Re: The Gaelic Book - The Printed Book in Scottish Gaelic.

Please note that Michilín is a Canadian who pretends to know and be
Scottish.

--
D@ve Dundee

"Michilín" <micheil@xxxxxxx> wrote in message news:43376949.15327750@xxxxxxx
> My reasons for posting this are essentially the reality that, Lowland
> Scottish posters protests to the contrary, the Gaelic language,
> literature and history are elements of an alien culture to almost all
> Lowlanders. The proof is this is easily demonstrated - let any
> Lowlander from memory, write a sentence from Gaelic literature and I
> will withdraw the remark.
>
> However, it is not my intention to stir up controversy. Instead I
> would call attention to the deep Gaelic roots of many southern Scots,
> whose families moved south to find a better life or employment on a
> full or part time basis. While this was rare in my lifetime, it was
> commonplace among our Gaelic cousins, the Irish, and most of those who
> came to work for my family still spoke Irish Gaelic among themselves.
>
> I believe that Lowland Scots have never really been introduced to the
> huge part that the Gaelic language has played in the building of
> modern Scotland; mostly because Gaels tend to live on their own
> enclaves - northwestern Scotland; the Hebrides; and cease using Gaelic
> as their first language, except among compatriots, when settled in our
> major cities.
>
> This is a matter of sadness, because one of the more popular beliefs
> among Lowlanders concerning Gaels that I noticed during my time in
> Edinburgh, was a belief that they are an ignorant people compared to
> the Lowland Scot. The reality in fact is quite the opposite and few
> peoples have demonstrated such a desperate thirst for knowledge as
> have the Gaels; a situation brought about by the deliberate attempts,
> Scottish and English, to exterminate anything to do with the Gaelic
> language and of course finally, through the Clearances, even the
> Gaelic people themselves.
>
> The failure to convert Gaels into a Broons' loving community; a paler
> imitation of their southern neighbours, has thankfully never happened
> and, God willing, never will, for Gaelic culture is every bit as
> volatile and worthwhile as any, and deserves to remain the living
> vibrant culture that it is.
>
> The following underlines how huge the Gaelic contribution was and
> should be an eye opener for those who think of Gaels as primitive
> peasants making a nuisance of themselves in the north.
>
> For those who revel in rubbishing Gaelic culture or citing uncheckable
> reasons why this or that is total nonsense, please try to desist from
> showing off how wonderful you are just this once. as I get more and
> more depressed every time that form of racist ignorance surfaces in
> the group. Comments by people like Allan Connochie and Glenallan are
> welcomed, as they and certain others are blessed with intellectual
> honesty and it warms my heart to see it is still alive in Scotland.
>
> Herewith, reprinted without permission, but highly available in its
> original format at: http://www.ilab-lila.com/english/gaelicbook.htm
>
> The Gaelic Book - The Printed Book in Scottish Gaelic.
> By Hugh Cheape,
> Curator of Scottish Culture,
> National Museums of Scotland
>
> For many Gaels past and present, the `Gaelic Book' would mean one
> thing - the Bible - and indeed in the sorry situation in which
> literacy in Gaelic has been rare, a Gaelic Bible would have been the
> only printed book in Scottish Gaelic in Gaelic-speaking households,
> whether in the Highlands and Islands or in the towns and cities such
> as Glasgow. But today publishing and broadcasting in Gaelic are
> enjoying the fruits of a new interest and enthusiasm, and there is a
> feeling in Scotland that the language is experiencing a renaissance or
> ath-bheòthachadh. This comes after decades of perceived decline and
> neglect when the language, insofar as the outside world took an
> interest in it, was regarded as occupying an insular and parochial
> fringe, without relevance to the `modern world', and clearly declining
> to cultural suicide or extinction. At best, it was enjoyed (or
> tolerated) while it added a musical element to people's expectations
> of the romantic atmosphere of misty islands while sometimes being
> regarded with suspicion by an obstinately and traditionally
> monolingual English-speaking peoples.
>
> The language has not been universally neglected however and has
> maintained a status in the literary and bibliographical context by
> continuing to be published. This has been a process which has not been
> evenly sustained but has responded to internal and external influences
> and threats. There was a notable revival of writing in Scottish Gaelic
> in the 1930s and 1950s for example, inspired perhaps by the
> contemporary literary renaissance in Scots led by Hugh MacDiarmid. He
> and his circle looked to recreating a distinctively Scottish culture
> in the wake of a steady attrition and acculturation since 1707, and
> MacDiarmid, in step with the political nationalism of the day, wrote
> in an acerbic and iconoclastic tone. Gaelic writers, most notably
> Sorley MacLean (1911-1996) and George Campbell Hay (1915-1984), were
> writing for a different audience and in a different tone. They and
> other poets such as Derick Thomson, Iain Crichton Smith and Donald
> MacAulay have maintained an output of their verse and collected
> editions, beginning with MacLean's iconic Dàin do Eimhir in 1943 and
> continuing significantly to the just-published scholarly edition of
> the work of Campbell Hay. The torch is being carried forward by a
> younger generation of poets such as Aonghas MacNeacail, Catriona
> Montgomery, Myles Campbell, Angus Peter Campbell, Meg Bateman and Rody
> Gorman, all of whom have been extensively published. The recent
> generations have experimented with new metrical structures in line
> with developments in English and European poetry but remained thirled
> to an elegiac tone. They write of homeland, the disintegration of
> community and dispossession and examine fundamental and introspective
> questions of personal and cultural identity. In its weakened state,
> theirs has been a heavy burden of inheritance given its longevity and
> antiquity.
>
> Scottish Gaelic originates, as far as we can tell, from migrations
> across the Irish Sea from about the third century AD. Following this
> Classical writers seem to make a distinction between Picti and Hiberni
> as enemies of the Britons of south Scotland, and reference is made
> about AD 360-365 to Scotti et Picti as allies against the Romans in
> the area of the Roman frontier of Hadrian's Wall. From a historical
> and perceivable linguistic point of view, the most significant
> migrations from Ireland to Scotland took place in the late fifth
> century, establishing apparently a kingdom in Argyll and the southern
> Hebrides. From here, these peoples and their Gaelic language spread
> east and south to achieve the language's greatest extent in Scotland
> probably in the eleventh century and certainly to establish it as a
> lingua franca of all of Scotland north of the Forth-Clyde line
> excepting those areas of the north mainland and northern isles still
> under Norse rule.
>
> Points to note in this period of spread and expansion of the Gaelic
> language, even colonialism and imperialism, are the involvement of the
> church in a process of colonisation, particularly associated with the
> monastic settlement of Iona by Columba in AD 563, and the vigorous
> phase of missionary activity by the saint and his fellow churchmen
> between the late sixth and late eighth centuries, a period often
> referred to significantly as the `Age of the Saints'. Columba, of
> royal lineage himself, supported the ruling families of the Gaelic
> Scots and legitimised their eventual assumption of the kingship of the
> Picts in the ninth century. In this period we have plentiful evidence
> of the written language, mainly in the manuscript texts surviving in
> Ireland, although, for example the Book of Kells is now accepted as
> having been at least begun in the monastic scriptorium in Iona.
>
> The Norse invasions of the ninth century created a territory known to
> contemporaries as Innse Gall, the `Islands of the Foreigners', and the
> increasingly vigorous Gaelic reaction to this effectively created a
> separate kingdom in the West Highlands and Hebrides. The earlier
> expansion to the status quo of all Scotland being Gaelic-speaking
> matches the apparent disappearance of Pictish as a separate language.
> From this point the Gaelic language thrived both culturally and
> politically, certainly until the eighteenth century, since when it has
> declined dramatically. Though often characterised retrospectively as
> an embattled language and culture, more or less on the retreat, this
> was not so and an indication of its strength and vigour lies in the
> steady and growing opposition to it from the south and east of
> Scotland, from Lowland Scotland, and from the kings of Scots until the
> Union of the Crowns in 1603 and then from the kings and queens of the
> United Kingdom.
>
> The opposition to Gaelic has been described as falling into successive
> phases of persecution, beginning, after the opposition to and
> forfeiture of the Lordship of the Isles in the medieval period, with
> the Reformation in 1560 and a long period of sectarian attack,
> particularly evident in the Statutes of Iona of 1609. The Scottish
> Parliament's Education Acts of 1616, 1646 and 1696 followed, by which
> English was explicitly to be the medium of instruction for
> Highlanders, interpreted as a policy to make the Highlands
> English-speaking and Protestant, and finally the founding of the SSPCK
> in 1709 with its declared intention of eradicating the Gaelic
> language. Its evident enthusiasm for this task of what has been
> described by recent Scottish historians as `cultural genocide' was
> warmed and sharpened politically by the exploitation by the Jacobite
> Movement of the Gaels and their support for the exiled Stewarts,
> culminating in the defeat of Prince Charles Edward Stewart's army on
> Culloden Moor outside Inverness on 16 April 1746. This sectarian phase
> which encouraged the outlawing, if not always explicitly of the
> language, then certainly of the culture was followed by a more liberal
> attitude in the late eighteenth century; this can be seen as initially
> a `utilitarian' phase, from about 1760 until 1872 when Gaelic
> benefited from the benign neglect of the European Enlightenment,
> succeeded by a phase of bureaucratic opposition from 1872 and the
> Scottish Education Act in which `education' and by implication
> advancement was synonymous with the English language.
>
> Census records have mapped the decline of the numbers of people
> speaking Gaelic, the decline being especially marked since the 1914-18
> War. In the mid-nineteenth century, about one quarter of the
> population still spoke Gaelic and this has fallen to about 1.2% today,
> in other words representing perhaps at its most optimistic about
> 70,000 speakers. Adopting Samuel Johnson's maxim of `languages are the
> pedigree of nations', we should take serious notice of this decline to
> avoid the cultural debacle of extinction. Gaelic is historically one
> of the main languages of Scotland and certainly contributes powerfully
> to a cultural distinctiveness, and arguably from the point of view of
> linguistic scholarship, it is the most important. This was recognised
> as early as the mid-nineteenth century with the emergence of the
> European science of philology, because it was, and is, one of the
> earliest surviving written vernacular language of Europe, with easily
> identifiable texts from the seventh or even sixth centuries.
>
> The essential works of reference for the Gaelic book are Rev Donald
> MacLean's Typographia Scoto-Gadelica of 1915 and the National Library
> of Scotland's Scottish Gaelic Union Catalogue of 1984. The foundations
> of listing and cataloguing had in fact begun earlier with a book which
> tends to be dismissed as hopelessly outdated but which gives a useful
> account of Gaelic and its literature. This was John Reid's Bibliotheca
> Scoto-Celtica published in Glasgow in 1832. Printed works are
> discussed diagnostically by theme with, predictably, bibles and
> liturgical items opening the listings. There is however interesting
> and important contemporary insight into the state of the language and
> of opinions about it and its literature from a range of different
> authorities. For example Reid offers the information that, in the
> opinion of all, the `best' or purest Gaelic was spoken in the western
> mainland of Argyllshire and Inverness-shire, and more specifically in
> the districts of Ardnamurchan, Moidart, Arisaig and Morar, sadly today
> areas where Gaelic is the daily speech of only a few and its survival
> may be in question. John Reid proffered the opinion that the Gaelic of
> the southern fringes of the Gàidhealtachd in Bute and Arran were by
> then most tainted by the Saxon tongue and Lowland Scots.
>
> A proper inventory of printed books had to wait until MacLean's
> Typographia Scoto-Gadelica or Books printed in the Gaelic of Scotland
> from the Year 1567 to the Year 1914 which then created the major
> bibliographical listing of works in Scottish Gaelic. Rev Donald
> introduced his mission with the following words:
>
> `I have searched the leading libraries of Great Britain and have been
> in communication with Colonial and Continental Libraries and
> Booksellers. I have approached private collectors as far as I could go
> and I have for many years scanned and noted the pages of booksellers'
> and auctioneers' catalogues.'
>
> Major private libraries included those of the Marquesses of Bute in
> Mount Stuart and the Dukes of Argyll at Inveraray and these yielded
> key texts. For example the beginning of all accounts of the printed
> book in Scottish Gaelic is Bishop John Carswell's `Book of Common
> Order', often referred to as `Knox's Liturgy', which was the service
> book prepared by the reformers of the church in Scotland under the
> leadership of John Knox following the Reformation in 1560. The first
> edition appeared in 1562 and the liturgy continued to be issued in
> successively updated editions until the Westminster Assembly in 1643.
> Knox's Liturgy was then translated into Gaelic by John Carswell as
> `Superintendent of Argyll' in 1567. MacLean's judgement was: `The
> first book printed in Gaelic of which there are only three imperfect
> copies known' and he goes on to describe the examples inspected in the
> library of the Dukes of Argyll, in Edinburgh University Library and in
> the British Museum. Neither scholarship nor antiquarian booksellers
> have succeeded in adding any further example to this frail remnant and
> it has been edited and printed twice since, the first scholarly
> edition being a reprint by Rev Dr Thomas MacLauchlan in 1873 and most
> recently the definitive treatment by R L Thomson of the University of
> Leeds for the Scottish Gaelic Texts Society in 1970.
>
> With the relative flood of Gaelic books being printed in the twentieth
> century, and especially since the 1914-18 War, a new listing of works
> in Scottish Gaelic began in the 1960s. A committee based on the
> Edinburgh Central Library, the National Library of Scotland and
> Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities began to record titles of Gaelic
> books published since 1915 held in libraries throughout the United
> Kingdom, mostly being in the major collections of Gaelic books in the
> National Library, Edinburgh University Library and the Mitchell
> Library in Glasgow. The product of this work was the Scottish Gaelic
> Union Catalogue. A List of Books Printed in Scottish Gaelic from 1567
> to 1973, published by the National Library of Scotland in 1984. The
> details include locations and this essential bibliographical tool
> offers a finding list for books in Scottish Gaelic amounting to 3,038
> titles with distinguishing features such as the 265 editions of the
> Bible, from items 79 -344.
>
> Gaelic has not necessarily been a language associated in people's
> minds with a literature, written or published, and even not a literary
> culture. That the Highlands were `bookless' was for long almost
> axiomatic. Those who have been thoughtful and discerning enough to
> realise that there was a literature in Gaelic would have seen at least
> that a liturgical and devotional literature predominated among works
> in print and that, if the Highlands were indeed `bookless', it might
> in part be explained by the destruction of manuscripts and books in
> the course of long-term clan, territorial and national warfare on the
> one hand and the persecution of Gaelic and the neglect and ignorance
> of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on the other. Dr Johnson's
> throwaway comment that the Highlands and Highland society had little
> or nothing to offer in print or manuscript of its own literary work
> seemed to satisfy most though it is painfully clear that he had no
> knowledge of existing manuscript material surviving in his day, or of
> the great manuscript collections such as the `Book of the Dean of
> Lismore', the Books of Clanranald or the Fernaig Manuscript (all texts
> now available in nineteenth and twentieth century editions), although
> by the eighteenth century their existence was more or less unknown to
> all except those who had them in their possession.
>
> Variance of opinion, hostility or neglect were sharpened with the
> appearance of Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands
> of Scotland in 1760, revealing perversely to the outside world that
> there was an extremely rich literary vein in the Highlands. The poetry
> of a prehistoric bard, Ossian, was seen as a classical epic of the
> stature of the Greek and Roman poets and compared to the Iliad and the
> Odyssey of Homer. Indeed, as some critic quipped, they had discovered
> a `Homer in the Highlands'. Entering only briefly into the topic of
> Ossian though significantly it has been translated into many
> languages, it may be too easy to characterise and denounce it as
> literary fraud without considering the Zeitgeist of eighteenth-century
> literary Europe or the acerbity, if not personal savagery of Dr
> Johnson's denunciation of James Macpherson, its `author'. For our
> purposes it is sufficient to indicate that there was a substantial
> body of mainly ballad literature surviving through oral transmission
> and itself very well known throughout the Highlands and Islands, and
> that the contemporary surprise and enthusiasm, and even the ensuing
> literary controversy on the authenticity of Ossian led to research and
> collection which accumulated the Advocates' Library Gaelic
> Manuscripts, the Edinburgh University Manuscripts, the Highland
> Society Collection and one or two important individual collections
> such as J F Campbell of Islay and J L Campbell of Canna.
>
> The output of printed works in Scottish Gaelic might be said to be
> meagre until the second half of the eighteenth century. The preamble
> to the Book of Common Order provides an insight into Gaelic culture
> where, in an expansive dedicatory epistle for example, the text is
> addressed to `learned men skilled in poetry and history and some good
> scholars'. Carswell, as `Superintendent' in the Reformed Church for
> Argyll and the Isles, then claimed that the printing of Gaelic books
> would be for the purposes of religious edification and not for `the
> framing of vain, hurtful, lying earthly stories about the Tuatha De
> Danaan and about the sons of Milesius and about the heroes and Finn
> MacCoul with his giants'. Calvin's Catechism, Catechismus Ecclesiae
> Genevensis, was translated about 1630 and has survived in a single
> copy from which a scholarly edition, Adtimchiol an Chreidimh, was
> published by the Scottish Gaelic Texts Society in 1968. Three Gaelic
> versions of the metrical psalms were prepared in the seventeenth
> century, the first fifty psalms in metre translated and published for
> the Synod of Argyll in 1659 and a full edition of 150 psalms published
> in 1694. Scholarly analysis of these texts has focussed on the evident
> stages of evolution of Scottish Gaelic as a distinct language,
> distinct, that is, from a standardised form of Irish often referred to
> as Classical Gaelic. Changes occurring in the spoken languages of
> Irish and Scottish Gaelic respectively began to be reflected in
> printed material. Carswell's liturgy follows a classical norm though
> he pleads that his ability in the language is far from adequate, and
> the first significant divergence appears in the Shorter Catechism of
> 1651 which is written in more nearly a spoken form of Scottish Gaelic.
>
> The first Gaelic Bible was an Irish production of the seventeenth
> century, the New Testament printed in 1603 and the Old Testament in
> 1686. Although these were known in the Highlands, they were considered
> to be of little use because Scottish Gaels were unfamiliar with the
> Irish script and a `Hiberno-Latin' printers' font and because of
> divergence in the language between Scotland and Ireland by that date.
> This was perhaps more critical than might be assumed since scholarship
> is now showing that distinctions between Scottish Gaelic and Irish,
> between what might be termed `Northern' and `Southern' Gaelic, were
> more pronounced by as early as the twelfth century than had previously
> been thought. A remedy was offered in an edition of 3,000 copies
> printed in London in 1690 of a transcription of the Bedell-O'Donell
> Bible into Roman characters. This was the work of Rev Robert Kirk, the
> Episcopalian minister of Aberfoyle, described on his tombstone as
> Linguae Hiberniae Lumen and better known to posterity as the author of
> `The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies' of c.1691. Such
> was his familiarity with the wee folk, it was said in the district,
> rhat he was carried off by them the following year and the headstone
> stands over an empty tomb.
>
> In the eighteenth century, Scottish Gaelic can be said to have come
> into being as a written language insofar as in the Bible it achieved a
> literary form and standard in its own right. At the request and
> expense of the SSPCK, the work of translation and publication began
> with the New Testament in 1767, translated from the Greek by Rev James
> Stuart of Killin with the help of Dugald Buchanan of Rannoch. This may
> not have been much used because few could read Gaelic and the older
> practice was apparently more acceptable of a minister's extemporary
> and colloquial translation from English, and indeed the Gaelic New
> Testament had met with opposition as an uncalled for innovation. In
> 1773, the minister in the island of Coll told Dr Johnson that `he did
> not use the Irish [i.e. Gaelic] translation of the New Testament which
> had been lately published because he could make the text more
> intelligible to his auditors by an ex tempore version.' The Old
> Testament appeared in four separate parts between 1783 and 1801, the
> work of Rev Dr John Stuart of Luss, son of Rev James Stuart, and Rev
> Dr John Smith of Campbeltown. In 1826, the Bible was republished,
> revised and entire, and became a standard classic of written Gaelic
> and syntax, orthography and morphology.
>
> In terms of numbers rather than importance perhaps for the language,
> religious works still held the stage in the eighteenth century and the
> Gaelic book was largely the work of the church. There was considerable
> demand for them, particularly in the later-eighteenth century as
> evangelical theology gained a firm hold throughout the Highlands and
> Islands. Under the influence of the General Assembly, of the
> missionary agencies, and also of Scotland's Secession churches, Gaelic
> translations were made of seventeenth-century English Puritan divines,
> such as most familiarly John Bunyan's `Pilgrim's Progress', and these
> went through many editions. In many households Gaelic versions of
> `Pilgrim's Progress' enjoyed a status second only to the Bible.
> Another well known and multi-published evangelical work was Richard
> Baxter's `Call to the Unconverted' which developed the theme of the
> `call' or warning to the unrepentant sinner on the dangers of lost
> eternity, exhorting them to allow the conversion of their soul.
>
> The mid-eighteenth century saw the publication of the first book of
> original Gaelic verse and, in terms of the language, essentially the
> first published vernacular and the genesis of a written tradition in
> Scottish Gaelic. Published in Edinburgh in 1751, and reputedly burnt
> as seditious by the public hangman at the City Cross, Alexander
> MacDonald's Ais-eiridh na Sean Chánoin Albannaich, no An Nuadh
> Oranaiche Gaidhealach, or `The Resurrection of the Ancient Scottish
> Language, or New Gaelic Songster' might well have encouraged another
> Jacobite rising with its powerful propagandist tone. MacDonald
> (c.1698-1770), known to tradition as Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair,
> dominates the stage of Gaelic literature; a learned, inventive and
> complex author, his work seems to have defied proper editing, due
> particularly to the powerful scatalogical element which led in
> successive editions of his poems through to 1924 to major omissions
> amounting to a form of censure. The same author published one of the
> first vocabularies, Leabhar a Theagasc Ainminnin, printed in Edinburgh
> in 1741 to the order of the SSPCK.
>
> Duncan Bàn Macintyre's collection of 1768 is the next major work of
> original Gaelic verse, written down for publication from his
> recitation by Rev John Stuart of Luss. The poet is said to have also
> dictated all his work, amounting to about 6,000 lines, to the Rev
> Donald MacNicol, the minister of Lismore, demonstrating the ready
> ability of the practised poet or bard who was illiterate in his own
> language to memorise and the primary importance of the oral tradition
> for the transmission of Gaelic beyond the printed page. Duncan Bàn's
> collection went through successive editions, such was his reputation
> and popularity in the Gaelic world. An anthology of 1776 by Alexander
> MacDonald's son, Ronald, and based largely on collections of verse
> made by his father has come to be known as the `Eigg Collection' from
> his being tenant of the farm of Laig in the Island of Eigg. The
> contents of the Eigg Collection set the tone for a flow of similar
> publications at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the
> nineteenth centuries, the volumes by John Gillies of Perth, Alexander
> and Donald Stewart and Patrick Turner being the most notable and
> popular at the time. The tone was encomiastic and rhetorical which
> reflected the work of the professional poets of earlier generations
> but gives only a partial view of Gaelic literature. The function of
> the bard was to `praise famous men' and poems and songs were written
> down for their subject-matter rather than necessarily on their merits.
> Later anthologies continued to draw on the earlier collections and
> therefore still gave a limited account of the different aspects of the
> oral tradition. These included publications which went through many
> editions and became for a time the most familiar representatives of
> the printed book in Scottish Gaelic, works such as John Mackenzie's
> Beauties of Gaelic Poetry (or Sàr Obair nam Bard Gàidhealach) of 1841
> and William J Watson's Bàrdachd Ghàidhlig of 1918 which was for the
> twentieth century the principal textbook for the teaching of Gaelic
> literature.
>
> The Eigg Collection is also significant as being the first produced in
> response to the intense national and international interest aroused by
> the publication of the works of Ossian in the 1760s, and with the
> cachet `Volume I' on the title page, a projected (but never published)
> second volume was to contain `poems of much older date than these of
> the first' which might well have included genuine Ossianic ballads. It
> is notable that these three collections all include variations of the
> word Oran or `Song' in their title, emphasising on the one hand the
> essential link between poetry and song - that more or less all poetry
> was made to be sung - and on the other the defining context of an oral
> tradition for Gaelic literature. The richness of this oral tradition,
> evident in the earlier surviving manuscript sources such as the `Book
> of the Dean of Lismore' and the Fernaig Manuscript, gives Scottish
> Gaelic a special value and its strength is richly demonstrated by the
> quantity of pre-eighteenth century poetry and folktale narrative
> surviving in the oral tradition to be recorded in the publications of
> more recent generations, a process that has continued to our own time
> with the work of individual and institutional collectors.
>
> A sense of crisis facing a demonstrably ancient culture and
> literature, and periodic challenges to its significance and
> originality, led to the publication in the second half of the
> nineteenth century of song collections which began to break the bardic
> mould of eulogy and elegy. An Duanaire published in Edinburgh in 1868
> was a collection of hitherto unpublished material mainly from the
> single locality of Lochaber. An t-Oranaiche (`The Gaelic Songster')
> edited by Archibald Sinclair and printed in Glasgow in 1879 was the
> first collection of popular songs, and Rev Thomas Sinton's Poetry of
> Badenoch of 1906 illustrates significantly the character and context
> and extent of traditional and ephemeral verse composition in a Gaelic
> community. Perhaps the most extraordinary component of neglected
> material in the Gaelic tradition was the class of songs associated
> with work, that is the chorus songs, `waulking' songs or òrain luaidh.
> These are songs of a distinctive metrical type with refrains of
> vocables followed by single lines or couplets; their authorship is
> seldom known and their history has been much debated by academics. An
> important selection of chorus songs , mainly from Barra and Uist, was
> published by Rev Angus and Rev Archibald MacDonald in their MacDonald
> Collection of Gaelic Poetry of 1911, further selections by Miss
> Frances Tolmie and K C Craig, and the most recent monument to this
> genre is the collection of Hebridean Folksongs in three volumes edited
> by John Lorne Campbell and Francis Collinson (Oxford University Press
> 1969, 1977 and 1981).
>
> If song gives deeper insights into the Gaelic tradition, works in
> prose tend to dominate the publisher's output by the nineteenth
> century. Antiquarian and literary interests inspired by Ossian
> prompted the production of grammars and dictionaries, the first
> grammars being William Shaw's An Analysis of the Gaelic Language
> (1773) and Alexander Stewart's Elements of Gaelic Grammar (1801).
> Apart from Alexander MacDonald's vocabulary, the first dictionaries
> were Robert Armstrong's in 1825 and the more massive Highland Society
> Dictionary of 1828, and a number of dictionaries appeared in the
> nineteenth century before the (to date) standard lexicon was assembled
> by the Englishman, Edward Dwelly, who first printed his Illustrated
> Gaelic to English Dictionary in 33 parts in his garden shed in Herne
> Bay between 1902 and 1911.
>
> The enlightenment of Gaels by the SSPCK included the tactic of
> teaching Gaelic reading in their schools since the strategy of the
> language's eradication stalled on an inability in the first instance
> to communicate. But apart from the Bible and texts of religious
> teachings and catechisms, there was little to read and few prose works
> until the mid-nineteenth century. Original Gaelic prose writing and
> publishing began most substantially with An Teachdaire Gaelach (`The
> Highland Messenger') published as a periodical between 1829 and 1831,
> Cuairtear nan Gleann (`The Traveller of the Glens'), between 1840 and
> 1843, and An Fhianuis (`The Witness') between 1845 and 1850. These
> were the work of or inspired by Rev Dr Norman MacLeod (1785-1852),
> who, writing in a biblical style of lexis and syntax, pursued
> ideological ends of providing more evangelical reading matter and
> self-improving prose for an audience literate in their own language.
> The range of prose writing expanded in the second half of the century
> to include national and international current affairs, politics,
> history and literature and, with cheaper paper and printing, provided
> outlets particularly for the literary talents and ambitions of
> emigrant and city Gaels. Though there was much to discuss such as
> clearance, dispossession, disenfranchisement and enforced migration,
> the general tone of Gaelic prose is anodyne apart from an occasional
> `shot' in An Gaidheal (1871-1877) and the bi-lingual Celtic Magazine
> and Celtic Monthly. Periodical production continued into the twentieth
> century with such titles as Am Bàrd, Guth na Bliadhna, An Deò Gréine,
> An Sgeulaiche, and An Rosarnach, all of which await more scholarly
> evaluation. Undoubtedly the triumph of Gaelic periodical publishing in
> its longevity and the opportunities it offers for original writing is
> the Glasgow based Gairm, founded by Derick Thomson and Finlay J
> MacDonald in 1952. They have greatly extended the range of
> subject-matter as well as linguistic register and, in taking over the
> business of other publishers such as Alexander MacLaren and Sons of
> Glasgow, now offer a wide range of titles of reprint and original work
> in Scottish Gaelic.
>
> The other important class of Gaelic prose is the traditional tale, the
> recording of which began in earnest in 1859 with the energetic and
> single-minded efforts of John Francis Campbell of Islay (1822-1885),
> working with helpers such as Hector MacLean, Hector Urquhart and John
> Dewar. The fruits of their labour were published in Popular Tales of
> the West Highlands (4 volumes, 1860-1862) which Campbell engagingly
> described in the Introduction as the `new science of "storyology" ....
> a museum of curious rubbish about to perish'. Further volumes were
> published from the Campbell Papers in the National Library of Scotland
> in 1940 and 1960. The subject-matter can be summarised as Scottish
> Gaelic versions of the international folktale, oral versions of
> medieval romances, and heroic tales deriving from the great Gaelic
> story-cycles of the `Ulster Cycle' (with Cu Chulainn as its central
> figure) and the later Fenian Cycle. The diffusion and transmission of
> these, especially international tales such as the `Tale of the
> Grateful Dead' found in localised form in South Uist, was likened by
> him to the mysterious passage over time and space of tropical drift
> seeds which, carried by the Gulf Stream, were enigmatic arrivals on
> the West Coast and often customarily kept as charms. Campbell
> introduces the metaphor with:
>
> `On the stormy coasts of the Hebrides, amongst seaweed and shells,
> fishermen and kelp-burners often find certain hard, light, floating
> objects, somewhat like flat chestnuts, of various colours - grey,
> black and brown, which they call sea-nuts, strand-nuts and
> fairy-eggs.'
>
> Campbell of Islay inspired others such as Alexander Carmichael
> (1832-1912) whose own extraordinary collection, Carmina Gadelica,
> began to be published in 1900 and the editing of his papers was
> continued posthumously to fill six volumes between 1928 and 1971. This
> was traditional verse rather than prose narrative, but verse that
> moved, chiming strongly with the mores of the late-nineteenth century,
> into a spiritual dimension with prayers, charms, blessings and hymns.
> Translation into English is provided for every page and every word,
> making the material accessible to a wide readership and bringing
> Scottish Gaelic literature to the world. Carmina Gadelica, with
> perceivable flaws of heightened tone in translation and reconstructed
> text, has inspired the English-speaking world but has sharpened issues
> such as the viability and survival of Gaelic. For all its inherent
> charm, an artificiality pervades the texts and creates discriminating
> preconceptions of intelligibility and identity; the Gaelic-speaking
> world today may not always wish to be the perpetrators and
> transmitters of Carmina Gadelica and is examining its soul in the
> exposed and threatening state of bilingualism and parallel texts. But
> from a recent flood of publications such as an 825-page anthology of
> twentieth century Gaelic verse (under the title of An Tuil, `The
> Flood' or `The Deluge'), the Gaelic book appears to be in a strong
> state.
>
>
>
> Further reading
>
> Black, Ronald ed., An Tuil. Anthology of Twentieth Century Scottish
> Gaelic Verse, Edinburgh: Polygon 1999
>
> Byrne, Michel ed., Collected Poems and Songs of George Campbell Hay,
> Edinburgh University Press 2000, 2 volumes
>
> MacKinnon, Rev Donald, The Gaelic Bible and Psalter, Dingwall 1930
>
> MacLean, Rev Donald, The Literature of the Scottish Gael, Edinburgh
> 1912
>
> Thomson, Derick, An Introduction to Gaelic Poetry, London: Gollancz
> 1974
>
> Thomson, Derick ed., The Companion to Gaelic Scotland, Oxford:
> Blackwell 1983
>
>
>
> Murchadh


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