THE GREATEST ERA OF THE GAELS? REASSESSING GAELIC CULTURAL ACHIEVEMENT IN
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Donald E. Meek
It is, I believe, safe to
say that we all carry around in our minds short-hand definitions of individual
periods in history. The principle that
we employ is to identify the salient event or process in a particular period,
and then to define the period in these terms.
I think of such labels as ‘The Age of Improvement’ or ‘The Age of
Enlightenment’, or ‘The Dark Ages’. The first two labels imply that before such
and such a period, there was little or no ‘improvement’ or ‘enlightenment’
worthy of the name. Of course, the terms
‘improvement’ and ‘enlightenment’ are used in a fairly technical way, but their
overall effect, when employed in short-hand, thumb-nail encapsulations of that
sort, is to ‘spin’ history in certain directions, to load the dice, to close
the debate. The last-mentioned label
covers several centuries, and implies that we can know very little about the
centuries concerned, because of the loss of evidence. The adjective ‘dark’ also
has connotations of non-enlightenment, or non-improvement, as if ignorance and
barbarity ruled OK throughout the length and breadth of the land. In fact, the evidence is not entirely lost,
nor is the period entirely dark – far from it, if we are to judge only by the
great legacies of art and sculpture from Britain and Ireland in the early
Middle Ages.
Even if we do not go as far as to provide short-hand titles
for particular centuries, we can all too easily define our centuries by using
what we consider to be their main distinguishing event or process of
events. If I were to mention the
sixteenth century, for example, many of us would think automatically of the Reformation;
the seventeenth century would immediately invoke the Civil Wars; and the
eighteenth century would likewise conjure up the Jacobite Rebellions. All of these events or processes undoubtedly
were significant, but they were assuredly not the whole story of these periods.
These happenings made an impact on Scotland and, specifically, the Scottish
Highlands and Islands. If we were to
move into the nineteenth century, the evidence might become a little more
arguable, but it would nevertheless remain hostage to short-hand
characterisation. For some, the century
might be the ‘Age of Industry’, with the so-called ‘Industrial Revolution’
(another misnomer, perhaps?) driving it along; for others, it might be the ‘Age
of Education’; for still others, it might be the ‘The Age of Dispersal’; and,
for those looking at the harsher processes of social change that swept
different parts of Britain in the context of industry, education and
reconstruction, it might become simply the ‘Age of the Clearances’. This last dimension of the nineteenth
century – the dislocation of the people by adverse forces – would certainly fit the popular perception of
the period as it unfolded in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Few stop to consider what the word
‘clearance’ actually meant or means; and, as a result, other processes, other
factors in motivating and in moving the people, including self-determination,
are swept away, obscured, or relegated to the margins of active
consideration. Indeed, it can be said
that, in characterising the nineteenth century in the Highlands and Islands as,
broadly, the period of the so-called ‘Highland Clearances’, that is exactly
what happens. Thought and reflection
are, at worst, disengaged in favour of the popular shibboleth, the short-cut,
identikit image of a dispirited and dejected people.
‘Going with the flow’ in this way can affect professional
and analytical approaches too in all sorts of subtle ways. Looking across the years, I can see that my
own output of essays and edited collections of Gaelic verse has been shaped
sub-consciously, if not wilfully, to some considerable extent by the ‘clearance
and revival paradigm’ of Highland history.
So let me hang first, if we are to have a hanging! More recently, however, I have tried to make
amends, and I have made a very determined effort – which I will endeavour to
supplement in this lecture – to ensure that a balanced perception of the
nineteenth century is made available. If
I move away from my own work, I find it fascinating that most of the historical
studies of the nineteenth century Highlands have also focused on the
‘Clearances’ and their consequences. I
think of the massive and important work of my good friend, Professor Eric
Richards, for example, as representing the high-water mark of fine writing on
the theme of clearing and social dislocation in the Highlands and Islands. The theme is explored further, but with a
brighter and more resilient approach, in the context of the Land Agitation
which began to affect certain parts of the Highlands and Islands from the
1870s, and led to the passing of the Crofters’ Holdings (Scotland) Act of
1886. Historians such as Professor James
Hunter, Professor Tom Devine, Dr Ewen Cameron and the Rev. Dr Alan MacColl have
contributed greatly to our understanding of the Land Agitation, with some
significant degrees of revision and reinterpretation beyond the original Hunter
thesis.
I mention the word ‘revision’ with some trepidation, because
it has come to be associated with a deliberately iconoclastic approach to the
‘nostra’ and the shibboleths and the received wisdoms of our time. Even I have been called a ‘revisionist’ –
something that I find very odd – and I have been called an ‘irascible uncle’
too, when I have attempted to set the record straight in other areas. I have not taken to denying the ‘Clearances’
or to any such crimes, because the evidence stands. I am not trying to rewrite history in any
misleading way; so there is no need to arrest me when I next come off the Clansman
at Oban. I have certainly found it
necessary to revise my views, and to present revisions of earlier positions,
but at no time have I set out to be deliberately provocative. My concern has been, and remains, to uncover
evidence which has been hitherto hidden or ‘off limits’, often because it is in
Gaelic, and often too because some of us, even those of us with Gaelic, have
been so mesmerised by dominant interpretations, or so seriously detained by
much less worthy academic diversions, that we have not had time to do justice
to it. The Gaels, in fact, have left a
very sizeable body of evidence in their own language, in journals, periodicals
and books, as well as in manuscripts.
The prevalent notion that the Gaels could not read or write prior to
1872 is yet another of the indefensible misunderstandings in which we are all
too frequently, and sometimes quite contentedly, trapped. And we should note also that the surviving
evidence encompasses the oral record too, with a great deal of commentary on
the processes of the later nineteenth century, for example, by those who did
what we have not done and can never do, namely, live through the events and
experiences that shaped that era. Some
survived to tell the tale until the 1960s and 1970s, and I knew several at
first hand.
The result of over-concentration on the ‘clearance paradigm’
of Highland history is that just about everything is cleared, at least in the
minds of those who cannot see, or perhaps read, the achievements of the
nineteenth century. The Gaels are
perceived as weaklings, driven away from their lands; they do not respond to
the events of their time; they have few leaders of note; they cannot read or
write; they do not write about scientific subjects in Gaelic; they have few, if
any, books; and those who have some sort of residual ember in their hearts
produce poor song, filled with romantic yearnings for a never-never land, a
Shangri La, an arcadia over the mountains.
Within such a paradigm, we hear little or nothing about the Gaels who
negotiated change; the Gaels who provided leadership, at home and abroad; the
Gaels who put Gaelic education on a sure foundation; the Gaels who created
printing-presses which survived for over a century; the Gaels who invested in
industrial developments, particularly in shipping, and shaped Scotland, and
even Britain and its Empire; the Gaels who defined cultural policy as a result
of their coming together in urban environments such as that of London; the
Gaels who stayed on their crofts and enjoyed life as much as they could,
composing songs and poetry, narrating tales and traditions, and passing their
language and culture effortlessly to the next generation – in short, the Gaels who made us what we are
today. From time to time, we are made
aware that such may have existed, but their contribution has somehow been
overshadowed by the grim spectre of the ‘Clearances’ and the ‘disappeared’.
So…let’s think the unthinkable for a minute, and imagine
that social displacement from the Highlands to the Lowlands and beyond may have
had some useful consequences. In broad
terms, let us imagine that leaving one’s homeland and entering a different
culture could be beneficial, once the initial discomfort had passed; let’s
consider that new worlds could be conquered, in more ways than one, and new
centres of energy created; let’s envisage an invigorating era in which
revolutionary technology could be applied as readily to the enhancement of
Gaelic as it could to the enhancement of English; let’s consider that culture
could be strengthened in the midst of social and industrial upheaval; let’s
imagine that Gaels themselves could be the leaders in such development; and
let’s look for some evidence that might support such propositions.
In the remainder of this lecture, I would like to present
such evidence under the broader headings of (1) Strategy, politics and debate;
(2) Publishing and printing; (3) Prose and verse; and (4) Scholarship and
folklore collecting. Here I will attempt
to offer a first look at the ‘alternative big picture’, which deserves to be
treated in a full-size book, but which will be presented here with a ‘broad
brush’. The evidence that I present
will be derived not only from my own enquiries, but also from projects by PhD
students and post-doctoral workers, which have been initiated in the Department
of Celtic and Scottish Studies since I arrived in Edinburgh for my second tour
of duty in 2002. It seems entirely
appropriate that, in this Valedictory Lecture, I should offer a view not only
of the nineteenth century, but also of the exciting advances in relevant
research which have occurred during my time in one section of the University,
and in which I have participated at various levels.
In terms of general background, there is one dimension above
all others which characterises the nineteenth century for the Gaels, as for the
entirety of Britain. This, as Thomas
Carlyle noted, was the ‘Age of the Machine’.
The arrival of machine technology revolutionised many of the basic ways
of seeing, and interacting with, the world.
The machine redrew the demographic map of Britain, setting up new
centres of industrial energy, which then attracted migrant populations. The machine provided means of travel to and
from these centres, by steamship and by steam train. The machine facilitated the production of
endless artefacts, including books and journals and newspapers, and aided their
distribution. We could go on in that
vein. Let us, however, note merely two
further matters of wider significance to our general theme. The first is that the machine led to the
creation of what could be termed ‘new communities’ of workers, centred on the
machine, caring for it and ensuring its efficiency, and, of course, its
productivity. The second is that the record shows quite clearly that Gaels were
as much to the fore as any others in these ‘new communities’.
The concept of kin and family was, in effect, refashioned or
extended in this context, with the emergence of new dynasties, with new skills,
connected (at the top of the social ladder) by wealth and patronage based on
that wealth, and (further down the social ladder) by wages derived from the
application of technology. Networks, as
we would call them today, began to appear in various guises and contexts. If I were to mention the name of David
MacBrayne, for example, most present would recognise it, not only as a
favourite theme of my own, but also as that of a world-famous shipping magnate
who developed Highland and Hebridean maritime communications from 1879. David MacBrayne’s grandfather was a Gaelic
speaker from the Lochgilphead area of Argyll, who moved to Glasgow and became a
merchant. The MacBraynes are an
excellent example of the Gaels who took up mercantile ventures, and prospered,
and helped others to do so. Again, if I
were to mention Sir William MacKinnon of Balinakill, in Kintyre, he would be
known to some of us as a major donor to Edinburgh University Library; but to me
he is known first and foremost as the founder of the British India Steam
Navigation Company, one of the greatest shipping companies of the Age of
Empire. If we look at the evidence for
Gaels in the employ of such men, and their role at the heart of new
communities, we need go no further than the Census Returns for 1881, and take a
look at the ships in Highland and Hebridean harbours on the census date – ship
after ship crewed by a majority of Highlanders and Islanders, alongside a
minority of Lowlanders, Irishmen and continental Europeans, brought together by
the servicing of the machine – in this case, the steamship. This point applies to virtually every aspect
of the evidence that I now wish to assemble.
(1) Strategy, politics and debate: Dispersal of Gaels to the cities of Scotland
and England was a very important catalyst in the creation of strategy for the
Highlands and Islands. Relocation to the
cities – the ‘energy centres’ of modern Britain, with machines and industry in
abundance – meant that Gaels sought new ways of retaining and encouraging their
Gaelic interests, and this quickly led to a symbiotic relationship between
urban Gaels and Lowlanders, and also with those Gaels who remained in the
Highlands. ‘Intellectual kindreds’ were
formed, as well as, or in tandem with, kindreds based on Highland
territorialism. These ‘intellectual
kindreds’ might well be classified as ‘networks’ nowadays.
No better example of the Gaels’ achievement in the urban
context can be found than the work of the Highland Society of London, and the
Gaelic Society of London. London appears
to have attracted Gaels of considerable intellectual and political power who
were willing and able to commit themselves to the improvement of conditions in
their homeland. In her Edinburgh PhD thesis of 2005, which I had the privilege
of supervising jointly with Professor William Gillies, Dr Janice Fairney has provided an extremely
important overview of both societies, and their contribution to Gaelic
culture. The Highland Society of London,
established in 1778, was more obviously concerned with ‘improvement’, and took
to do with such matters as the preservation of piping, the development of
fisheries, and the revision of the Excise Act.
For our purposes, its particular significance lies in its call, as far
back as 1786, for the creation of a Gaelic Professorship in one of Scotland’s
universities, with Edinburgh in its sights.
It continued to make the case for the Gaelic Professorship, and the call
was taken up by the Highland Society of Scotland, and more notably by the
Gaelic Society of London. Eventually,
thanks to the catalytic effect of Professor John Stuart Blackie on home turf,
Edinburgh established its Chair of Celtic in 1882, almost a century after it
was first proposed in London.
The Gaelic Society of London, founded in 1830, had a
considerable influence on the course of events in the Highlands. Although it was mainly a literary society, it
strongly encouraged Gaelic education in the schools, and held regular debates
and lectures. It was prepared to lobby
MPs as required, to institute enquiries into education, and to provide
finance. It formed a close relationship
with those politicians who espoused the crofters’ cause in the late nineteenth
century, among them Dr Roderick MacDonald, MP.
Through migration from the Highlands and Islands to London, Gaels established
a bridgehead, so to speak, in the corridors of power, even in the Palace of
Westminster itself, and used their opportunities well for the improvement of
their homeland.
The Highland and Gaelic Societies of London, by virtue of
their position in the British capital, commanded a position of power which
could not be matched by similar associations in Scotland’s cities. Nevertheless, the nineteenth century
witnessed the creation of numerous societies in Scottish towns and cities,
which promoted Gaelic cultural interests, and continue to do so to the present,
among them the Gaelic Society of Glasgow, and the Gaelic Society of
Inverness. Migration to the Scottish
cities provided platforms in every sense for the improvement of conditions for
Gaels at home. Energy existed in the
cities, and, in that context, many Gaels were prepared to roll up their sleeves
in order to provide leadership and labour on behalf of their culture.
(2) Printing and publishing:
If London illustrates the interaction between migrant Gaels and cultural
politics, with some very considerable achievements to its credit, we could, I
think, claim that Glasgow illustrates a similar interaction between Gaels and
industry, for the greater good of the Gaelic world. Gaels found employment in the industrial
cities, in the cotton factories, the iron foundries, the shipyards, the
railways, the utilities, the police forces, and so on. The extent of that interaction remains to be
explored in full, but the record, both prose and verse, shows that they did so
with vigour and considerable skill.
Gaels also took hold of industrial enterprise and shaped it to meet
their own needs. This is most evident in
printing and publishing, a theme which I was compelled to investigate when I
co-operated with Dr Bill Bell in the creation of the third volume of the Edinburgh
History of the Book in Scotland.
As with several major
developments in the nineteenth century, the origins of Gaelic printing and
publishing are earlier than 1800.
Edinburgh and Glasgow provided printing facilities for Gaelic books
prior to 1800, and Edinburgh, particularly through the output of MacLachlan
& Stewart, led the field until the mid-nineteenth century or
thereabouts. Only in the second half of
the nineteenth century did the balance begin to alter in favour of Glasgow as
the principal producer of Gaelic printed books.
It did so very largely because of the contribution of Archibald
Sinclair, a native of Mulindry in Islay, who set up a printing press in Glasgow
in 1848. Archibald Sinclair, who was
forced to leave Islay because of difficult economic circumstances, is an
excellent example of the displaced Gael who turn adversity to advantage in the
wider cause of Gaelic culture. Archibald
Sinclair was succeeded in the business by his son and grandson, both named Archibald,
and the business, generally known as the Celtic Press, continued to function
until 1951. At that point it was taken
over by Alexander MacLaren, whose business in its turn was taken over in 1970
by the Gaelic magazine, Gairm, which functioned from 1952 to 2002. There is therefore a direct link between a
displaced Islayman of the mid-nineteenth century, and late-twentieth century
Gaelic publishing in Glasgow.
The Sinclairs are
important not only as printers and publishers – in industrial terms they were
experts in hot-metal and letter-press printing – but also as diversifiers of Gaelic literary
output. Gaelic publishing in the
nineteenth century was overwhelmingly religious, with some significant
early-century collections of poetry.
MacLachlan & Stewart specialised in what I have called rather wryly
‘puritanism and pedagogy’, but the Sinclairs pushed the boundaries in every
respect, producing collections of secular song, stories, translations,
political pamphlets, and so on. In this
they both recognised and developed the changing tastes of Gaelic readers, who,
having been brought up on a very strictly religious diet at home, were
beginning to broaden their literary horizons quite markedly in an industrial
environment.
(3) Prose and verse:
Noteworthy advances towards the
provision of a less religious selection of Gaelic reading material were being
made from the early 1820s, and in this too industrial developments played their
part. The most important contributors
were Gaelic-speaking clergymen who had moved from the Highlands and Islands to
Lowland charges, and of these the best known was the Rev. Dr Norman MacLeod,
‘Caraid nan Gàidheal’ (‘The Friend of the Gaels’). MacLeod realised the value of nurturing the
emerging Gaelic readership on a varied diet of religious and secular reading,
and combined both in various ways, using the periodical as his literary
vehicle. He began to write quite
deliberately for the printed medium, but, as another Edinburgh graduate, Dr
Sheila Kidd, now lecturing at the Department of Celtic at the University of
Glasgow, has amply demonstrated, he owed a considerable debt to
well-established oral templates. The
original publishers of MacLeod’s journals were W. R. McPhun of Glasgow, and
William Blackwood of Edinburgh, and these Gaelic ventures, which spanned
(broadly) the years between 1829 and 1843, appeared when journals in English
were being developed as literary media in Britain. Through these Gaelic journals, a tradition of
printed Gaelic prose, a good part of it non-religious, was established. That, in itself, was one of the greatest
achievements of the nineteenth century.
One of the many questions
which arises in this context is to what extent the writing in these Gaelic journals reflected the world of
the time. I found myself considering
that topic when examining the development of steamships in Scotland. I turned
to one of the essays of the Rev. Norman MacLeod, which was published in his
journal, An Teachdaire Gaelach, in 1829, and described a journey by a
small group of Highlanders on board the new-fangled steamship, Maid of
Morven, from Morvern to Glasgow. The
more I examined the piece, the more astonished I was by its sophistication and
clever symbolism. MacLeod, so often seen
as a staid establishment figure and a ‘politically correct’ cleric, was
interacting with, and satirising, the literary genres of his time published in
English. He had obviously become weary
of the travellers’ accounts of the previous decade or so, with their often
pompous ‘take’ on the Ossianic Highlands, and he decided to subvert them by
putting rustic Highlanders, rather than snooty Englishmen, at the centre of the
story. I have published my analysis in
the Review of Scottish Culture, vol. 20 (2008).
One point which struck me
after I had published my article was the fact that MacLeod had anticipated by
some 70 years one of the themes explored, in a similarly symbolic mode, by
Thomas Hardy, namely the effect of the machine on rural rhythms and lifestyles. In his Gaelic account, MacLeod draws
attention to the engine of the ship and the engineer, who is a Gaelic speaker,
but who has been cooped up by the engine.
The rustic Highlanders who visit his domain on board ship cannot
understand what he is trying to tell them about the engine.
‘Sailthean iarainn agus slatan a’ gluasad a-nunn
agus a-nall, a sìos agus a suas, air an ais ’s air an adhart, gun tàmh, gun
stad; cnagan agus gòbhlan agus eagan a’ freagairt da chèile. Cuibhleachan beaga nan deann-ruith mu na
cuibhleachan mòra. Duine truagh shìos am
measg na h-acfhainn, a’ cur na smùid deth, far nach saoileadh tu am b’ urrainn
do luch dol gun a milleadh; ach bha esan a’ gluasad air feadh na h-ùpraid, cho
neo-sgàthach ’s a rachadh Para Mòr no mise am measg nan caorach; ag armadh gach
acfhainn, achlais, udalain, agus feadain le h-olaidh agus le h-ìm. ‘A dhuine thruaigh,’ arsa Para Mòr, ‘’s ann
agam nach eil sùil ri d’ àite; is daor a tha thu cosnadh d’ arain.’ ‘Carson?’ ars esan, ’s e tionndadh suas a
shùl a bha snàmh ann am fallas. Ged a
labhradh a’ ghèimhleag iarainn a bha na làimh, cha b’ urrainn duinn barrachd
ioghnaidh a bhith oirnn na nuair a chuala sinn an duine seo a’ labhairt na
Gàidhlig. ‘Nach do shaoil mi,’ arsa Para
Mòr, ‘gur Sasannach, no Eireannach, no Gall bochd a bh’ ann.’ Thàinig e nìos, a’ siabadh an fhallais o
ghnùis le bad còrcaich a bha na làimh; agus thòisich e air beachd a thoirt
dhuinn air an acfhainn. Ach, eudail, b’
i sin an fhaoineis. ‘An saoil thu, a
Phara Mhòir,’ a deir mise, ‘nach anns a’ cheann a smaointich an toiseach air
seo a bha ’n innleachd?’ ‘Coma leam e
fhèin is innleachd,’ arsa Para Mòr. ‘Is
mì-nàdarra, peacach an innleachd seo fhèin, a’ cur sruth agus soirbheis an
Fhreasdail gu ’n dùbhlan, a’ dol nan aghaidh gun seòl, gun ràmh. Coma leam i; chan eil an innleachd seo
cneasda. B’ fheàrr leam a bhith ann an
geòla dhuibh Achadh na Creige – Eòghann an Rudha air an stiùir a’ ruith le
croinn rùisgte tro Bhuinne nam Biodag – na bhith innte; tha mi ’g ràdh riut
nach eil an innleachd seo cneasda.’
‘Iron beams and rods moving over and back, up and
down, backwards and forwards, without ceasing, without stopping; pulleys and
forks and notches responding to one another.
Little wheels going full speed round the big wheels. A poor man down among the gear, perspiring
steamily, where you would not imagine that a mouse could venture without being
disfigured; but he was moving in the midst of the commotion as fearlessly as
Para Mòr or myself would go among the sheep; greasing every piece of equipment,
joints, swivels, and ducts with oil and butter.
‘Poor man,’ said Para Mòr, ‘I certainly do not envy you your place; you
earn your bread dearly.’ ‘Why?’ said he,
turning up his eyes which were swimming in sweat. Though the iron crowbar that he had in his hand
should have spoken, this would not have caused us greater wonder than when we
heard this man speaking Gaelic. ‘ Did I not think,’ said Para Mòr, ‘that he was
an Englishman, or an Irishman, or a poor Lowlander.’ He came up, wiping the sweat from his face
with a hemp rag which was in his hand, and he began to give us an opinion of
the equipment. But, my dear, that was a
complete waste of effort. ‘Don’t you
think, Para Mòr,’ said I, ‘that there was real ingenuity in the head that first
thought of this?’ ‘ I have no time for
himself or his ingenuity,’ said Para Mòr.
‘ This ingenious device itself is unnatural and sinful, defying the
current and favouring breeze of Providence, going against them without sail,
without oar. I have no time for it;
this device is not human. I would prefer
to be in the little black boat of Achadh na Creige – Hugh of the Headland at
the helm running with bare masts through the Current of the Daggers – than to
be in her; I am telling you that this device is not natural.’
In Tess of the
D’Urbervilles, first published in 1891, Hardy provides a cleverly nuanced
account of a threshing machine, and its effect on Tess and the harvesters, and
he draws particular attention to the engineer:
A
little way off there was another distinct figure; this one black, with a
sustained hiss that spoke of strength very much in reserve. The long chimney running up the ash-tree, and
the warmth which radiated from the spot, explained without the necessity of much
daylight that here was the engine which was to act as the primum mobile
of this little world. By the engine
stood a dark motionless being, a sooty and grimy embodiment of tallness, in a
sort of trance, with a heap of coals by his side; it was the engine-man….What
he looked he felt. He was in the
agricultural world, but not of it. He
served fire and smoke; these denizens of the fields served vegetation, weather,
frost and sun.
It is worth noting that
some of the very earliest prose descriptions of steamboats and steam trains in
Scotland are to be found in Gaelic, written by Norman MacLeod. Journals, of course, continued to be
published throughout the nineteenth century – with longer and shorter lives –
and these made an enormous contribution to Gaelic literature – and also to
language. The Gaelic linguistic register
was extended, expanded, and pushed into new areas as Gaels confronted machines
and industry, and harnessed them for themselves, or came to terms with them.
As with prose, so with
poetry, song and verse. The nineteenth
century forced Gaelic song into new subjects, embracing steamships and steam
engines, the thrills and spills of cities, with the attendant need for new
terms of expression. Song and verse
were applied to express the emotions generated by clearance, social change and
dislocation, but also to highly experimental attempts to recreate epic
historical encounters, celebrate the lives of ministers, collectors and
scholars, and even traditional clan chiefs.
The changing world of the clan chief in the early nineteenth century,
with the gradual infiltration of Lowland ways, and the accompanying challenges
to the role of the poet, are detectable in the song and verse of my
fellow-islander, John MacLean, Poet to the Laird of Coll, whose output was
studied in detail by Dr Rob Dunbar in his fine 2007 Ph.D. thesis, supervised by
Professor Gillies and myself.
(4) Scholarship and folklore collecting: John
MacLean, as well as being a poet, was a collector of song. He was a man of his time, not a relic from a
bygone age. The nineteenth century was
pre-eminently the period in which Gaelic scholarship and folklore collecting
emerged in forms which we would recognise today as the forerunners of the
disciplines still conducted in the Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies at
Edinburgh, and in the corresponding Celtic Department of Glasgow and the
section in Aberdeen. These important
advances were, in part, driven by a recognition of gaps in the record (as in
the case of John MacLean), but also by the needs of the newly literate Gaels
for whom Norman MacLeod compiled his journals.
There were other developments too, which drove educational
initiatives. The translation of the
Bible into Scottish Gaelic was completed in 1801, and published in Edinburgh,
and in 1807 the Highland Society of London published the Gaelic versions of
James Macpherson’s Ossian.
These salient literary
events, which owed a great deal (once again) to Gaels in the cities, led
directly to the compilation of a significant number of dictionaries and
glossaries. These have been studied by Ms Lorna Pike in 2003-4, in the course
of a project to establish a new Gaelic dictionary project on historical
principles – an inter-university enterprise funded at various stages by the
Gaelic Language Promotion Trust, the Carnegie Trust, the Leverhulme Trust, and
Bòrd na Gàidhlig. Lexicography, including a major dictionary of 1831 carrying
the names of the aforementioned Norman MacLeod and Daniel Dewar, became a
significant strand in Gaelic scholarship until the end of the nineteenth
century, reaching its pre-1900 high-water mark with the publication of
Alexander MacBain’s Etymological Dictionary of Scottish Gaelic in
1896.
Alexander MacBain, a
native of Badenoch and the Headmaster of Raining’s School in Inverness,
represented a new breed of Gaelic scholars who came to power in the second half
of the nineteenth century, and swept out the hoary Ossianic speculation of the
preceding fifty years. The operating
principles of the new scholars, whose pioneers included the Revs John Kennedy
and John Cameron, both Free Church ministers, were based on the methods of
German scholars who had expounded the pedigree of the Celtic family of
languages. Professor Donald MacKinnon,
the first occupant of the Chair of Celtic at Edinburgh when appointed in 1882,
also represented this stream of scholarship.
MacKinnon had a deep interest in lexicography, but he was also among the
earliest scholars to attempt a definition of the hallmarks of the Gaelic
people, based on the evidence of their proverbs, and he had an immense
knowledge of Gaelic tradition in the round.
For the next thirty years, MacKinnon was the presiding genius in Gaelic
and Celtic studies in Scotland, gathering round him a circle of enthusiastic
men of letters – poets, prose-writers and folklore collectors – and ensuring
that Edinburgh became synonymous with the best scholarship in the field. Among the beneficiaries of his support were,
for example, the outstandingly original and avowedly ‘modern’ writer of Gaelic
prose, Donald MacKechnie, an ‘exiled Gael’ from Jura, and the folklore
collector, Alexander Carmichael.
An interest in collecting
traditional material, centring on Gaelic tales, had developed in the first half
of the nineteenth century, spearheaded by John Francis Campbell of Islay, whose
Popular Tales of the West Highlands in four volumes was published
between 1860 and 1862. Campbell employed
a number of different collectors when gathering his tales, including Alexander
Carmichael, best known today as the compiler of the first two volumes of Carmina
Gadelica, published in 1900.
Carmichael was, of course, an exciseman, and collected most of his
material when stationed in Skye and the Outer Hebrides in the second half of
the nineteenth century. His vast
compendium of material, which eventually furnished another four volumes of Carmina
Gadelica, is currently the subject of a major ground-breaking project, run
jointly by Edinburgh University Library and the Department of Celtic and
Scottish Studies, which has proved to be extremely productive and is awaiting
funding for its third stage. Already the
project has produced a major volume of essays, edited by Dr Donald William
Stewart, Gaelic Researcher for the project, who was described recently as ‘the
outstanding Carmichael scholar of our time’.
Campbell and Carmichael
were far from being the only major workers in this field, and I would like to
conclude this section by referring to a very important lady – a real lady, if
you like – Lady Evelyn Stewart Murray.
Lady Evelyn, from Blair Castle, who was encouraged by Professor
MacKinnon, recorded a splendid collection of Gaelic tales from Highland
Perthshire in the early 1890s. These
have now been edited by Tony Dilworth and Sylvia Robertson, under my guidance,
and form a sumptuous volume which will soon be published by the Scottish Gaelic
Texts Society.
Conclusion
That, then, is my ‘broad
brush’ picture of the nineteenth century – painted in brighter colours than
usual. As you will appreciate, I myself
have had my eyes opened to the dynamism and productivity of this remarkable
era. Thanks to the ongoing efforts of
researchers at the University of Edinburgh, and specifically in the Department
of Celtic and Scottish Studies, I have been given a grandstand view of its
unfolding riches – and the chest is not yet empty, believe me.
This lecture has been
entitled somewhat provocatively, ‘The Greatest Era of the Gaels’ – with a
question mark. Could this title ever be applied fairly to the nineteenth
century? Could it replace ‘The Age of
the Clearances’? My own response is that
it could, if we consider the cultural achievements of the period, as I have
tried to do this evening. It may not
cover every aspect of the century, but it certainly fits the emerging cultural
profile.
In my view, Gaelic
cultural achievements in the nineteenth century were quite outstanding, in
their depth and breadth and in their foundational roles – foundational, that
is, for everything that followed in the intellectual and cultural realm. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries
have been the beneficiaries of the Gaelic enterprise of the nineteenth
century. Such enterprise came about
because those Gaels who remained in Scotland, but who had migrated to the
Lowlands, as well as those who had gone further afield (for example, to
London), were able to harness the benefits bestowed unquestionably by the
redistribution of the Gaelic people, and their implanting in ‘centres of
energy’, as I have called them. The
cities and migration and industry – and the grasping of opportunity – are
central to it all.
Despite the emigration of
many Highlanders and the contradictory and sometimes destructive forces at
work, nineteenth-century Gaels seem to me to have been empowered with a
remarkable cultural vitality which has not been matched since 1900, and it is
all the more noteworthy because of adverse social circumstances.
Here’s to the nineteenth
century, and to those who laboured in it.
May we – and particularly you! – in the twenty-first century go and do
likewise!
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