Donald MacLean Sinclair provides an interesting anecdote on how Blair received an honourary Doctor of Divinity degree from the Presbyterian College of Montreal. Blair was nominated for the degree at a meeting of the General Assembly:
Robert Murray, editor of the Presbyterian Witness, and my father, Rev. A. MacLean Sinclair, were sitting together, whilst before them several D.D.s could be seen and frequently heard. My father said to Murray “We must get a D.D. for Blair.” “Certainly,” he replied, “write out an application and I will sign it.” The application was written out then and there, and Robert Murray and Judge Forbes signed it. My father handed it to Principal MacVicar, a Gaelic-speaking Highlander, and the result was that Mr. Blair became Dr. Blair.10
In 1893 Blair died at the age of seventy-eight. His wife had died in 1882, and they are buried together in Laggan cemetery a few miles away from Blair Church in the Garden of Eden.
One of Blair’s most important legacies was the great influence he had on Alexander Maclean Sinclair. Maclean Sinclair himself was the grandson of well-known poet John Maclean, who left Tiree for Nova Scotia in 1819. Reared in his grandfather’s household, Maclean Sinclair was only eight years old when his grandfather died in 1848. Blair, only newly arrived, would become friend and mentor to the young Maclean Sinclair. It was Blair’s example that represented the ultimate path his own life would take as minister and Gaelic scholar. Blair was thus a significant influence in Maclean Sinclair’s life, not only as a representative of the church, but also as an educated Gael who was actively involved in the literature of his native language.
Maclean Sinclair’s relationship with Blair continued even after leaving his home community of Glen Bard to further his education. When it was time for him to get his licence as a minister, Maclean Sinclair returned to his home district in order to be examined. Prospective ministers were licensed and ordained by established ministers in the church court of the Presbytery. Part of this process involved a lengthy oral examination, which, in Maclean Sinclair’s case, involved presenting a homily in Gaelic and being tested on theology, church history, Hebrew and Greek.11 One of Maclean Sinclair’s examiners was Blair, and, as Moderator of the Presbytery, it was Blair who ultimately licensed Maclean Sinclair to preach in the Free Church of Nova Scotia on May 2, 1866. Blair presided over Maclean Sinclair’s wedding to Mary Ann Campbell in 1882, and Blair composed an òran pòsaidh (wedding song) for the occasion. This song was published in Mac-Talla in 1903 and is included in the present volume. In 1887, when Maclean Sinclair’s mother passed away at the age of seventy-seven, it was Blair who conducted her funeral service.
Blair contributed much to Maclean Sinclair’s publications, and when Blair died in 1893, Maclean Sinclair inherited Blair’s manuscripts. Maclean Sinclair described Blair as:
a man of deep and thorough piety, but somewhat quick-tempered. He was an accomplished scholar. It is no exaggeration to say that he could read Hebrew just as easily as I can read English and Gaelic. He intended at one time to become a missionary among the Jews, and this led him to take an interest in Hebrew. He knew Latin and Greek at least as well as the ordinary run of educated men do. I called to see him one day and asked what he was at. His reply was “I have been reading the Odyssey in Greek for the last six weeks, and I have got through it. I read the Iliad when I was going to college, but I never read the Odyssey until now.” He had a smattering of French and German. He knew Gaelic thoroughly. He could read Irish Gaelic and Welsh. He had an extraordinary memory for words. Of philology, or the science of language, he knew nothing. The fact is that until Max Muller published his lectures, philology was a subject in which very little interest was taken among Britons. When Dr. Blair was dying he ordered his son to give me all his Gaelic manuscripts.12
Blair’s manuscripts are today housed, along with Maclean Sinclair’s own papers, in the Public Archives of Nova Scotia and the Father Charles Brewer Celtic Collection at St. Francis Xavier University. Aside from Gaelic translations of the Psalms and a Gaelic Grammar that he had been working on, Blair’s manuscripts include personal and religious poems, historical sketches, notes in Gaelic on grammar with an English translation, a Greek-Gaelic glossary, transcriptions of Gaelic poetry (e.g., by Duncan Bàn, William Ross and Alexander MacDonald) and a Gaelic translation of Homer.
Though Blair published a few monographs in English and Gaelic, most of his publishing activity was in periodicals. The Canada Scotsman of Montréal, edited by Angus Nicholson, contained a regular Gaelic column which became one of Blair’s earliest venues for his prose writing in Gaelic. Angus Nicholson went on to publish a Gaelic magazine in Toronto called An Gaidheal, beginning in 1871 to which Blair continued to contribute. Nicholson took An Gaidheal with him to Glasgow when he returned to Scotland a few years later. Once Blair’s protegé Maclean Sinclair began publishing his own Gaelic column in the local Pictou News in Nova Scotia in 1883, Blair aided him by contributing numerous items. Maclean Sinclair’s column, “Cùil na Gàidhlig” (The Gaelic Corner), ran for just over five years, from December 1883 to at least January 1888 (the month of the latest surviving issue of the Pictou News containing “Cùil na Gàidhlig”). Blair contributed much to it, including a series “About the Old Highlanders” (“Mu na Sean Gaidhil [sic]”) and “The History of the Highlanders” (“Eachdraidh nan Gaidheal”). An introduction to Blair’s series described the new feature:
The “Cùil na Gàidhlig,” dear to so many Highland hearts, will be continued, and a very interesting feature will be the regular publication of a “History of the Highlanders,” by the Rev. D. B. Blair, one of the most distinguished Gaelic Scholars of the day, who has very materially aided the Rev. Mr. Sinclair in furnishing matter for the Gaelic column.13
To a lesser extent, Blair also contributed to Scottish-based papers such as the Oban Times and the Inverness Highlander, as well as several items to the Halifax Presbyterian Witness; however, the best known of all periodicals to which he contributed is the famous Mac-Talla (Echo). Mac-Talla was published between 1892 and 1904 in Sydney, Nova Scotia. Its editor, Jonathan MacKinnon, began the paper when he was twenty-two years old with the dream of publishing a newspaper completely in Gaelic. He succeeded for many years in bringing out a weekly edition, but by its tenth volume in 1901, economic exigencies, which included difficulties with subscriptions, something about which MacKinnon often lamented in the paper, forced him to move to releasing an edition every other week. MacKinnon had a subscription base all over the world, yet he continually struggled to increase his numbers and after only three more years he had to cease publication. Mac-Talla’s final issue appeared on June 24, 1904.
Much of what Blair submitted to Mac-Talla included material he had already published in earlier papers. His Mac-Talla contributions are thus representative of much of his ongoing intelectual interests. Some of the currents and themes that we see running through his work reflect an interest in the early history of the Gaels, for which he relies heavily on the work of George Buchanan, and a preoccupation with the injustices perpetrated against the Gaels in the Highland Clearances. As a minister it is not surprising that Blair had an abiding interest in the history of Christianity, particularly in regard to his native Scotland (hence the inclusion of his article on this topic in the present volume), and his prose is accordingly peppered with Biblical references throughout. Blair’s interest in the Clearances is reflected in his interest in the Brahan Seer, and he clearly sees the events of the Clearances predicted in Coinneach Odhar’s prophecies. He finds some solace, however, in also seeing the eventual return of the Gaels to their homeland in the Highlands and Islands. Much of Blair’s poetry represented here is also in this vein and reminiscent of the type seen in Donald Meek’s Tuath agus Tighearna.
Though the source for his writings on the Clearances is not clear, Blair obviously knew the history and genealogies of many of the Gaels who emigrated to the Maritime region, and incorporates this information throughout. Blair�
�s stance is clearly evident, and he essentially demonizes the people whom he sees as responsible (i.e., the sheep owners, landlords and their factors who were accountable for the forcible removal of the Gaels from land on which they had traditionally lived for centuries). Blair’s inclusion of anecdotal information from personal informants adds a colourful accent to the genealogical and historical material. For instance, Blair describes two old women from Barney’s River who would take delight in singing satire against Patrick Sellar, the factor who forced their grandfather out of his home in Sutherland:
There are old women at Barney’s River who can dance with ardour and mirth, and who sing a humorous, satirical and vituperative ditty composed about Sellar in Sutherland. You would think their heads would hit the rafters or the ceilings as they leap and spring from the floor while singing like thrushes in the bushes on a May morning.14
Among Blair’s contributions to Mac-Talla is a piece on the “Poems of Ossian,” referring of course to the work of James Macpherson and the Ossianic controversy of the 18th and 19th century. The publication of Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language (1760), Fingal (1762), Temora (1763) and the Poems of Ossian (1765), which was a compilation of the three previous publications in two volumes, was a literary phenomenon that did much to raise the profile of the Gaelic language. Translated from English into most of the major European languages, Macpherson’s Ossian enjoyed immense popularity in Europe and sparked a surge in interest in “things Celtic.” Macpherson deliberately misled the public in his Ossianic publications. He made the extraordinary claim that his works were translations of poetry originating in the 3rd century by Ossian, the legendary poet/hero of Gaelic mythology. His work came to be discredited as a forgery even in his own lifetime.
Ministers of the Presbyterian Church were strong supporters of the authenticity of Macpherson’s Ossian, and in this regard Blair was no exception. Blair had obviously been reading his Scottish Enlightenment authors and uses the four stages theory of history based on ideas popular among writers in Scotland (such as Adam Smith) during the mid- to late 18th century, in his analysis of Ossian. Blair writes as though it were a given fact that Ossian had been a real figure, and shows this by attempting to prove that the historical Ossian had to have lived during the first stage of society, that of hunting, in the 5th century, a date which is only slightly more conservative than Macpherson’s own assertion that Ossian had lived in the 3rd century. Blair does not perfectly agree with Macpherson, but nor does he refute him.
Macpherson’s purported Gaelic “originals” were not published until 1807, and were really a translation of Macpherson’s English-language edition. However, they had a lasting influence on much Gaelic verse throughout the century, including Blair’s own poem on Niagara Falls. During his passage to North America, Blair describes Ailsa Craig, that famous landmark in the Firth of Clyde witnessed by many an emigrant as they departed Scotland. He compares Ailsa Craig with the icebergs he later sees on his voyage as the ship approaches Newfoundland. The accounts of his travels seem to lead unerringly in a great crescendo to the Niagara Falls, and though he stops short of describing the Falls in his prose accounts, this is made up for in his poetic tour de force, his poem on Niagara in which he uses similar language in describing the superlativeness of the Falls as he did in his earlier prose accounts of his ocean crossing. His use of language in both prose and poetry demonstrates his familiarity with Gaelic tradition. Alasdair Mac Mhaightir Alasdair’s words from “Birlinn Chlann Raghnaill” (Clan Ranald’s Galley) are irresistible in describing how his own vessel was tossed about by the waves as he crossed the Atlantic: “bha an fhairge ’ga sloistreadh ’s ’ga maistreadh troimhe cheile” (the sea was churning and dashing together), and much of this type of imagery also turns up in his later poem on Niagara Falls for which Blair even chooses the same metre, Snéadhbhairdne (2 (82 + 42)), used in “Birlinn Chlann Raghnaill.” In addition to demonstrating his rootedness in Gaelic tradition, Blair’s poetry also shows influences from contemporary streams evident in English literature. The sentiments and descriptions that Blair employs might be described in the vein of the literary Sublime, and arguably influenced by the Ossianic aesthetic which permeated the writings of many of his fellow minister-poets. Additional influences from texts such as Milton’s Paradise Lost, which Blair translated into Gaelic, the work of Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, contemporary Gaelic writers, Classical writing (Blair also translated Homer), and the Bible, all blend together to leave their mark on Blair’s work.
Notes
1. Duncan B. Blair, “Autobiography – Duncan B. Blair, The History of His Life Written By His Own Name, September 1839 – Lublin, Badenoch.” [Transcribed by Rev. Dr. Glen Matheson, 2004, based on a hand-written copy.], 2.
2. Ibid., 2-3.
3. Ibid., 4.
4. Ibid., 9.
5. Ibid., 11.
6. A. Maclean Sinclair, Clàrsach na Coille (Glasgow, 1881), 325.
7. Blair, “Autobiography,” 12, 17.
8. D. M. Sinclair, “Rev. Duncan Black Blair, D.D. (1815-1893): Pioneer preacher in Pictou County, Gaelic scholar and poet,” Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society 39 (1977): 160.
9. Blair, “Autobiography,” 17.
10. D. M. Sinclair, “Rev. Duncan Black Blair,” 165.
11. A. Maclean Sinclair, “Fifty Years Ago,” Eastern Chronicle, January 9, 1917, 5.
12. Alexander Maclean Sinclair, qtd. in D. M. Sinclair, “Rev. Duncan Black Blair,” 165.
13. Pictou News, Maclean, Sinclair Family Fonds (Scrapbooks), MG9/542/234, NSARM. D. B. Blair’s “Eachdraidh nan Gàidheal” (History of the Highlanders) began 30 Oct. 1885 and appeared in “Cùil na Gàidhlig” until 10 Dec. 1886.
14. See Gaelic on page 103-104 of this book and English translation on 102.
Further Reading:
Bell, Bill, ed. 2007. Ambition and Industry 1800-1880. Vol. 3 of The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Kidd, Sheila M. 2000. “Social Control and Social Criticism: the nineteenth-century còmhradh.” Scottish Gaelic Studies 20:67-87.
———. 2002. “Caraid nan Gaidheal and ‘Friend of Emigration’: Gaelic emigration literature of the 1840s.” Scottish Historical Review 81 (1): 52-69.
Meek, Donald E. 2002. “The pulpit and the pen: clergy, orality and print in the Scottish Gaelic world.” In The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500-1850, 84-118. Ed. Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
———. 2007. “Gaelic Literature in the Nineteenth Century.” In Enlightenment, Britain and Empire (1707-1918), 28-266. Vol. 2 of The Edinburgh History of the Scottish Literature. Ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Nilsen, Kenneth E. 2002. “Some Notes on pre-Mac-Talla Gaelic Publishing in Nova Scotia (with references to early Gaelic publishing in Prince Edward Island, Quebec and Ontario).” In Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig 2000, 127-40. Ed. C. Ó Baoill and N. R. McGuire. Obar Dheathain: An Clò Gaidhealach.
——. 2010. “A’ Ghàidhlig an Canada: Scottish Gaelic in Canada.” In The Edinburgh Companion to the Gaelic Language, 90-107. Ed. Moray Watson and Michelle Macleod. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
An t-Urr. Donnchadh Blàrach
le Mìcheal Linkletter
(Bha MacIlleathain Sinclair, a tha air ainmeachadh tric anns a’ chaibideil seo, daonnan a’ cleachdadh an t-sloinnidh Sinclair ann an Gàidhlig seach Mac na Ceàrdaich, son adhbhair a tha e ag ainmeachadh an àiteachan eile. Tha sinne a’ leantainn a’ chleachdaidh seo. Son beachdachadh air a sin, faicibh Michael Linkletter, “Gàidhlig aig Oilthigh Naoimh Fransaidh Xavier agus an t-Urramach Alasdair MacIlleathain Sinclair – Gaelic at St. Francis Xavier University and the Rev. Alexander Maclean Sinclair” ann an Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig5/Fifth Scottish
Gaelic Research Conference, deasaichte le Kenneth E. Nilsen (Sydney: Cape Breton University Press, 2011), 134-48.)
Bha an t-Ollamh Urramach Donnchadh MacIlleDhuibh Blàrach air fear de iomadh neach, a’ mhòr-chuid dhiubh pearsachan-eaglais, a bha an sàs ann an sgrìobhadh litreachas Gàidhlig anns an naoidheamh linn deug. Is dòcha nach eil seo ’na iongnadh mòr oir b’iad am prìomh bhuidheann foghlaimte am measg nan Gàidheal le briseadh siostam nam fineachan anns an linn a dh’fhalbh agus, mar thoradh air sin, call nan sgoiltean dùthchasach anns an robhar a’ beachdachadh gu foirmeil air bàrdachd, eòlas-leighis, lagh agus ceòl. Chaidh am beàrn seo a lìonadh gu ìre le pearsachan-eaglais na dùthcha, a chaidh oideachadh ann an oilthighean bhailtean-mòra na h-Alba, ged a thill mòran dhiubh gu dreuchdan air Ghàidhealtachd agus anns na h-Eileanan. Is dòcha gur e an taigh-cèilidh, far an robh bàrdachd, sgeulachdan agus beul-aithris eile (agus gu dearbha stuth sgrìobhte agus clò-bhuailte anns an naoidheamh linn deug) air an liubhairt, an rud a bu chudromaiche ann a bhith cumail cultar dualchasach na Gàidhlig beò nuair a chaidh siostam nam fineachan a mhùchadh an dèidh 1745. B’ann anns an àrainneachd altramach seo a thogadh mòran de na pearsachan-eaglais aig an robh àite cudromach nuair a thàinig literati ùr Gàidhlig na naoidheamh linne deug gu bith. Bha àite cudromach cuideachd aig a’ Chomunn Albannach son Sgaoileadh a’ Chreidimh Chrìostaidh (an SSPCK) ann an leasachadh litreachas na Gàidhlig anns an naoidheamh linn deug. An dèidh a stèidheachadh ann an 1709, bha am buidheann seo gu cinnteach an aghaidh Gàidhlig oir b’e an amas air tùs foghlam cràbhach a thoirt chun na Gàidhealtachd agus ceàrnan neo-shìobhalta eile na dùthcha, ach aig toiseach na naoidheamh linne deug bha iad air toiseachadh a’ brosnachadh leughadh Gàidhlig son am Bìoball a dhèanamh so-ruigsinn, ach b’e gluasad gu tur gu Beurla an ceann-uidhe.
Fògradh, Fàisneachd, Filidheachd Page 3