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THE GAELIC EDITOR’S FOREWORD
THE Hebridean Celt is not of
them who cannot sing because they are in a strange land; on the contrary, he
never really finds his voice until he has wandered far from the Western Sea
and the Isles. True, his singing is not always appreciated in his new
surroundings, and in that case he goes apart into a quiet nook, near a
waterfall, and there, under the stars, croons to himself the music of his
folk. And as the old familiar sounds come rolling from the heart to the
tongue, and from the tongue to the ear, he is no longer a stranger in a
strange land—he is piloting a boat through the Western Sea to the creek in
which, as a boy, he bathed, having dived from the flat rock with the queer
name. How fragrant the night is now!—just the sort of night that comes fresh
from the heart of the Good One. The sail is full of the homeward breeze; the
waves leap and lap against the sides of the boat; the stately mountains
glide past; the seagulls fly overhead ; the lights along the shore beam
softly and kindly, as if in welcome; and, ere long, to the best of luck is
added the joy of danger. To the right is the Black Reef, to the left the
Death-Rock, and, in the channel between them, the tangle is peeping through.
But, there! the steering hand has lost none of its old cunning; a few turns
of the helm and the boat heaves through, and is soon bounding into the
creek. Across the slippery weed-covered rocks leaps the exile, and before
him lies the well-beaten track of his youth, and of his father’s youth. In
the passing, he has time to notice the two or three old boats lying
upside-down on the beach, and the heaps of mussel and limpet shells near the
cottage door, relics of a generation of fishing; and then up goes the door
sneck, and into the reek and the light of the peat steps the wanderer. How
the kindly folk of the ceilidh spring up! all wonder and gladness, and—Faili
air an /hear a thainig dhachaidh—Welcome to the man who has come home. But
the night is short and must not be wasted; the man who has come home has
much to hear and learn ere the flowing tide floats his boat again. He has
forgotten the last three verses of Aiuin Duinn, o hi shiubhlainn leal; he
sees here a woman who has good reason to remember them; he must get her to
sing the old song, the glory-song of pain, till the lost verses get a grip
of his heart. And while he remembers—there is yon queer twirl in luraibh o
hi, iuraibh o ho—he must learn it before he leaves. There is another thing
too—another thing!—yes, scores and scores of other things, both songs and
tales, which, if not picked up now, may go down into the grave to-morrow
with this old woman or with that old man. If only time would dawdle a bit in
the passing! But time never does when the Celt is supremely happy; and with
a start and a shiver, the man who has come home suddenly realises that the
ceilidh and the kent faces and the old songs and the Western Sea have all
vanished, leaving the stars cold and the air chilly and the waterfall
hoarse. And as the exile turns his face towards the home which is not home,
his night-wish (and the old folks say that a night-wish always comes true)
is something like this : if only the songs and tales of yon ceilidh were
gathered into a book, so that they might be safe, for a while at any rate,
from the sneaking fingers of that black thief Time !
The writer, as an Islesman, considers it a privilege to have been asked to
give a little help in the making of such a book. Such material as he has
contributed forms part of a collection of unpublished ballads and legends,
partly handed down in his family, and partly picked up by himself in various
isles. In the old leisurely days all the folk were collectors, though they
knew it not, and as recently as fifteen years ago the gleanings of the past
could be picked up with little trouble by youngsters born under a lucky star
and on lucky soil—or in the parish of Small Isles
In the middle of the nineteenth century a smack crossed from the Island of
Eigg to the mainland once in the week, weather and inclination permitting,
for the few letters and the one newspaper brought by the stage-coach from
Fortwilliam to Arisaig: about a fortnight later, somebody sailed across from
Rum to Eigg to see if any letters had arrived by the packet-boat within the
previous month; in the course of another week, more or less, a shepherd from
the west side of Rum, looking for stray sheep, unexpectedly found himself in
the seaport clachan of Kinloch, and while there might remember to ask if
there were any letters for the neighbouring Isle of Canna; on the following
day the folk of Canna saw a fire on a certain hill in Rum, a sign that their
letters had somehow or other found their way to the shepherd’s house, and
some time before the end of the week somebody who had probably never in his
life received a letter sailed across the Sound, and returned with the
mail-bag as soon as he felt in the mood for returning. Those were the days
of song and tale, for no man was the slave of time or of the penny post, and
to be in the mood for a thing was but a short step from the thing itself.
Canna Isle, now so unknown owing to quicker transport by steamers which are
always passing by, was then the midway port between the Outer Isles and the
mainland, and, as such, was a veritable mart of lore and music. The folk of
the isle never hung pot of fish or potatoes on crook without putting into it
the stranger’s share, and seldom, if ever, went that share unclaimed. The
herdman, night, which brings all creatures home, brought the boats of all
the isles into the harbour; and for kindness received the strangers ever
paid handsomely, if not in gold, at any rate in song and tale. The writer
owes something to Canna Isle and to the boats which struck sail in its
harbour. He owes even more to his native Eigg; the little island, six miles
by three and a half, which now dreams, in the Western Sea, of the time when
it was an independent kingdom, with a queen of its own! In its day it has
been the scene of dark deeds, picturesque ceremonies, and plots without
number. The martyrdom of St. Donnan in the sixth century, the crowning of a
Lord of the Isles in the fifteenth, and the burning of all the inhabitants
by the Macleods of Dunvegan in the sixteenth, are but the outstanding events
in the history of an island which for centuries was the recognized centre of
the Clanranald territories, and which, further back, in the days of the
Island Kingdom, had been a favourite rallying-point for the Western clans,
when in the mood for plots. Such a place was the natural home of tale and
ballad, and tales and ballads there were, as plentiful as the blaeberries—so
plentiful, indeed, that a man might live his full fourscore years in the
island, and yet hear something new at the ceilidh every night of his life.
The writer was fortunate enough to spend his boyhood in Eigg just before the
old order of things had quite passed away. Several of the folk could boast
that their parents had been taught a little reading and writing, and a great
deal of poetry by Raoghall Dubh, son of the famous bard, Alastair Mac
Mhaighstir Alastair; while everybody in the island over sixty years of age
had been themselves pupils of Iain og Morragh, poet, musician, dancer,
courtier, and, last of all, dominie. Ranald Macdonald is known in Gaelic
literature as the compiler of a valuable collection of poems published in
1776, but if the Eigg tradition may be trusted, “Little worth were the
things in the book compared with the things which were not there at all;
sure, it is books, and books to excess, he might have sent out; never was
his kist of meal as full as the one in which he kept the bits of paper and
the old skins brimful of writing.” If only the bits of paper and the old
skins (probably the missing Clanranald manuscripts) had been preserved
Even more interesting than Ranald Macdonald was Iain Og Morragh. The son of
a Skye laird, he spent his early years in a Government situation in London;
but high living and a warm heart soon brought him within sight of the
debtor’s cell, and to save himself he had to escape to his native Skye,
where for the next few years he told and retold wonderful stories of Court
life and the Princess Caroline. Eventually his friends got him appointed to
the parish school of Small Isles, and there, for over a generation, he
played the fiddle, composed and collected! songs, and taught the youth of
Eigg the Spanish ambassador’s deportment and the Princess Caroline’s
curtsey. “He was a treasure of a teacher,” said one of his old pupils; “on
dull or rainy days, his first words to us always were: ‘Ye children of other
folk, what brought you here to-day? My curse on gloom! it was ever a bad
teacher—let us to the fiddle and the dance.’ And on bright sunny days he was
equally sensible: ‘Is it not a great sin, children of my heart, to be packed
in this narrow room like puffins in a hole, while the sun is so warm and
radiant outside, and the bird-world so frolicsome!’ And, indeed, we were
always of the same opinion ourselves, and, in the twinkling of an eye, out
we all were on the green sward at the foot of the hill, laughing on the
threshold of a beautiful day of song and dance. Och! och! the young, foolish
days! But my thousand blessings on Iain Og Morragh—may his soul have found
rest ”Wise old master! if he failed to make the youth of the island
bad Saxons, he made them at any rate good Gaels, ready on the slightest
provocation to rush into song, and dance, and tale. Eigg was in those days,
and until recently, a nest of antique Celticism. Every inch of it was alive
with legends and otherworld beings. Mysterious tales made the caves and the
kirkyard a terror by night; the sealwoman crooned on the reefs; the mermaid
bathed in the creeks; the fairies sang and piped in the knolls; the
water-sprite washed in a certain burn the shrouds of the dying; the kelpie
hatched plots in the tarns against beautiful maidens;
the spirits of murdered baby-heirs sobbed in. gloomy nooks; mystic boats, “with
a woman in the prow ever weeping, and a woman in the stern ever shrieking,”
glided into the bays at twilight; and on the first Monday of each quarter, a
fire-ship passed the island at midnight, with “a long lean black creature on
board, a fiddle in his hand, and he ever playing, and dancing, and
laughing,” while ’tween-decks lost souls clanked their chains, and shrieked,
and cursed. Such was the Eigg night under the stars. Within doors, however,
at the ceilidh, the folk told the tales and sang the ballads of the Fayne,
or of the less ancient heroes, the Lord of the Isles, Macleod of Dunvegan,
and “our own treasure, Clanranald,”—with, for Sundays and holy days,
beautiful legends of Iona and Oronsay. But ever, whether on holy or on other
eve, as midnight drew nearer, the tales and the songs, and the distant roar
of the Western Sea grew weirder, until at last song and tale ceased, and the
fire smouldered, and the cruisie-light flickered, and the folk whispered,
while over the ceilidh crept the shadow of night and the mysteries hiding
therein. “Sweet is the lark at dawn,” said the Eigg folk, “but sweeter the
cock at midnight.”
There are echoes of other Isles, too, in this book. Eriskay, sacred to the
memory of Father Allan Macdonald, makes itself seen and heard in the
introduction ; and the music of many isles and many seas lilts and sobs
throughout the pages. In Uig, Skye, one may still see the little cottage
which gave shelter long ago to the literary legacy brought from Dunvegan by
one of Clann a’Chomhairlich, “The Counsellor’s Family,” and carried later to
the Island of Eigg by a woman who never forgot song or tale, and whose
favourite by-word2 was: “A short giving with the gold, a long giving with
the song; not far goes the golden coin in a crowd—to a world of folk goes
the song.” In that same cottage is a room in which Janet Macleod and a
girl-friend once imprisoned a famous old songstress, the only woman in Uig
who knew the spinning-song given in this book; nor did they set her free
until they had memorised, behind the barred door, the long tricky chorus.
The writer, for one, has reason to bless that little cottage on the shores
of the Western Sea. Nor is it the only one. On a certain headland in North
Uist there stands a crofter’s house, overlooking a wide ford, beyond which
lies a small island utterly unknown to the outside world. “This an inhabited
island!” exclaimed a stranger who once found himself there, though how he
knew not, “there is nothing here but white sand making a poor attempt to
grow sea-bent; a score of solan-geese could eat up the whole place in a
week! ” But the solan-geese know better; so also do the women who milk the
cattle, and the men who sow and reap the barley, and the lads who ride the
sturdy little ponies across the fords. On moonlight nights, if the tide be
suitable, the men folk of the little isle cross over to Uist, each going his
own way according to the errand he is on, and some time before midnight they
all form again in the headland house overlooking the ford. A youth is placed
at the western window to watch for the appearing of certain reefs above
water—the rider’s reef,t if ponies are handy, the footman’s otherwise ; the
rest of the company are in the humour for a ceildih, and if wit and humour,
tales old and new, ballads of the brave long ago and satires on the latest
wedding or the latest heresy hunt, can make a ceilidh, then here is the best
in the Outer Isles—the ceilidh which never yawns. Time and tide are left
waiting outside, and the reefs become dry, and wet again, ere the men rise
to go; and as the last of them rides or wades across the ford, one feels
that here is a world, in the world, of which London is not the centre, and
gold not the god, and in which a man has time to remember that he is soul as
well as flesh. The writer owes something to the house overlooking the ford.
In another isle there stands, or let us say there stood, within sight and
sound of the Outer Sea, a tack-house known to a lucky few as the House o’
Music. To a Gael the soil around was historic ; Flora Macdonald had played
there in her young days; and in a certain ale-house, the ruins of which were
now overgrown with nettles, the Clanranald gentlemen had, in the days of
romance, toasted through the long weary years the Old Cause and Our King
over the Water. But to get at the secret of the place one had to be a guest
in the House o’ Music ; on a lucky night too, when visions could be seen in
the peat fire, and when the songs were sung and the tales told by a Celtic
patriarch, and by another, a woman pictured in the old lines :—
Bu bhriagh a sheinneadh i
chruit,
Beautiful her music on the harp,
’S gu’m b’ fhearr na
sheinneadh, a beus.
Beautifuller than her music, her goodness.
One such night always meant
another, and another meant a week, and at the end of that time, if the call
of the world had to be obeyed, one left the House with the typical Celtic
farewell ringing in one’s ear: “Would it not be the beautiful thing now if
you were just coming instead of going!” And the “beautiful thing” always did
happen sooner or later, for that is the way of the West —a far wandering
perhaps, but aye back to the old tune, and the old friend, and the old isle.
As for the House o’ Music, such as knew it and loved it long ago can never
keep it out of anything they write. The Western Sea is wide, however, and
the Isles are many, and the old life and the weird tales and the queer songs
and the sore tunes are all for the wanderer; for him who has sailed in the
smacks and crossed by the fords and waited the ferry; who has heard runes
chanted to the rising sun and to the new moon; who has seen mysterious rites
of healing and saining in the dim crusie-light; who has frequented the
midnight ceilidh of many clans and districts; who has helped the folk of the
shore-clachan to dig for sand-eels in lonely bays under the full moon; who
has spent long evenings with the wandering tribes, in the hazel wood, by the
side of the burn; and who has camped out with ancient herdmen whose talk was
of the old droving ploys : men mixing their cattle and their oaths at the
toll-house, and clinking their glasses and joining in the chorus at the
ale-house, on their way, by Kintail and Glengarry, by Lochaber and Rannoch,
to the lowland trysts.
Cha robh ceol a sheinneadh
eoin Nor music that birds do sing
Moch no anamoch’s a’ choill, Late or early in the grove,
Cha robh ceol an caol no ’n cuan Nor music of sound or sea
Nach cual’ an ridire gun mhaill. But heard the errant-knight
anon.
Nearly all the songs and
legends in this book have come from the Northern Hebrides—the Isles to the
north of Ardnamurchan Point. This in itself is a confession that, even in
the Hebrides, what may be called folk-life is gradually disappearing. “What
is a feast for a king?” asks an ancient Gaelic by-word; and the answer is:
“The sea-ducks of Colonsay, the harping of Oronsay, and the swelling tunes
of Jura.” The king would need, however, to be less aesthetic in these days;
he might still, indeed, dine off the sea-ducks of Colonsay, but not even his
royal will could command the harping of Oronsay or the swelling tunes of
Jura. And, before long, the Northern Isles may be equally barren of
traditional music. Already the curious old songs are being forgotten, and in
tone and colour, and probably in scale, the airs of the folk are changing.
The songs and legends given in this book then are of a life in the passing,
and are such as the folk will recognise as their very own. Incidentally,
they give a bird’s-eye view of Gaeldom from the misty beginning to the
present time. Fionn, and Diarmad, and Grainne are here; whether they be gods
become men, or men become gods, who can decide?—at any rate, they love and
hate, plot and weep, at a time when day and night have a mouth, and the
birds speak, and the serpent is worshipped, and Hades is terrible, not
because of its heat, but because of its biting cold. Here, too, is Iona,
teaching truth to the living, chanting consolation to the dying, and
battling to the death with paganism for possession of the Isles.
And, as if to show the issue of the struggle, we have also here the salt
life which reives and prays with equal vigour—always pagan by day and
Christian by night. Here, too, is some of the glamour of Jacobite times; the
Silver Whistle calling the Gaels, for the sake of the Old Cause and the
honour of the fathers, to Prince Charlie’s side; and Flora Macdonald, in a
remote isle, stitching her sampler and making a love-lilt to her sweetheart,
and then laying both aside to play with Saxondom for a king’s life. And
behind the mythological and historical movements, we find here the common
life of the folk; work and love, pain and death; and the worst as well as
the best of it set to music. Passing strange that drudgery and pain should
rush into music as naturally as the sparks fly upward; that a girl milking a
cow, an old dame spinning the wool, men rowing a clumsy fishing-skiff, a
woman in tears because a seaman has been drowned— that such things should
move the folk to song as easily as the dawn sets the lark trilling or
twilight the mavis. To a race with soul, however, there is nothing common or
tame in the whole range of life, from birth to death.
KENNETH MACLEOD.
NOTE.
Full versions of the Gaelic songs are given when they seem likely to be of
literary or historical value; in other cases, only a few of the best verses
are given—just enough to serve the singer’s purpose. In the matter of
dividing the Gaelic words into syllables, consistency has not been aimed at.
For instance, a Highlander would naturally write M6r-ag; but for singing
purposes Mo-rag conveys the sound better. In this book both methods have
been followed, to show that as yet there is no stereotyped way of
“syllabizing ” Gaelic words for musical purposes.
Strathloch, Pitlochrie,
October, 1908.
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