Near the burgh of Auchtermuchty in Fife, lived two poor widows who were unable to pay the rent of the small plot of ground allotted them by the farmer whose sub-tenants they were. This being the case, the landlord insisted on their putting away their sons to some employment, that they might the better be able to pay their rents, as they were grown up, and able to do something for themselves and their mothers. These old women, though loath to part with their sons, having no alternative left to them, to part they must. Their situation having been communicated to each of the sons separately, these young men determined to push their fortune in some distant country.
For this Chambers has:
There were ance twa widows that lived ilk ane on a small bit o’ground, which they rented from a farmer. Ane o’ them had twa sons, and the other had ane; and by and by it was time for the wife that had twa sons to send them away to spouss their fortune.
He has perhaps over-simplified the situation to make a ‘nursery’ story, actually changing the relationship of the two widows’ three sons, and ‘spouss’ (espouse) seems to be his own romantic false etymology for the usual Scots phrase ‘push their fortune’ – but who could prefer Buchan’s long-winded wording?
There are fourteen stories in Buchan’s collection and seventeen prose tales (some in two or three versions) in Chambers’ section, and these thirty (allowing for the overlap) are almost all the Märchen published from Lowland Scotland for over a century after 1841: Walter Gregor printed two or three from the North-East, and a few others appeared in various periodicals from the Northern Isles and Galloway, but it was generally felt (as in England) that fireside storytelling had been wiped out by general literacy. It was only in the 1950s that Hamish Henderson, helped by Maurice Fleming and others, started to record stories as well as songs from cairds in Perthshire and Aberdeenshire, and sometimes further north, which showed that fictional folktales were still flourishing among the travelling people. The vast size of some cairds’ repertoires was not really revealed until a second wave of collection, led by postgraduate students including Linda Williamson, Sheila Douglas and Barbara McDermitt, began in the 1970s.
Meanwhile hundreds of Märchen had been written down and latterly recorded on disc, wire and tape in Scottish Gaelic. Chambers was inspired largely by the example of Sir Walter Scott, but Gaelic collection goes back in a clear line to the work of Scott’s correspondents, the Brothers Grimm. They inspired the Norwegian collection of fictional folktales (eventyr) by Asbjørnsen and Moe; this was translated as Popular Tales from the Norse by Sir George Dasent and published in Edinburgh early in 1859;24 Dasent’s friend John Francis Campbell must have seen the translations as they were being made, for he was immediately reminded of the Gaelic tales he had heard as a small boy in Islay from his father’s piper John Campbell, ‘my nurse’ as he called him, among others, and realised that as good a collection could be made in the Highlands: by April 1859 he already had several people working for him taking down stories. Campbell’s father had been forced to sell his Islay estate to pay his creditors some years before, but his son is always called ‘Campbell of Islay’. He was trained as a lawyer, based in London, held such positions as Secretary to the Commissioners for Northern Lights, and had many interests beside folktales: he travelled widely in Scandinavia and elsewhere and published books on his travels and various scientific subjects. He was also a valued friend of the Duke of Argyll. He could speak and write Gaelic, but could not take down whole tales from dictation, and for this he employed half a dozen collectors, including an Islay schoolmaster and gamekeepers on the Argyll estates, who went all over the West Highlands and Islands in 1859–60 writing stories for him. Only part of the resultant collection was included or summarised in the four volumes of his Popular Tales of the West Highlands (PTWH), and there are hundreds of stories in the National Library of Scotland still awaiting publication.25 The English translations in the book, which are Campbell’s own work, try too hard to give the literal meaning of idioms or the sound of words and do not appeal to many readers, but his comparative notes and his insistence on giving the storyteller’s words as exactly as they could be got down on paper are far ahead of most folklorists of his time.
Campbell’s publication aroused a new enthusiasm for the collection of Gaelic folklore, especially tales, and between 1880 and 1910a number of important books were published, mainly by ministers such as those who contributed to Waifs and Strays of Celtic Tradition (WRS), under the general editorship of the Duke of Argyll’s brother Lord Archibald Campbell,26 one of the founders of An Comunn Gàidhealach and the Mòd. Several Gaelic journals which appeared at the same period, such as Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, The Celtic Magazine, The Celtic Review, and An Gàidheal, were also full of stories. Some collectors, like the exciseman Alexander Carmichael, a late recruit to Campbell of Islay’s helpers, Father Allan MacDonald, priest in the island of Eriskay, or Lady Evelyn Stewart-Murray, a daughter of the Duke of Atholl, published only in the journals or not at all, though they took down many stories along with other Gaelic lore,27 and there are enough Gaelic folktales lying unread in their manuscripts to provide a lifetime’s work for a dozen researchers.
After 1914 it seems to have been assumed that every story worth collecting had been collected, until the independent researchers John Lorne Campbell and K. C. Craig began to publish Gaelic tales (often only in one language) in the 1930s and 40s.28 Or Campbell was the first to use wire and tape recordings to take down a natural text rather than a dictated one. Soon after, Calum Maclean was sent to his native Hebrides to collect for the Irish Folklore Commission, recording mainly tales, as he had done in Ireland, on an Ediphone cylinder recorder and reusing the scraped wax cylinders when the text had been transcribed. Some disc recordings were also made by Edinburgh University’s Phonetics Department shortly before the University set up the School of Scottish Studies in 1951; Calum Maclean became the School’s first researcher and recorded hundreds of tales, now on tape, throughout the Highlands, and in Shetland and the Borders, before his untimely death in 1960.29 Other fieldworkers from the School’s staff, postgraduate students and some volunteer contributors to the archives have helped to record most of the stories in this book. Again, hough a good number of stories have appeared in the School’s journals in the past thirty-five years, hundreds more are lying untouched in the archives.
Most of the published collections of traditional tales from Scotland covered by the sketch above have concentrated on international wonder-tales and other longer stories. The legends are quite different; most of them are scattered through guide-books, local histories and reminiscences, nearly all retold in the author’s own words, sometimes at great length (as in Wilson’s Tales if the Borders),30 sometimes just briefly mentioned in passing. A few appeared before 1950 in something more like the storyteller’s own words (though often they are a reconstruction) beside the wonder-tales in books and journals,31 but content rather than language tends to be what matters to the writer. The legends are among the thousands of tales in unpublished manuscripts, notably the Dewar manuscripts of clan legends at lnveraray Castle.32
FOLK NARRATIVE SCHOLARSHIP
This book is intended to be enjoyed as a representative sample of texts of Scottish traditional tales, but it may be as well to mention that folktale scholarship (which again has tended to concentrate mainly on fictional folktales, especially international wonder-tales) today indignantly repudiates the suggestion that texts as such are worth studying for their own sake: it is necessary instead to look for a deeper meaning beneath the surface of the story. This approach began with the Grimms’ ‘worn-down myth’ idea, which was taken to ridiculous extremes by nineteenth-century scholars who saw every story as a ‘solar myth’, a metaphor for the workings of nature, heavenly bodies, the weather, the seasons and so on. Andrew Lang ridiculed this school by ‘proving’ Max Müller, its leader, by his own methods to be a solar myth himself, but Lang championed the equally romantic, if slightly more convi
ncing, theory that myths and folktales embodied the principles of pagan rituals. After an interval of fifty years, the search for meaning has now become fashionable again, with the difference that apart from some cosmologists who are still looking for symbolism and ritual behind narrative plots, most analysts now base their approaches on the psychology of Freud or Jung, look for binary oppositions in the style of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss or threefold classifications after Dumézil, unearth traces of the class struggle or the battle between the sexes, or pursue the quest for national or community identity. The most publicised are those who psychoanalyse Greek myths or the stories from Grimm and Charles Perrault (author of ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Bluebeard’), that so many Westerners know, but the most interesting are those who take the trouble to ask active storytellers why they themselves choose to tell particular stories in a particular way.
Earlier this century, in the fifty or so years between the ages of “meaning”, stories were studied in their own right, as enjoyable texts which had a history and travelled. A nineteenth-century suggestion that all European tales (and the Indo-European group of languages) originated in India was followed by the development of the very successful Finnish ‘historic-geographic method’ of study, which sought to establish tale-types and by comparing all available texts discover where they had originally come from and how they had spread and taken on different forms (‘redactions’ or ‘ecotypes’) in different countries. A great deal of hard work went into these studies, based mainly on the Aarne-Thompson type index, but by the 1960s they were being criticised for the superficial criteria used to define tales and motifs, for over-simple ideas about the ways tales were diffused, and above all for concentrating on published Märchen texts, which might, for example, have been thoroughly collected in Lithuania while those in Iran had hardly been touched. The critics turned to genre analysis, paying more attention to neglected types of narrative such as legend and folk epic, and to ‘structuralism’, following the first English translation of Vladimir Propp’s analysis of Russian wonder-tales.33 In fact Propp’s binary, cause-and-effect system of constuction proved difficult to apply to other sorts of stories, and his greatest achievement seems to me the definition of the ‘donor’ – the essential character in wonder-tales who helps the hero by giving him advice or a magical object, whether he gives it to the hero as a reward for his kindness in sharing his bannock with him or the hero takes it from him as a ransom and then kills him.
Another frequent reaction in the 1960s and 70s was to turn from text to context, studying the occasions when stories were told and the purposes their telling served. This involved a more anthropological, synchronic approach to living traditions of storytelling, rather than studying the history of ‘dead’ texts. Good collectors for the past century had found out all they could about the people from whom they recorded stories, and this practice now gained the praise it deserved. Apart from studying the narrators’ repertoires, how they used them and why they and their hearers liked them, researchers studied all elements of storytelling technique, not only words but gestures, asides to the audience, tones of voice for different characters, and every trick of the trade used in this very dramatic art-form that modern audio and video-recording could capture. Some reacted so far against the study of texts that they denied the validity of the concept of a tale-type, and insisted that any telling of any story must be studied as a unique happening in as much detail as possible. This extreme approach fortunately did not last long, but the interest in storytellers and their audiences has continued, and now includes not only the study of many sorts of live performance other than the telling of wonder-tales, but attempts to reconstruct the personalities of past storytellers and the methods of the collectors who took down and edited their tales.
It is now possible, therefore, to look at any rendering of any traditional tale from many points of view – structure, style, context, function, meaning and so on. It is also still valuable to compare obviously related tales either from these points of view or more traditionally to discover how they may be related historically and geographically. Applying the Finnish method to AT 922, the story with which we began, for instance, tells us that this story probably reached the Gaelic Highlands from France or Spain by the mediaeval wine-trade route, while the version told by Scots-speaking cairds came across the North Sea.34 The transmission of traditional tales from one person to another is after all what distinguishes them from novels or television plays. We have been particularly interested in two aspects of transmission: the way in which written and oral sources can combine to make an orally delivered story – there are plenty of examples of this below – and the process of remembering a story. The latter is certainly not usually a matter of memorising words, like learning a part in a play; it has generally been assumed to involve learning a framework which is fleshed out with words in each performance, perhaps drawing on a stock of verbal clichés for descriptions and dialogue. But this reflects a method some of us have learned at school: it is not necessarily the way a person will tell someone else the story of a film they have seen, or the way a storyteller who can hardly read remembers stories. Most people who hear or read a story form some sort of image of characters or scenes in their mind’s eye, and may complain that a film of a novel they have read is not at all like the way they see it. Scottish traditional storytellers have told us that they use such pictures to help them to recall and re-tell their stories, and that they would not be able to do this without them.35 This has, of course, significant implications for the study of structure, style, meaning, and so on.
SOURCES, EDITING AND NOTES
Most of the stories in this book have been transcribed from tape-recordings in the Sound Archive of the School of Scottish Studies (SA): in this case the Notes acknowledge the storyteller, the fieldworker who made the recording, the transcriber and (if the story was told in Gaelic) the translator, unless the last two functions were carried out by us. If so, most of the Gaelic stories were transcribed by Donald Archie MacDonald (DAM), though a few began as transcriptions by me (AJB), which were then revised by D. A. MacDonald; mostly the translation was started by the same person who made the transcription, but all translations in their final forms have involved the collaboration of both editors, and we have also revised those made by other people. All stories in Scots (including Shetlandic, and English) were either transcribed or revised, with consultation of the original tapes, by me. We have not included the Gaelic texts of any tale in this collection because we feel few of our readers would have any use for them, but a separate publication is a possibility, and many of them have already appeared beside the translations in the School’s journals Scottish Studies (SS) and Tocher (T). These references are also given in the Notes. Outside these journals, none of the stories in this book has been fully published before except for ten Scots ones which appeared in my collection The Green Man of Knowledge and Other Scots Traditional Tales (GMK), now out of print, and the Gaelic texts of two which appeared in Peter Morrison’s Ugam agus Bhuam (UAB), edited by D. A. MacDonald. However, a large part of this book consists of stories which were privately printed under the same title in 1974 by the School of Scottish Studies as a textbook for the then course in Oral Literature and Popular Tradition, the predecessor of Scottish Ethnology 1. This was out of print within ten years, by which time it had been turned down for full publication by several Scottish publishers, but in more enlightened times this revised and enlarged version has been accepted.
Unlike the earlier version, this book also includes some stories from manuscript and typescript collections deposited in the School, the oldest dating from 1891. In these cases the collector and storyteller are acknowledged with a note of the history of the collection: Scots texts are reproduced in the manuscript form, Gaelic ones have been translated by us. The tale-types to be used were selected, with a textbook for teaching traditional narrative in mind, by me, and I chose the Scots examples, but most of the Gaelic texts wer
e found by D. A. MacDonald. The Notes were written by me, and include a very brief biographical sketch or assessment of each storyteller if possible, supplied by the fieldworkers, D. A. MacDonald and myself. Living storytellers, and relatives of those now dead (sadly, the vast majority), if they could he traced have kindly given permission for their stories to be used. We are grateful to them and the fieldworkers for their contribution, and hope this book will be to the credit of all the storytellers; many fine ones, like Brucie Henderson and Jamesie Laurenson from Shetland, have had to be left out because few of their tales were recurrent types, but we hope this will be remedied in future collections.
The translations from Gaelic are intended to give the flavour rather than the literal meaning of the storytellers’ words, though they keep as closely as possible to the sentence structure of the original. Occasionally a ‘he says’ or the like, used by most oral storytellers as a sort of punctuation in the flow of dialogue and a constant reminder that one of the characters is speaking, may be omitted silently. However, in both transcriptions from Scots and translations from Gaelic ellipses (. . .) are regularly used, to indicate not just a pause but the omission of some words, either because they could not be understood, or more often because they are part of the hesitation and repetition that the ear accepts in speech but the eye may find disturbing in reading: the storytellers would not have wanted their ‘ers’ and ‘ums’ and mumblings printed, but we leave the ellipses to show that the narrative does come from an imperfect oral original. Where we have been uncertain of a word or phrase, or have had to supply one to make the meaning clear, it is in square brackets: The transcriptions from Scots likewise try to indicate the flavour, showing characteristic features of the accent and dialect with a spelling which suggests the standard English form of a word if there is one. So ‘maet’ transposes the vowels of ‘meat’, though ‘mait’ would indicate the sound more closely. ‘Hey’ sounds like ‘high’, rather than ‘hey’. In Orkney and Shetland dialect Ö and Ü are pronounced much as in German, and ä indicates something closer to short e than a standard British a. Vowel changes are the main dialect indicators, though different parts of Shetland use ‘quite’ for ‘white’ or ‘white’ for ‘quite’, and sometimes I hear an intermediate form which I ha.ve written as in old Scots ‘quhite’ . The spellings of the Scots Style Sheet, which dispense with apostrophes in common forms (o’, wi’, a’, an’, -in’ etc.) are often followed, but apostrophes at the beginning of words (as in ‘ ’at’ for ‘that’) are kept for clarity, and we write ‘oot’ for ‘out’ when we hear that, because in such words both the Scots and the English forms are used side by side by many Scottish speakers. We expect readers to understand the fairly standard, elementary Scots forms which most storytellers use, and sometimes build on top of them (‘aafae’ = ‘awfy’ = ‘awfully’). Remember that in Scots it is correct to use such forms as a singular verb with a plural subject (‘his dogs is forgotten’), while in Orkney and Shetland ‘is’ rather than ‘has’ forms the perfect tense (‘they were all hed to clear oot’). All Scots dialects also use ‘they were’ to mean ‘there was’ and ‘they are’ or ‘there’ for ‘there is’. ‘-ed’ often becomes ‘-it’ and may be swallowed by a preceding t in words like ‘start’, meaning ‘started’. David Murison’s The Guid Scots Tongue (Edinburgh, 1977) is a good introduction to the regular features of the language many of which (such as thu are for ‘thou art’) might seem like mistakes to most Scots today. More unusual words and phrases are explained in the notes, along with, for instance, Gaelic names when the meaning is of importance to the story.
Scottish Traditional Tales Page 4