The Pagan Symbols of the Picts offers a fresh perspective on the importance of art, symbolism and the Picts in Scotland's cultural history. By looking beyond historical written accounts to oral tradition and story-telling from a variety of sources, Stuart McHardy challenges traditional interpretations of Pictish stone art. Believing them to be neither commemorative monuments nor an early alphabet, he instead explores their binary existence; as examples of larger shared beliefs in a linguistically and politically diverse landscape, and as objects of a very local genesis and influence. The Pagan Symbols of the Picts reveals not only the significance of Pictish symbology in the course of everyday life, but its place in the larger history of the Picts in Scotland and beyond. The Pagan Symbols of the Picts is a cohesive interpretation of the Pictish past. Examing the temporal and geographic, the cultural and the mythical, the artistic and the oral, Stuart McHardy paints a vivid and diverse picture of Pictish Scotland.