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THE booming of the quarrel over the Veto
Act, which quickly developed into a bitter war between Church arid State,
was from south and north soon rolling over the heads of our Glen academic
debaters, who still thought themselves safe when the coronation of Queen Victoria diverted people's thoughts
for a moment to a far more agreeable subject, and
united all Highlanders in one glow of chivalrous
loyalty and devotion to their girl Sovereign, whose
age, sex, and loneliness, appealed to their deepest
sympathies. Well do I remember being set to read
a florid account of the Coronation from an Edinburgh paper either the "Courant" or "Caledonian
Mercury" to an attentive audience gathered round
our kitchen fire, while my aged grandmother took
upon herself the larger part of the task of simultaneously translating the English, sentence by
sentence, into Gaelic. She had, pat and perfect,
old Gaelic words for throne, coronation, robes,
crown, sceptre which I fear I called "skepter"- and Sword of State,
etc., but the globe bothered her so entirely that she had to give it up. She
translated it "cruinneag" or ball, but could make nothing
of its symbolical meaning. She and others of her
generation enjoyed the liberty this occasion gave
them for going back from Kings of Judah and Israel
to the history of Scottish Kings as far as Kenneth
Macalpin, which had come down by oral tradition.
Long afterwards when I read the "Duan
Albannach," I was much surprised to discover that the
substance of it was retained to a remarkable extent
in the oral and local traditions which our aged
people recalled and told at the time of Queen
Victoria's coronation. As for the later Kings from
the days of Wallace and Bruce, as Glenlyon was
visited by so many of them for hunting purposes
until the Union of the English and Scottish Crowns,
there was nothing very strange in the fact that the
traditions were fairly strong and unbroken. |
