The Gaelic Book - The Printed Book in Scottish Gaelic.

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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