Talk:Pictish Beast

Newly discovered example

This BBC article may be of use to anyone looking to expand the entry. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.200.79.217 (talk) 17:01, 15 September 2011 (UTC)

"Recent thinking" on Pictish beast as dragonesque brooch

"Recent thinking" on the Pictish beast's identity, as cited here, seems to be just one individual's hunch in support of a wider hypothesis about post-occupation Roman influence in northern Scotland. It's presented as a scholarly consensus -- but without explicitly claiming that it is a consensus, or saying why it should be.

Any 21st century thinking about what the Pictish beast is -- it needs more than 19th-century "Hmm, reminds me a bit of something else I saw somewhere else". It needs to be thinking about how its Pictish audience would read it -- but more than that -- about why it should matter at all to them.

Contemporary thinking needs to make a case for why the Picts would go to the trouble of hewing a stone and carving that something on it, carving the other specific images on that stone, transporting the stone (in a landscape with few roads) and erecting it in some given area. A proposal needs to propose why a brooch/elephant/dolphin would matter to them. It needs to address the obvious question: why they invested it with such significance. What was the rationale for it as far as they were concerned? How does it mesh with what else they depicted?

The supposed "S-shape" as mutated dragonesque brooch appears on only one single stone out of hundreds. In earlier as well as later stones, the Pictish beast's long snout, back limbs and curlicues are all fully formed. These are only two images on the back face of this Mortlach stone. If a double-headed dragonesque brooch design developed gradually ever-wonkier versions through an inanimate "S-shape" and then through more intermediates to the animate beast, then why would the composition consist of a Pictish beast AND an inanimate, intermediate stage?

What the inanimate shape on the Mortlach stone resembles is just a less sharply-cornered version of the "notched rectangles" carved on a similar scale in a similar context on similar stones in the same region.

1. The "notched rectangle" symbols appear in many variations on Pictish stones. 2. They appear on several stones along with the Pictish beast. 3. No explanation is given for why a mutated, S-shaped, double-headed dragonesque brooch (ie a bust of an animal, joined to an upside-down mirror image of itself) should be misperceived as a single (ie asymmetrical) M-shaped animal. 4. No intermediate carved stone forms of dragonesque brooches are cited; they appear to not exist. The Pictish beast appears in the earliest known Pictish carvings, and with notable consistency of form for centuries. 5. No explanation is offered for why members of the Pictish public in northern Scotland, long after the brief Roman occupation there, should either recognise or care about a gigantic version of some particular design of Roman brooch; one of many and various designs. No proposal is made about what they should understand from a poster-sized version. 6. The Pictish beast could be said with more justification to represent a Roman or southern Romano-British brooch modelled on a hare. ==(a) Hare brooches have the same limb orientation and has a projection (ear in profile) back from the head, just as the Pictish beast has. The proposed dragonesque type brooch is self-symmetrical around its torso and has no rump or back limbs: the Pictish beast is highly asymmetrical and has back limbs. ==(b) The hare is known to be invested by several European cultures with some religious or totemic significance. Note, I am not proposing that the Pictish beast is a hare, only that it is a Romano-British jewelry design that is less unlikely to mutate into a Pictish beast than a highly distorted dragonesque piece that has no actual intermediate examples. 7. The brooch idea presumes unusually poor powers of observation by early Pictish stonecarvers who accurately reproduced complex symbols and naturalistic, well-observed sketches of animals on the same stones. 8. If a foreign cloak-pin design had taken on some talismanic significance, such that a distorted poster-sized version was recognisable to the Pictish general public at the time, what is its proposed significance to them? 9. Pictish metalworkers were perfectly capable of good accurate work. If dragonesque brooches became a major motif or icon to northern Picts, then Aberdeenshire and Morayshire should be full of Pictish copies of dragonesque brooches -- in metal, as brooches.

The brooch idea was plainly conceived to support the "Mithraism" hypothesis that ex-Roman military may have settled in Scotland. Outsize carvings, as poor reproductions of a jewelry design from earlier generations further south, would be extremely weak support for the Mithraism hypothesis. Accepting or rejecting brooch-as-beast doesn't really say anything about the Mithraism hypothesis, one way or the other. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.187.165.87 (talk) 02:30, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

Is there enough content here to keep?

This stub has been sitting for quite a while without much development, and there may not be enough definitive research about this one symbol to make a compelling article. Perhaps this page could be renamed Pictish Symbols and focus on the still evolving understanding of the symbols as a set? Alternatively, the section about they symbols on the Pictish stone article page could be further developed instead. Kdhabolt (talk) 20:38, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

I'm fine with it as it is. It's longer than most of the articles on individual Pictish symbols. Johnbod (talk) 00:19, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

Kdhabolt: Interesting article. Please keep it but it would be good to add inline citations.--Ipigott (talk) 12:14, 27 January 2024 (UTC)