Malcolm Chapman - The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture

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ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: SCOTLAND

Volume 5

THE GAELIC VISION IN SCOTTISH CULTURE

First published in 1978 by Croom Helm Ltd

This edition first published in 2022

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1978 Malcolm Chapman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-03-206184-9 (Set)

ISBN: 978-1-00-321338-3 (Set)(ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-03-207019-3 (Volume 5) (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-03-207026-1 (Volume 5) (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-00-320501-2 (Volume 5) (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003205012

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer

The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture

MALCOLM CHAPMAN

1978 Malcolm Chapman

Croom Helm Ltd, 210 St Johns Road, London SW11

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Chapman, Malcolm

Gaelic culture.

1. Highlands of Scotland - Civilization

I. Title

941.11 DA880.H7

ISBN 0-85664-752-7

McGill-Queens University Press

1020 Pine Avenue West, Montreal H3A 1A2

ISBN 0-7735-0506-7

Legal deposit first quarter 1979

Bibliotheque Nationale du Qubec

Printed in Great Britain by

Biddles Ltd, Guildford, Surrey

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

2. Ossian and the Eighteenth Century

3. Alexander Macdonald and Duncan Macintyre

4. Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold

5. Folklore and Folklorists

6. Modern Gaelic Poetry

7. Anthropologists, Folklore and Community

8. Conclusion

1. Acknowledgements
2. 2. Ossian and the Eighteenth Century
3. 3. Alexander Macdonald and Duncan Macintyre
4. 4. Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold
5. 5. Folklore and Folklorists
6. 6. Modern Gaelic Poetry
7. 7. Anthropologists, Folklore and Community
8. 8. Conclusion

Guide

1. Acknowledgements

This book has grown out of a thesis submitted to Oxford University for the degree of B.Litt. in 1977.1 am grateful to all at the Institute of Social Anthropology in Oxford who have helped to provide the intellectual and social context within which I have worked. I am indebted especially to all those concerned with and contributing to the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, which has provided a focus of discussion that I have found invaluable.

In particular, Maryon McDonald and Roger Rouse have helped me both in discussion and with early drafts of this work. Edward Condry, with whom I have shared an interest in the Highlands, has helped me in many ways to sustain and further this interest. Alasdair Duncan, Graham Chapman, Elizabeth Grimshaw and Leonard Barkan have all provided, in different ways, friendly and sceptical commentaries on my enthusiasms. John Maclnnes, of the Edinburgh School of Scottish Studies, who examined this work in its thesis form, has made several helpful and sympathetic suggestions for its improvement. Many people have helped me, in various ways, to learn such Gaelic as I can command. My family has provided sustained and invaluable moral support, and James Drummond and Sons have allowed me to use their photocopier. I am grateful to them all.

My principal debt, however, is to my supervisor, Edwin Ardener, who has taught me much of the Gaelic that I know, and most of the anthropology. The benefits of my discussions with Mr Ardener are manifest throughout this book, in far more ways than any specific reference might suggest.

I acknowledge with thanks the financial support of the Social Science Research Council. I am also indebted, for permissions received to cite the various Gaelic poems contained within, to Canongate Publishing Ltd, and to Gairm Publications.

For all defects and misunderstandings in this work, the responsibility is mine.

Mr. Crotchet. The sentimental against the rational, the intuitive against the inductive, the ornamental Egainst the useful, the intense against the tranquil, the romantic against the classical, these are great and interesting controversies, which I should like, before I die, to see satisfactorily settled.

Thomas Love Peacock
Crotchet Castle, 1831

Hes dreaming now, said Tweedledee: and What do you think hes dreaming about? Why, about you! And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose youd be?

Where I am now, of course, said Alice.

Not you! Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. Youd be nowhere. Why, youre only a sort of thing in his dream!

If that there King was to wake, added Tweedledum, youd go outbang!just like a candle!

I shouldnt! Alice exclaimed indignantly. Besides, if Im only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?

Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking Glass

INTRODUCTION: HISTORY AND THE HIGHLANDS

The Highlands and Islands of Scotland occupy a place in Scottish history whose importance is out of all proportion to their economic significance, or to the small population that now occupies these remote and infertile regions. The face that Scotland turns to the rest of the world is, in many respects, a Highland face. When Scottish identity is sought, it is often by the invocation of Highland ways and Highland virtues that it is found. At the same time, both the Gaelic language and the Highland way of life have suffered persecution at the hands of their southern neighbours. Indeed, the history of Scotland since the Reformation reads in many ways as a sustained confrontation of the Highlands and the Lowlands.

This work is an attempt to show how the Highlander has come to occupy this paradoxical place in Scottish and British history. I have not, however, attempted a history of the Highlands, or of Gaelic culture and life. The place that the Highlander occupies in the Lowland imagination cannot be understood by a simple reading of Highland history. This is not to deny the importance of this history, but rather to recognise that the importance it assumes is something we need to explain. Every country has its minorities, its histories of lost opportunity and its vanished and vanishing traditions, few of which come to dominate their history in the way that the Highlander looms in the Scottish imagination. The past only offers its message at the enquiry of the present, and it is the nature and structure of that enquiry, as it has been turned towards the Scottish Gaidhealtachd, that I attempt to examine and explain here.

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