and the West. Adomnán’s purpose is not to chronicle a negotiation over a slave-girl but to stage the confrontation of the two powers and to show whose prevailed. The historical residue that may be lodged within the convention — that Columba did intervene at Bridei’s court, that he did contend with a figure of the old Pictish religious order, that a captive was freed — cannot be separated from the form with any confidence, and the Vita gives us no independent control. What is solid is the testimony itself and its function: Adomnán presents Columba as victorious over the king’s magus, and presents that victory as the demonstration of the Christian God’s supremacy before a heathen court (VC 2.33–34; Sharpe 1995; Herbert 1988).

The Gate of the Fortress

The episode most often cited as the climax of the mission is the briefest. On Columba’s “first journey” to Bridei, Adomnán relates, the king in the pride of royalty did not open his stronghold to the saint at his first coming. When Columba and his companions approached the gates, they found them shut and barred. The saint, Adomnán writes, made the sign of the Lord’s cross over the doors and laid his hand upon them, “and at once the bolts were driven back with force and the gates opened of their own accord with all speed.” Columba and his company entered; and the king, learning what had happened, was filled with fear, and thereafter “honoured the holy and venerable man, as was fitting, with high esteem” (VC 2.35; trans. Sharpe 1995; Anderson & Anderson 1991). Adomnán compares the wonder explicitly to the opening of the prison doors before the apostle Peter in the Acts of the Apostles (cf. Acts 12) — an allusion that frames Columba as an apostolic figure and the closed pagan court as a prison from which the gospel breaks free (VC 2.35; Sharpe 1995).

This too is reported here as the Vita’s testimony, pinned to its chapter per METHODOLOGY §3.5. And it is exactly here that the central nuance of the whole dossier becomes unavoidable: the gate opens, the king is awed, the king honours Columba — and Adomnán stops. He does not write that Bridei was baptized. He does not write that the Picts were converted. The chapter that most reads like the conversion of a king ends not in a font but in royal “esteem.”

What Adomnán Does — and Does Not — Claim

It is worth stating plainly what the Vita Columbae actually narrates of the Pictish mission, because the gap between it and the later memory is the most important single fact in this section. Adomnán narrates: a journey (indeed journeys) across the Druim Alban to Bridei; preaching to the Picts through an interpreter, with a household baptized (VC 2.32); the defeat of the king’s magus Broichan in contests of healing and weather (VC 2.33–34); the self-opening of the royal gate and the king’s consequent reverence (VC 2.35); and, on the way, the rebuke of the beast in the Ness, at which heathen onlookers glorified God (VC 2.27; see The Loch Ness Episode). Elsewhere he records Columba ordaining or dealing with individual Picts and the conversion of particular persons and families (VC 1.37; 2.32; 2.42).

What Adomnán does not narrate is just as striking: he does not record the baptism of Bridei mac Maelchon; he does not describe the conversion of the Pictish nation, or of any large body of Picts, as an event; and he does not call Columba the apostle of the Picts. His Columba wins a king’s respect and defeats a king’s wizard, and he makes converts among the Picts household by household — but the Vita presents nothing like the mass turning of a people. Adomnán’s reticence is the more remarkable because he had every hagiographic incentive to claim the conversion of a nation for his founder, and did not. The honest conclusion drawn by the modern editors and critics is that Columba’s mission to the northern Picts was real but more limited and more gradual than tradition remembers, and that Adomnán, writing closer to the events, declined to overstate it (Sharpe 1995, introduction and notes; Herbert 1988).

Bede and the “Apostle to the Picts”

The sweeping memory comes from Bede. Writing his Ecclesiastical History on the far side of Britain around 731, more than a generation after Adomnán, Bede states that Columba “came into Britain to preach the word of God to the kingdoms of the northern Picts” — those separated from the southern Picts “by steep and rugged mountains” — and that “he converted that people to the faith of Christ by his preaching and example,” receiving the island of Iona from them as the seat of his mission. He carefully distinguishes these northern Picts from the southern Picts, who, he says, had “long before” forsaken idolatry through the preaching of Ninian, a bishop trained at Rome (Bede, HE 3.4; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). It is from Bede’s confident sentence — gentem illam … ad fidem Christi … convertit — far more than from anything in Adomnán, that the title “apostle to the Picts” descends to Columba.

The two witnesses must therefore be held together with care, and the divergence flagged honestly:

[Disputed: Bede (*HE* 3.4) credits Columba with converting the northern Picts to the faith of Christ by his preaching, distinguishing them from the southern Picts converted earlier by Ninian; Adomnán (*VC* 2.32–35), writing a generation before Bede and closer to the events, narrates contests with the *magus* Broichan, the self-opening of Bridei's gate, and household baptisms through an interpreter, but does not record the baptism of Bridei himself nor a conversion of the Pictish nation. Scholars (Sharpe 1995; Clancy) caution that the "apostle to the Picts" framing partly outruns the *Vita*'s actual claims, and that Bede's sweeping statement may compress and idealize a longer, more gradual, and more partial process — while the question of whether Bridei was in fact baptized remains genuinely open on the evidence.]

Several considerations bear on the divergence and none resolves it. Bede was a careful historian with Iona contacts, and his testimony is not lightly dismissed; he may preserve a tradition, current at Iona itself, that the Vita simply did not choose to narrate in those terms. On the other hand, Bede wrote far away and long after, with an interest in fitting Columba into a tidy scheme of British conversion (Ninian for the south, Columba for the north) that may be neater than the reality; and his own framing of Columba is qualified elsewhere by his disapproval of the Ionan Easter (Bede, HE 3.4; on which see The Seed of Lindisfarne). The Ninian-to-the-southern-Picts half of Bede’s scheme is itself now heavily contested, with Clancy and others arguing that “Ninian” is partly a literary construction and that the southern Pictish mission has been misdated and misattributed (Clancy 2001) — which should make us cautious about treating the parallel northern half as simple fact. The sober position is that Columba’s mission to the northern Picts was historically real and lastingly important, but that its scope in the sixth century cannot be reconstructed from Bede’s one sentence, and that Adomnán’s quieter record is the better guide to what the cult itself remembered.

The Mission as the Foundation of Iona’s Prestige

If the Pictish mission cannot bear the full weight of “the conversion of a nation,” it bears another weight securely: it is the foundation of Iona’s prestige. Whatever its precise extent, Columba’s standing with the most powerful king of the northern Picts gave his island monastery a reach and a reputation across the Druim Alban that no other insular house could claim, and it is this standing — a holy founder who had awed a Pictish king and bested his wizard — that later generations drew upon. The cult of Columba and the familia of Iona were built in no small part on the memory of the Pictish mission, and Adomnán, writing c. 697 to defend Iona’s position and its paruchia, had every reason to set the mission in its most luminous light (Herbert 1988; Sharpe 1995, introduction; see The Shape of the Cult). The prestige won among the Picts also helped make Iona the natural source, two generations later, of the mission that carried the gospel into Northumbria from Lindisfarne (see The Seed of Lindisfarne).

There is, finally, a properly Orthodox way to hold all this. The veneration of Columba as apostle to the Picts does not stand or fall on the question of whether Bridei was dipped in a font, any more than the veneration of any apostle depends on a census of converts. The Church honours the labour and the holiness, and the genuine turning of a heathen people toward Christ that began — however gradually, however household by household — with this monk who crossed the mountains with interpreters and contended for the gospel before a pagan king. The source-critical care urged here is not corrosive of that veneration; it is its honest form. The wonders are received as the Vita‘s testimony to the saint’s holiness; the historical mission is received as real and consequential; and the gap between Adomnán’s restraint and Bede’s sweep is named rather than smoothed, because naming it is the truthful thing to do (METHODOLOGY §§3.5, 4).

References

Adomnán of Iona. Life of St Columba (Vita Sancti Columbae). Trans. Richard Sharpe. London: Penguin Classics, 1995. (Translation with introduction and notes; the interpreter at VC 2.32; the contests with Broichan over the slave-girl and the wind at VC 2.33–34; the self-opening gate, the comparison to Acts, the “first journey,” and the king’s esteem at VC 2.35; further Pictish material at VC 1.37 and 2.42.)
Anderson, Alan Orr, and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson, eds. Adomnán’s Life of Columba. Rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. (The standard critical edition of the Latin text, with the Broichan, gate, and language passages.)
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (HE 3.4: Columba’s preaching to and conversion of the northern Picts; the grant of Iona; Ninian and the earlier conversion of the southern Picts.)
Herbert, Máire. Iona, Kells, and Derry: The History and Hagiography of the Monastic Familia of Columba. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. (The Vita as a cult-document and the place of the Pictish mission in Iona’s self-understanding.)
Clancy, Thomas Owen. “The Real St Ninian.” The Innes Review 52 (2001): 1–28. (The literary construction and contested attribution of the southern-Pictish mission, bearing on Bede’s scheme in HE 3.4.)
Mac Airt, Seán, and Gearóid Mac Niocaill, eds. The Annals of Ulster (to A.D. 1131). Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1983. (Notices of Bridei son of Maelchon, king of the Picts, in the later sixth century.)