by Anne Ross
The Highlands and Islands of the west contain both Protestant and Catholic communities. In the Outer Hebrides North Uist and the Islands to the north are Protestant, part of Benbecula and all the southern Isles Catholic. Like the early Celtic Church in Ireland, the Catholic priests had a greater tolerance for the old customs which were at one time feared and disliked by the Protestant ministers as being representative of pagan decadence. As a result, the extant traditions in the Catholic areas differ from those of the Protestant regions, being, in many ways, more archaic and rich; but the Protestant areas retained much of their lore and made their own valuable contribution to the preservation of tale, custom and belief which is so astonishingly rich and varied in the Scottish Highlands.
Calendar festivals have always been closely observed by the Celts and in these, much that is purely pagan has survived, blended often almost inextricably with Christian feasts. Festivities connected, for example, with the ancient pan-Celtic god Lugus (Lugh), which we know to have taken place on 1 August in Gaul at the time of Caesar’s wars there, survived vestigially all over the Celtic world down to the present century and have been the subject of a fascinating study by Máire MacNeill. The feast, which took place on or near 1 August and was known as Lughnasa, ‘the feast in honour of Lugh’s birth’, was not a harvest thanksgiving, but a feast of propitiation — a blessing of the harvest to be reaped. The festivities customarily took place on a hill or eminence; there was often a ‘patten’ — a procession — round a holy well, led by the priest; games, markets, races and communal activity of every kind ensued. At the various calendar festivals in the Protestant areas the Trinity was invoked; in the Catholic regions pagan deities metamorphosed into local saints were added to the Trinity and the more common orthodox saints; and in the southern Outer Hebrides St Michael was sometimes invoked as the god Michael. Hallowe’en, the ancient feast of Samhain, the night before 1 November, continued to be regarded as the most awesome period of the year, a time when the powers of the Otherworld became visible — and often dangerous — to mankind, and when human sacrifice and propitiation were essential according to the belief of the pagan Celts, to make benign and satisfy the dark forces of the unknown.
Many of the ancient beliefs and superstitions can still be glimpsed in the treasure-house of the surviving oral tradition, their power gone, their continuity due entirely to the force of the strong folk memory and the longevity of the traditions from which they originally sprang. Stories of the rebellion of 1745 and the evictions of the following decades are related as if they had happened yesterday. Belief in the power of Second Sight is more or less universally present; and the association of prehistoric monuments with past battles fought by gigantic foes is equally widespread. There are still people living in the Gaelic West who claim to have had direct experience of the fairies, and others who assert that they did exist until comparatively recently but, like the great shoals of herring that seasonally frequented the seas round the Hebrides, have now, for some mysterious reason, gone.
It is due to the devoted, tireless and often hazardous work of the great collectors of Gaelic folklore that we have a repertoire of recorded tradition of considerable size and variety, one which provides a yardstick against which to measure the by now infinitely more fragmented body of lore still current in the West today. The persecution of the Gaelic language and all that it stood for began long ago. As early as 1567 John Carswell, Bishop of the Isles, wrote: ‘Great is the blindness and darkness of sin and ignorance and of understanding among composers and writers and supporters of the Gaelic in that they prefer and practise the framing of vain, hurtful, lying, earthly stories about the Tuatha Dé Danann and about the sons of Milesius and about the heroes and Fionn MacCumhail and his giants and about many others whom I shall not number or tell of here in detail, in order to maintain and advance these, with a view to obtaining for themselves passing worldly gain, rather than to write and to compose and to support the faithful words of God and the perfect way of truth.’ In this castigation of the oral tradition, Bishop Carswell gives us valuable information, not only about the vigour with which it was practised, but the nature of its contents. The Tuatha Dé Danann were the pagan gods of ancient Ireland, known to us through the stories of their deeds, recorded by the scribes of the early Christian Church. They were clearly still popular with the people in the sixteenth century; and even today fragmentary stories of their heroic and magical deeds can still be found in remote corners of Gaelic Scotland. The stories of the sons of Mil likewise belong to the early Irish Book of Invasions, that great corpus of semi-historical, semi-mythological material accounting for the coming of the different races — some of them deities — to Ireland. Hero tales, about characters ancient and modern, were, and perhaps still are, the most popular of all the long stories. Amongst these rank the stories telling of the fabulous deeds of the semi-supernatural Irish hero, Fionn MacCumhail and his giants, as Carswell calls them, the characters who played the leading rôle in MacPherson’s Ossian (Fionn’s son by a woman in the form of a hind). This led to the great Ossianic controversy in the eighteenth century and the subsequent focusing of attention of the whole of literary Europe on the Gaelic West. All these subjects are treated in greater detail in the relevant sections of the book.
In spite of persecution by the Protestant Church and by the education authorities, the Gaelic language and some of its great heritage of oral tradition has survived. Ancient customs and beliefs were commented on, inadvertently as it were, by travellers to the Highlands such as Edward Lhuyd, the Welsh geologist and Celtic linguist, the first collector of Gaelic folklore and compiler of the first Gaelic dictionary in the late seventeenth century; natives like Martin Martin, protestant minister in the Island of Skye, visited the Outer Hebrides a few years later and recorded much valuable material. Again, strangers such as Dr Johnson, making his famous tour of Scotland with the Lowland lawyer, James Boswell in 1773, stimulated by the writings of such as Martin, whose original Description appeared as early as 1703, have valuable fragments to add to the testimony of the surviving oral tradition and the comments of native writers.
The systematic work of collecting extant popular lore in the Scottish Highlands really began in the nineteenth century with the great work of John Francis Campbell of Islay (Iain Òg Ìle, ‘Young John of Islay’). A gentleman by birth, and living at a time when the Gaelic language was despised as being the speech of peasants and the poor, he learnt to speak the native tongue of his island and dedicated himself to travelling far and wide, laboriously writing down every fragment he could find of the once rich folklore. He worked in every kind of condition and left to posterity a unique corpus of material which would otherwise have soon perished under the strong pressures operating against it. In his edition of the Dewar Manuscripts, the Rev John MacKechnie says of Campbell:
The collecting of folklore was but one of J.F. Campbell’s many activities. He it was who had seen the need of gathering the material and who set up the machinery for doing that; but it was not so much what he actually collected that is important, but rather the example he set before others and the inspiration which fired all who came into contact with him. At a time when Gaelic was neglected and regarded as unworthy of a gentleman’s attention, he pointed out its charm and the inestimable value of much that was enshrined in the Gaelic language. He showed that a gentleman might well be proud of his knowledge of Gaelic.
The nature of the great collector, the first of many eminent scholars in this field, is well illustrated by his own comments on his work:
My wish has been simply to gather some specimens of the wreck so plentifully strewn on the coasts of old Scotland, and to carry it where others may examine it; rather to point out where curious objects worth some attention may be found, rather than to gather a great heap. I have not sought for stranded forests. I have not polished the rough sticks which I found; I have but cut off a very few offending splinters, and I trust that some may be found who will not utterly despise such ru
bbish, or scorn the magic which peasants attribute to a fairy egg.
John Campbell was primarily interested in the tales told in the Highlands, and these he classified into various types. Another important contemporary collector was Alexander Carmichael (6) who was mainly concerned with the charms and incantations current at the time, although he recorded every piece of Gaelic lore which it was in his power to do. Recently, several boxes of previously unknown material which had been collected by Carmichael were discovered in the library of the University of Edinburgh, and these are in the process of being examined. Other distinguished collectors added to the growing body of oral material; today, the School of Scottish Studies in the University of Edinburgh, and other organisations, are endeavouring to collect, by the much more efficient medium of the tape recorder, the last fragments of the rapidly dying tradition. The Gaelic language is seriously threatened by all the forces that are putting at risk minority cultures all over the world; even so, it is astonishing that so much has survived into the present century of a language and its traditions which spring directly from that spoken by an ancient Celtic people whose culture was archaic long before the English ever set foot in Britain and which the Romans must have found so strange on their exploratory trips to Ireland.
6Alexander Carmichael, after the second edition of his Carmina Gadelica, Edinburgh and London, 1928, frontispiece and pxxxvi
In order to understand anything of the formative elements that have gone into making Gaelic Scotland a distinctive cultural unit, it is necessary to glance briefly at the early history of the country and the nature of the various peoples who inhabited it. The area covered in the book is huge and varied. It includes districts which were at one time Gaelic-speaking and, at an earlier period, were inhabited by British-or Pictish-speaking peoples; regions which were Gaelic-speaking until comparatively recent times; and territory where the Gaelic language is still in everyday use to some extent or another. It includes areas which have had a totally different historical evolution from each other, where external influences of different types and of differing degrees have operated, and in which the religions have been, and still are, very mixed. We may note that, in similar fashion to the languages of other Celtic countries, there is a firm educational policy to retain the Gaelic speech and to ensure that it continues into the foreseeable future.
In Roman times a people known as the Caledonii occupied land extending from the Valley of the Tay to the Great Glen. Two place-names in Perthshire still bear witness to the presence of these people — the mountain Shiehallion on the Moor of Rannoch, ‘the Fairy Mound of the Caledonians’, about which has accrued much legend, and another hill, Dunkeld, ‘the Fort of the Caledonians’. The original Caledonian confederacy included many other tribes: the Taezali of the far north-east, the Lugi of Sutherland, the Decantae of Easter Ross, the Smertae between the Lugi and the Caereni of north-west Sutherland. These powerful Caledonians constituted a strong threat to the Romans and constantly harassed them and raided into territory which they had occupied further south. Scots from Ireland came in their ships and raided the western coasts; the Picts from northern Scotland also joined in the attacks. The Caledonii spoke a language which was the ancestor of Welsh, that is, British; the Picts used a speech containing an admixture of elements including British. Their language has not, as yet, been satisfactorily deciphered. By the end of the fifth century AD Scotland had become a land, not of 17 or so tribes, but of four kingdoms. The largest of these was that of the Picts, extending from the Forth to the Pentland Firth; they were divided into the northern and the southern Picts until eventually they became amalgamated into one kingdom.
The second people are those who most concern us here — the Scots, for they gave the Gaelic language to Scotland, and the name to the country. They came from Ireland to the west coast of the Highlands bringing with them their own Gaelic form of the Celtic language; Scotland means the lands of the Scotti or Scots. They settled in Dalriada, Argyllshire and the adjacent islands, naming the land after their own territory in Ireland. It is of some importance to note that the Irish settlers were not pagans, as were the three other peoples who occupied Scotland at that time, but Christian, although many pagan traditions still lurked beneath their Christianity, as they have done down to the present day. And, although Dalriada was the smallest of these kingdoms, it was from this Gaelic settlement that the first king of a united Scotland was to come. The third people were the Britons of Strathclyde, and the fourth kingdom was that of the Angles, whose territory reached as far as the Firth of Forth.
7Pictish figures engraved on stone — deer, horse
These four kingdoms were constantly at war with each other, but the conversion of the three pagan factions to Christianity made ultimate union possible. In AD 843 Kenneth MacAlpin became King of the Picts as well as ruler of the Scots; any threat from Anglian power had been destroyed in 685 at the Battle of Nechtansmere in Angus. Kenneth MacAlpin extended the boundaries of his territory, but he could never finally conquer the Angles and he remained King of Alba, as the united kingdoms were called. It was not until the victory of Malcolm II at the Battle of Carham in 1018 that total victory came to the Scots, and the four peoples became united under Malcolm’s grandson, Duncan I, and Scotland came into being. This did not include Orkney and Shetland, or parts of Northern Scotland and the Hebrides which were at that time under Norse rule — another important cultural factor influencing the subsequent development of Highland history and its traditions.
It is at the boundaries between Gaelic and non-Gaelic areas that some of the most interesting folk material is to be found, for traditions pay no respect to geography, and there must always be some peripheral region where they mingle and blend into each other. Settlements too, of one people into the territory of another group, can bring about the introduction of stories and traditions which rightly belong to a different district or milieu. But, even so, there is a fascinating universality and consistency in the legends and superstitions in the Highland areas of Scotland, in spite of the different influences and ideas that have been gradually introduced down the centuries. The result of all this amalgam of cultural contacts is well-expressed by John Campbell in his introduction to his Popular Tales of the West Highlands:
In the islands where the western wanderers settled down and where they have remained for centuries, old men and women are still found who have hardly stirred from their native islands, who speak only Gaelic, and cannot read or write, and yet their minds are filled with a mass of popular lore, as various as the wreck piled on the shores of Spitzbergen.
8Highland army officer, eighteenth-century. After F.A. Macdonald 1983, 140
2 Clan lore
In order to fully understand the nature of surviving tradition in Gaelic Scotland, social as well as historical factors must be taken into account. Until the final breakdown of the clan system in the eighteenth century, after the disastrous Battle of Culloden in 1746, Highlanders were organised in tribes or clans (from clann, ‘children’), as were the Celts from time immemorial. After the defeat of Prince Charles Edward Stuart by the Duke of Cumberland and his troops, this ancient system ceased to function officially, although it has survived vestigially until the present day, having acquired a certain glamour with the establishment of Balmoral as a royal residence and the interest of the Royal family in things Highland.
Nearly all the Highland clans (9) traced their origins back to Ireland; genuine clan names appear in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. Most of the genealogies are traced back to Loarn, son of Erc, one of the three brothers who established the kingdom of Dalriada in Argyllshire in the late fifth century AD. The Lords of the Isles, the MacDonalds, however, trace their ancestry to Colla Uais of Ireland. The Campbells seem to have a purely fictitious origin and the MacLeods and Nicholsons have a strong Norse element in their genealogy. The concept of clan differed from that of tribe in that the central feature of the clan was consanguinity or kinship; that of the tribe, tuath, had a te
rritorial basis. As the word clann means ‘progeny, children’, the members of any clan, from the chief down, were bonded together by blood kinship, the degree of which varied; the chief of the clan and the heads of the various branches or septs were closely related. There were, however, accretions to the clan who could, strictly speaking, claim no blood relationship. The clansmen bore a common name, and this name was derived from a common ancestor who may, in certain instances, have been a pagan deity rather than an historical character. In the later Middle Ages, the feudal system was extended in Scotland and the clans were confined to the more inaccessible districts; and, as we have seen, this archaic system survived until the eighteenth century, when it was terminated as a result of Culloden Moor.
Like the old pagan kings, the chief was believed to be semi-divine, in that he could do no wrong and loyalty to him was absolute. The clan chief was the real owner of the clan territory; the clansmen got their land from him and in return they gave him goods in kind and military service. Archaic records make it clear that the clan as a functioning organisation in Scotland existed as early as the sixth century AD. If a clansman had to obey a feudal superior and his orders were at variance with those of his chief, then the feudal lord, or king, would be ignored; when the clans were sufficiently isolated to make punishment for this too difficult to enforce, then they could escape retribution.