The Braflang Scóine is a non-extant tale of suggested 11th century Scottish

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

 origin. It appears in a list of literary tales a "good poet ought to know" in the Book of Leinster

Book of Leinster

The Book of Leinster , is a medieval Irish manuscript compiled ca. 1160 and now kept in Trinity College, Dublin, under the shelfmark MS H 2.18...

; its absence from another similar list suggests that the story came to Ireland

Ireland

Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...

 and the attention of the compiler in the 11th century.

Benjamin Hudson

Benjamin Hudson

Benjamin T. Hudson is an American medievalist based at Pennsylvania State University in State College, Pennsylvania. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree at Pennsylvania State University, received his Masters at University College, Dublin, and his Ph. D. at Worcester College, Oxford...

 argued that the tale was the basis for the account given by Gerald of Wales in the Instructions for Princes and by the author of the Prophecy of Berchán

Prophecy of Berchán

The Prophecy of Berchán, is a relatively large historical poem written in the Middle Irish language. The text is preserved in the Royal Irish Academy, as MS 679 , with a few early modern copies...

. In this story, the Scots invite the Pictish

Picts

The Picts were a group of Late Iron Age and Early Mediaeval people living in what is now eastern and northern Scotland. There is an association with the distribution of brochs, place names beginning 'Pit-', for instance Pitlochry, and Pictish stones. They are recorded from before the Roman conquest...

 nobles to their banquet hall for a feast; the Scots however prearranged for the banquet seats to sit on top of a pit, and engineered the set-up in such a way that removing a pin would drop those seated into the pit underneath. Gerald's tale did not feature Kenneth MacAlpin or Drust

Drest X of the Picts

Drest was king of the Picts from before 845 until 848, a rival of Kenneth MacAlpin . According to the Pictish Chronicle, he was the son of Uurad....

.

Gerald alleged this allowed the Scots to conquer the Picts, demonstrating for his reader how by perfidy

Perfidy

In the context of war, perfidy is a form of deception, in which one side promises to act in good faith with the intention of breaking that promise once the enemy has exposed himself .The practice is specifically prohibited under the 1977 Protocol I Additional to the...

 "an inferior people can overcome a superior race". The account, hostile to the Scots in the way Gerald told it, was repeated in future Anglo-Norman and English histories, including the Polychronicon of Ranulf Higdon

Ranulf Higdon

Ranulf Higden was an English chronicler and a Benedictine monk of the monastery of St. Werburgh in Chester....

. The tale is a recognisable part of European folklore, being classed by Stith Thompson

Stith Thompson

Stith Thompson was an American scholar of folklore. He is the "Thompson" of the Aarne-Thompson classification system.- Biography :...

as tale-type K 811.1.