David Buchan - Scottish Tradition (RLE Folklore): A Collection of Scottish Folk Literature

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: FOLKLORE

Volume 13

SCOTTISH TRADITION

SCOTTISH TRADITION

A Collection of Scottish Folk Literature

EDITED BY

DAVID BUCHAN

First published in 1984

This edition first published in 2015

by Routledge

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and by Routledge

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1984 selection and editorial matter David Buchan

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ISBN: 978-1-138-84217-5 (Set)

eISBN: 978-1-315-72831-5 (Set)

ISBN: 978-1-138-84387-5 (Volume 13)

eISBN: 978-1-315-73079-0 (Volume 13)

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SCOTTISH TRADITION

A Collection of Scottish Folk Literature

Edited by

David Buchan

Professor of Folklore

Memorial University of Newfoundland

by Routledge & Kegan Paul plc

39 Store Street, London WC1E 7DD, England

9 Park Street, Boston, Mass. 02108, USA

464 St Kilda Road, Melbourne,

Victoria, 3004, Australia and

Broadway House, Newtown Road,

Henley-on-Thames, Oxon RG9 1EN, England

Set in 10/12 pt VIP Bembo by

Inforum Ltd, Portsmouth

and printed in Great Britain by

T.J. Press (Padstow) Ltd,

Padstow, Cornwall

Selection and editorial matter David Buchan 1984

No part of this book may be reproduced in

any form without permission from the publisher,

except for the quotation of brief

passages in criticism

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Scottish tradition.

Bibliography: p.

Includes indexes.

GR144.S37 1984 398.209411 8313754

British Library CIP available

ISBN 0-7100-9531-7

INTRODUCTION

The term folk literature poses certain problems, largely because of this word folk. In popular usage the word tends to be applied to anything old, or earthy or couthy or even, in the Scottish context, vernacular. This batch of connotations casts a fine haze of imprecision over any attempt to employ it in a compound with pretensions to scholarly exactitude. Here, however, it is used in a precise sense as an adjective denoting of traditional culture. Customarily one distinguishes three segments along the cultural spectrum: high culture, popular culture, and folk culture, three overlapping but distinct areas. Of these, folk or traditional culture is the culture maintained and transmitted by word of mouth and by customary practice rather than by written or printed document. Folk literature, therefore, is the literature of traditional culture, that is, the literature perhaps created by but certainly transmitted by word of mouth rather than written or printed document; it is the literature of tradition as distinct from the literature of print. (To differentiate between the two is, of course, in no way to ignore their various interrelations.)

Tradition, however, has two stages, what one might call the preliterate and the postliterate or the preindustrial and the post-industrial. In the first stage, the time of general nonliteracy before the Industrial Revolution, word of mouth tradition pervaded the life of all the people who could not read and write: it was, in a quite encompassing sense, their means of both instruction and delight. In the second stage, the time of general literacy after the Industrial Revolution, word of mouth tradition had many of its functions gradually taken over by print, writing and official education, but it continued adaptively within its contracted range, retaining older material and creating new, and becoming increasingly the carrier of unofficial culture. Earlier antiquarians tended to search exclusively for relics of the preliterate stage as evidence of folk tradition, but modern folklorists take both stages as their province, considering both historical and contemporary phenomena or, in the current terminology, adopting both diachronic and synchronic perspectives. Folk literature, then, consists of the literary and linguistic products of both preliterate and postliterate tradition.

Folk literature, it is somewhat startling to realize, has been the literature of the bulk of the Scottish people. In standard usage the term literature means the literature of high culture, but that was the literature of only a relatively small proportion of the population before the days of general literacy, a proportion made up of those who not only could read but also had both access to and interest in the material. For most of the population the literature was that of oral tradition. In Scotland, as in Europe generally, mass literacy came in the wake of the Industrial and Agrarian Revolutions,1 and changing conditions exposed people to other kinds of literature and new forms of social activity, which both diminished folk literatures importance and altered its nature, but the old patterns of behaviour persisted, adapted to the new situation. As society changed, so did tradition and its literature. It was only after widespread education, in the nineteenth century, that there appeared many local books written by old residenters about their communities and districts, and often expressly designed to record a past or passing way of life, which give some indication of the patterns of behaviour which fostered the perpetuation of folk literature. Here is a scatter of accounts, all from the nineteenth century, which indicate the prevalence and sketch in some of the contexts of folk literature:

In winter, too, we beguiled the long evenings with story-telling, ballad-singing, tales of bogles and witches (in which all devoutly believed); and to these the wandering beggar and the pedlar, always welcome guests, added other varieties of entertainment.2

In the long winter evenings in particular, when the whole household was assembled round the ingle-cheek, the song was very frequent: the young men, as well as the young maids, gave it alternately. They had sometimes a fiddle, but there was no dancing; that did not consist with the tasks of the maids, or the general thrift of the establishment, though they all liked to hear a spring. The herd-boy, too, took this opportune time, in the winter evenings, of perfecting himself in his whistle. The other lads, in the interim, mended their own shoes, or the shoes of the maids. At other times they played at games of