This is Farley Mowat’s odd book about a possible pre-viking European presence in the Canadian Arctic.
Mowat is very careful to warn the reader that he is engaging in a kind of speculative archaeology. He even intersperses the text with little passages of adventure fiction. But it is also clear that he has convinced himself pretty thoroughly that his speculations correspond to what actually happened. And the result is, of course, one of those books where a chapter begins with the assertion that something might have happened , which by the end of the chapter has been gradually transformed into what certainly did happen , and then becomes the premise for the next chapter, which begins with if that happened, then this might have happened , and so on. Gradually, a huge sequence of suppositions begins to have the appearance of a framework of solid evidence, when it is most clearly not.
What he begins with is something which is verifiably true. The eastern Arctic of Canada is littered with odd ruins and megalithic structures that can not be easily attributed to the Inuit, or to the earlier Dorset or Thule cultures. Nor do they appear to be built by the Norse. They are definitely very old. The most interesting concentrations are on the western shore of Ungava bay, and in a bay immediately south of the spectacular Torngat range, in Labrador.
Mowat attributes these structures to a pre-indo-European people of Europe whom he calls the Alba. He takes his cue from the fact that, scattered across Eurasia, in an arc from Persia through the Balkans and Western Europe, one finds places and people named “alb”, “albi” or “alba”. There are indeed several “Albanias”, including, of course, “Albion”. And it is clear that there was a non-Indo-European people in prehistoric Britain. The Celtic tribes seem to have begun to enter the British Isles sometime during the first millenium BC. They may have been preceded by some lost, earlier wave of Indo-European speakers, or they may have been the first wave of IE. We simply don’t know.
In addition to this, there are lots of peculiar inconsistencies and clues in the Sagas that suggest that the Norse were preceded by other people to Iceland, Greenland and even possibly Vinland — and not just a few eccentric Irish monks. I have noticed a number of these inconsistencies myself, and so have many other people. There is not just the vague tradition of the Irish epics. When the Norse come to Iceland, for instance, their behaviour (avoiding the best lands and setting up fortified positions on highly defensible, but otherwise inappropriate places), did not make any sense if they had only a handful isolated monks to deal with. This odd behaviour is repeated in the Greenland, Markland, and Vinland voyages.
Now, out of these intriguing and perfectly solid facts, Mowat weaves a great romance, a story that would be delightful if true, and is certainly possible, but is not even close to being demonstrated. His story goes thus: Ancient Britain is inhabited by a pre-Indo-European culture which is part of one great ethnic family, whom he calls the Alba. From the Basque Pyranees to the Shetlands and Orkneys, the Alba have a cultural continuum of megalithic famers, fishermen, seafarers and traders. The Celtic and Germanic invasions sweep over much of these, but Scotland and the outer islands, as well as southwestern France and the Basque country remain non-IE well into historical times. The Armoricans are the great holdouts of the non-IE tradition, and when the Romans conquer Gaul, they flee. Since they are fabulous sea-traders, they sail to Scotland, supposedly because Scotland still contains other Alba-type people. These new arrivals in Scotland assume the name of one prominent Armorican tribe, the Pictones, and are the Picts of Scottish history. The Picts eventually fuse with the Alba, and become powerful in the farfaring trade in arctic goods — especially the immensely valuable products of the walrus, whose ivory is worth as much as gold, whose blubber can be boiled down into the strategically useful tar that works as well as any modern chemical sealant, and whose leather can be made into cables, shields, and ship hulls. The trade in these arctic goods is already ancient, as is testified in the narrative of the Greek explorer Pythias.
The raiding and conquests of the Celts and Vikings drives the Alba /Picts further and further outward. First to Iceland, then to Greenland, then into the Canadian Arctic, where the wealth of walrus and other arctic fauna keeps them busy. It is these non-Indo-European Alba who are responsible for the strange megaliths, boat-shaped house foundations, and odd towers scattered in the Canadian Arctic. Unfortunately, wherever these peaceful and productive sea-traders and crofters go, they are chased down and routed out by nasty, warlike, slave-trading Vikings. Mowat, who long ago wrote the definitive book on the Norse voyages to the New World, now has a dim view of their morals. They are definitely the villains in the narrative, and Mowat is far too familiar with the bloodthirsty Sagas to be much impressed by recent revisionist attempts to recast them into the role of peaceful farmers.
Now, I really enjoyed this fanciful “reconstruction”. I would dearly love it to be true, because it would be just plain fun. There is a mystery to be solved in Canada’s Arctic history, and this would be a dandy solution. But any way you look at it, Mowat’ tale is just that…. a tale. It’s something that could have happened, and might have happened, but it is a long way away from being something that we can claim even probably happened.
Since much of Mowat’s material sounded very plausible, I decided to poke around a bit in the areas that are the farthest removed from his material evidence, and farthest removed from his expertise. I decided to check his assertion that the Picts were a non-Indo-European people directly related to the Basques.
Immediately, I could see problems with this. Caesar, in his commentaries, divides Gaul into three parts, asserting that the southwestern Aquitani are culturally and linguistically very different from the other (Celtic) tribes of Gaul. Now, the resemblance of the Aquitani to the nearby Basques is quite obvious. We have perhaps a hundred words of the Aquitanian language, including place names, relational terms, and personal names. Most of them can easily be matched up to elements in modern Basque.
Now, Mowat cites certain place names in Scotland, the Orkneys and Shetlands, and says they are non-Indo-European. He also believes the Picts of Scotland are non-IE, and that they are close relatives of the Aquitani. Throughout the book, he assumes that any of the Armorican tribes are close to, part of, or identical to the Basque-related Aquitani. He never questions this identification of the Picts. So I took all the enigmatic place names in Scotland that he mentions, and looked for resemblances to Basque place-name elements. I found nothing.
I then created a list of key topographical name elements — mountain, hill, river, sea, lake, white, black, high, low, forest, fort, rock, etc… the sort of things that invariably shows up in the names of permanent features of landscapes, and hang on through many population and language changes. I looked up all the Basque (and, where possible, Aquitanian) versions of these words. I took each one of these and searched through a massive database of place names in Scotland. I found only one case of a resemblance. One hill in southern Scotland sounded like it could be related to a proto-Basque word element that means “hill”. However, there was an equally valid Indo-European explanation for this one case. Now, Scotland is supposedly filled with Pictish and/or pre-Indo-European name elements. If the Scottish non-IE layer was directly related to the Aquitani /Basque languages, then numerous resemblances should have popped up in this exercise. They didn’t. Many very common name components in Scotland have been clearly identified as of Pictish origin. “Aber-”, “Lhan-”, “Pit-” or “Fin-” indicate regions inhabited by Picts in the past (for example: Aberdeen, Lhanbryde, Pitmedden, Pittodrie, Findochty, etc). I looked for any sign of these elements in Basque, or in the surviving Aquitanian vocabulary. I also tried all of the names in the Pictish King List. Nothing. Zip. Nada. These Pictish terms don’t even look remotely connected to anything Basque or Aquitanian. For that matter, the element “Alb” or “Alba”, which is the cornerstone of Mowat’s pan-pre-IE universe, doesn’t show up anywhere in Basque except in a word meaning “heat” (as in an animal being in heat, an unlikely component of a universal ethnic or landscape term).
What Mowat doesn’t mention is that most scholars don’t believe that the Picts were non-IE speakers. Most of the Pictish names can be fairly easily connected to the Brythonic, or “P‑Celtic” branch of Celtic Languages. There are a minority of names that may be pre-IE. Those names could easily be there simply because they predate the arrival of the Picts. It is possible that the Picts are somehow connected to the Armorican tribe of Pictones, but the Pictones were in modern Poitou, nor Armorica or Aquitaine, and most ancient writers firmly identify them as a Celtic tribe. The center of their tribal territory was well inland, and not a coastal city of intrepid sailors.
It is not absolutely essential for Mowat’s mysterious visitors to the Canadian Arctic to have been non-Indo-European speakers, or for them to have been related to Picts, Pictones, Armoricans, or Basques. It is simply part of the romance he builds, and I find it rather suspicious that he made so little effort to examine the linguistic data behind it.
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