Portal:Scotland/Selected article/Week 16, 2011

Scottish literature is literature written in Scotland or by Scottish writers. It includes literature written in English, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Brythonic, French, Latin and any other language in which a piece of literature was ever written within the boundaries of modern Scotland.

The people of northern Britain spoke forms of Celtic languages. Much of the earliest Welsh literature was actually composed in or near the country we now call Scotland, as Brythonic speech (the ancestor of Welsh) was not then confined to Wales and Cornwall. While all modern scholarship indicates that the Picts spoke a Brythonic language (based on surviving placenames, personal names and historical evidence), none of their literature seems to have survived into the modern era.

Some of the earliest literature known to have been composed in Scotland includes:

• Brythonic (Old Welsh): The Gododdin (attributed to Aneirin), c. 6th century
• Gaelic: Elegy for St Columba by Dallan Forgaill, c. 597
• Latin: "Altus Prosator" ("The High Creator", attributed to St Columba), c. 597