Britons: Painted People and Blue Priests

The fruit loaf called by the Welsh ‘bara brith’ means ‘speckled bread’ in their tongue.

This reminded me of the word ‘Brythonic‘, a term coined for a group of southern Celtic languages by John Rhys, Oxford’s first Professor of Celtic and a fellow of Jesus College.

Now I speculated (speckle-ated?) that the ‘bryth-/brith’ could be connected, since the ancient Britons painted themselves, and in an early twentieth century article I found this:

‘… the name of Briton apparently comes from the word ‘Brith,’ painted, while Giraldus Cambrensis records that ‘Glaswir,’ ‘blue men’, was in his time the name for the Welsh clergy, probably a survival attached to the priestly caste from heathen times. It is probable that both Britons and Caledonians adopted the practice of painting from the earlier races among whom they found it observed.’

‘The Pictish Race and Kingdom,’ by James Ferguson, in The Celtic Review, Vol. 7, No. 25 (Feb., 1911) – page 30

https://zenodo.org/record/1570180/files/article.pdf?download=1