Storytelling in Gaelic Culture

The Lordship of the Isles had tended to be a separate Gaelic principality within Scotland, closely associated with Gaelic cultural forces in Ireland. Following the forfeiture of the Lordship the main clans who came to the fore were the Campbells of Argyll, the Gordons of Huntly and the Mackenzies of Seaforth. Rich and powerful as Argyll and his kinsmen became after the end of the fifteenth century, they did less and less to support or encourage the arts of Gaeldom.

Clan Donald now consisted of eight branches of that family, founded by the younger sons of the successive heads of the family. There were ties of association with many vassals, including the Macleods of Lewis. The MacMhuirichs, who had been the poets and historians of Clan Donald in Islay continued in the employ of the Clan Ranald branch of Clan Donald and were mainly in South Uist.

Throughout the Gaidhealtachd a great deal of insecurity and disruption followed the break-up of the Gaelic Lordship. Many clans had to fight to protect their claims on land and many were deceived out of these lands particularly through the introduction of a system of written charter land claims. Any meaningful patronage of the arts was lost but a consequence of the decline of the status of the classical artists was a growth and a new wealth in the folk tradition. The Ossianic ballads for example were now passing into the Gaelic folk tradition, which came to the fore in the eighteenth century.

This is the period that inspired the great corpus of stories surrounding the clan battles and wars. Amongst the most well known of these stories are two particular ones. One tells of how the Glengarry Macdonalds burnt a church in Ross in 1603 with the congregation still in the building. Another gives an account of the people of the island of Eigg hiding in a cave from a group of Macleods who built a large fire in the mouth of the cave.

In 1760 James Macpherson published his ‘Fragments’ which he claimed were part of a Gaelic epic poem he had collected from oral tradition in the Highlands of Scotland. He said it was the work of the poet ‘Ossian’, a 3rd/4th century bard who composed poetry about the life of the warrior band of the Fianna. Macpherson’s work became popular chiming as it was with the new Romantic movement sweeping through Europe, and his work was translated into many European languages.

In Germany the Grimm brothers published a collection of folk tales in 1811. By the middle of the 19th century John Francis Campbell had published a collection of Gaelic stories that had been collected from oral tradition throughout the Highlands. His first collection was published in 1862. Amongst these stories were wonder tales, and heroic tales. John Francis Campbell was a nobleman from Islay, who had learnt Gaelic and Gaelic stories from an old piper and a fiddler who had worked on the estate he grew up on.

In the 1930s the voice of the storyteller was recorded in audio form by John Lorne Campbell. He had graduated from Oxford in 1929 with a BA in Agriculture, and it was there that he became interested in Gaelic. In 1934 Compton Mackenzie invited him to Barra and it was there he met the renowned storyteller the Coddy. In 1935 John Lorne Campbell married the writer and music scholar Margaret Fay Shaw who had been collecting Gaelic song and oral tradition in South Uist, and in 1938 the couple bought the island of Canna where they have built up an important collection of books, manuscripts, photographs and audio recordings.

In 1951 the School of Scottish Studies was established. Today one can find many recordings of storytellers and of different types of stories within their collections. The School is part of the University of Edinburgh and was established to preserve and research the oral tradition of Scotland. The collection contains over 10,000 hours of stories and songs. The research carried out by students and lecturers are constantly adding to the collections of the School.