Seanchaidh na Coille, page 5
Highland gentry and churchmen were instrumental in maintaining elements of the higher registers of Gaelic literature, but to a large extent the peasantry became the de facto heirs of the bulk of this enormous corpus of material. Although largely lacking the formal institutions that the native intelligentsia had used to maintain learning in the past, communities continued to meet together in each other’s homes to create, reproduce, transmit and celebrate their literary inheritance in evening céilidhs during the wintertime:
It is conventional to say that until the Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge was set up in 1709 there were virtually no schools in the Highlands. Technically that is true. What is overlooked however is that the céilidh-house was an educational institution. Like the schools of the time, it operated on a seasonal basis (during the winter months, when children could be spared from domestic and agricultural labour), but in other respects it had much in common with the educational values of today. Children were not whipped or humiliated for speaking Gaelic or failing to remember their lessons. Children and adults learned together. Girls and boys learned as equals. And the quality of learning did not have to depend upon the strengths and weaknesses of an individual, for the visitor to the township—the stranger who told his “tale until dawn”—was eagerly listened to.46
Accounts from the 19th century about the céilidh47 support the notion that it was not only responsible for sustaining oral tradition, such as song-poetry, it was an exercise in social cohesion and cultural solidarity.
The young man would go away from the céilidh elevated from the knowledge he had acquired there. He knew he was not a stray atom in creation. He had listened to the tales told of his clan, and felt that the halo encircling their brows reflected a glory upon him. ... But though proverb, tradition, and story served to educate the young Highlander at this wonderful institution of the céilidh (at which dance also had no mean place), the great source of knowledge and of culture was in the poetry of the country; and if it is a sign of superior culture in the homes of rank and fashion to be able to quote the poets, it must necessarily be so also in our lowly Highland cots.48
The positive reinforcement offered by the céilidh was often in sharp contrast to official schools where children could be humiliated and punished for speaking Gaelic and made to defer to the authority of the anglophone world rather than their local community and ancestral traditions.49 Indeed, as this column from a Nova Scotia newspaper in 1937 attests, many Gaels have long considered schools to be weapons put in the hands of their long-time enemies to strike a fatal blow at their language and identity:
Bha na Gàidheil a thàinig a-nall a Cheap Breatann glé fhileanta ’s a’ Ghàidhlig agus cuid mhór dhiubh, rachadh aca air a’ Ghàidhlig a leughadh; gu sonraichte muinntir Eaglais Shaor na h-Alba a chleachd a bhith leughadh a’ Bhìobaill ’s a’ seinn na[n] Sailm an Gàidhlig moch is an-moch ’nan adhradh spioradail. Ciamar a chum iad greim cho daingeann air cànain a sinnsreadh an déidh an tàir a fhuair iad bho na Goill, agus an oidheirp a thug iad gus a dubhadh ás gu buileach an déidh an cumail fo chuing fad còrr agus dà chiad bliadhna?
An uair a fhuair iad uachdranachd air Alba, b’e cheud ni a rinn iad, a Ghàidhlig a chur ás na sgoiltean Gàidhealach. Maighstirean sgoile Beurla a chur a theagasg na cloinne an cànain céin nach b’ aithne dhaibh a gnàths. ... Bu léir dhaibh gun robh e na b’fhasa an Gàidheal a chìosnachadh le cànain a chridhe thoirt bhuaithe na le faobhar a’ chlaidheimh....50
The Gaels who came over to Cape Breton were very fluent in Gaelic and a great many of them were able to read Gaelic; especially the members of the Free Church of Scotland, who were used to reading the Bible and singing the Psalms in Gaelic morning and night in their worship services. How else could they keep such a firm grip on the language of their ancestors after all of the contempt that they got from the non-Gaels, and the effort that they made to wipe it out entirely after they had been subjugated by them for over two hundred years?
After they achieved dominion over Scotland, the first thing that they did was to banish the Gaelic language from the Highland schools. Anglophone school-masters were sent to teach children in a foreign language whose standards they did not know. ... They realized that it was easier to conquer the Gael by wresting the language out of his heart than by the blade of the sword....
Oral traditions could be performed and shared in contexts other than the céilidh. The bee of North American pioneer communities offered an opportunity for putting Gaelic labour songs to good use, as described in an anecdote about the early days of Glengarry, Ontario:
Anyone who ever saw the reaping “bee” by moonlight was likely never to forget it; a singer would, sickle in hand, follow the bent forms of the racing reapers (women and men) leading the solo part of a song which they, or their forbears, had learned in the Highlands, while the workers took up the chorus with great glee and good time; for example—
Mo ghille dubh, buidhe, bòidheach
Tha mi deònach as do dhéidhsa
O mo ghille ’s tu mo laochan.
Chorus:
Mo ghille dubh cridheil gaolach,
O mo ghille ’s tu mo laochan.
Although young men did not handle the needle at quilting bees, they generally put in an appearance in the evening when the girls had accomplished that feat, but at fulling bees both sexes participated and the fulling could not be properly carried on without the songs to regulate the time for the beating of the cloth with hands and feet.51
The communal nature of oral tradition and the nature of transmission via close personal contact encouraged people to value and memorize not just individual texts but the lineage of transmission through which they received them. The person who transcribed song-poem 2.2, for example, supplied the following details about its pedigree:
Chaidh an t-òran seo a sgrìobhadh air pàipear bho aithris Ghilleasbaig MhicGill-Ìosa ann an Albainn Nuaidh; dh’ionnsaich esan e aig bràthair athar, Iain MacGill-Ìosa, a dh’fhalbh á Uibhist a Tuath; dh’ionnsaich Iain an t-òran aig seann cheistear a fhuair e, a-réir aithris, aig a’ bhàrd ainmeil Iain MacCodruim.
This song was written down on paper from the recitation of Archibald Gillies in Nova Scotia; he learned it from his father’s brother, John Gillies, who emigrated from North Uist; John learned the song from an old catechist who received it, according to report, from the famous poet John MacCodrum.
The oral nature of the sources of communal memory made it very vulnerable to loss. Gaelic scholars of the 19th century were keenly aware of the hemorrhage of oral traditions and lore incurred by the large-scale loss of population in the Highlands. The pioneering folklorist Iain Òg Ìle (John Francis Campbell) stated in the year 1860, for example:
I have inquired, and find that several Islanders, who used to tell the stories in Gaelic, are now settled in Australia and Canada. ... There are hundreds in those distant lands whose language is still Gaelic, and to whom these stories are familiar, and if this book should ever remind any of them of the old country, I shall not have worked in vain in the land which they call Tìr nam Beann, nan Gleann ’s nan Gaisgeach.52
Highlanders who had been dispersed across the empire formed a variety of social and communications networks that conveyed information about families, spread cultural developments, carried new songs between settled communities and fostered a sense of international Gaeldom. Books and periodicals formed a sort of mobile media, connecting literate Gaels across Canada, Scotland and elsewhere to each other for the sharing of tales, song-poetry and other forms of lore. Remarking on a mid-17th-century song contributed to a Scottish newspaper by Alasdair “the Ridge” MacDhòmhnaill in Nova Scotia, for example, Dr. Keith MacDhòmhnaill noted:
If the whole of Oban were to turn out and walk to Glenfeochan, I very much doubt if they would find any trace of the above lament. They would be more likely to meet with the last music-hall ditty, and broken Gaelic, than the vigorous language and music of their forefathers. ... We have to go to the Colonies for these long lost things.53
Despite the strong MacDonald biases harboured by the Ridge family, the song that they preserved in this case was composed by a Campbell woman lamenting the death of her husband, brothers, foster-siblings and son after the Battle of Inverlochy. We should not underestimate the active curiosity and pan-Gaelic sympathies of many tradition-bearers.
Probably more influential in the dissemination of Gaelic materials than printed matter were human travellers. Some of them were migrants themselves, often moving in stages from one community to another, sometimes returning to their original birthplaces after a period of time. Others had employment which required travel: sailors, soldiers, railway workers and so on. Such people were ideal conduits for oral traditions, new and old, and ensured that no immigrant community was truly isolated from the developments occurring in others.54
Travellers were expected to share the news and lore they carried from community to community, and they were sometimes sent with messages from one individual to another at a far remove. This is reflected in a Gaelic song composed after the Second World War by Donnchadh Ruairidh a’ Chùbair of Beàrnaraigh, in the Outer Hebrides, who asked his nephew to communicate his greetings to relations in Vancouver.
Nuair ruigeas tu Vancouver thall,
’S an àm, toirt dhaibh do sgeul:
Dèan innse dhaibh gum bheil sinn slàn,
Is na dh’fhàg thu ás do dhéidh. ...55
When you arrive in Vancouver over yonder, relate your news to them at that time: tell them that we, and everyone you left behind, are well ...
Carriers of oral communication were particularly important for the many Gaels who, due to the assimilationist policies of official educational institutions, did not have the opportunity to learn how to read and write in their native language. A mid-19th-century poet on the Isle of Lewis mourned not only the loss of his brother to Canadian emigration, but the inability to communicate directly with him:
Sinn cho fada bho chéile ’s tha ’n cruinn-cé ’s e cho farsaing
Sinn gun sgrìobhadh gun leughadh, och, gu sgeul a thoirt ead’rainn.
We are as far apart as the world is wide; we cannot write nor read to give each other news.56
With a full translation of the Bible into vernacular Scottish Gaelic finally complete and in print in 1807, religious schools were established and promoted in the early-19th-century Highlands that allowed for record numbers of Gaels to become literate in their native language.57 At least some of the immigrants to Canada benefited from the education that they received in them.
One of the first Presbyterian missionaries to travel among the Highland settlers of Cape Breton estimated in the eighteen-thirties that not more than one-fifth of the heads of families could read, although he noticed that most of those who were young enough to have attended the Gaelic schools in Scotland before they emigrated were at least literate in their own language.58
The forward momentum being made in favour of Gaelic in Highland schools was nullified when universal education through the medium of English became effectively mandatory in Scotland and Canada in the later part of the 19th century.59 Despite institutional limitations, we should not underestimate the number of Gaels who acquired literacy by one means or another and their impact on the transmission and documentation of oral tradition. It is due to their efforts, after all, that so many texts were preserved and cherished, including many of those in this volume.
When examining the Gaelic literary tradition we should also be careful not to draw too great a distinction between oral and written forms of literary expression and transmission. Books and newspapers were often read aloud at céilidhs by literate members of the community, bringing new material into oral circulation. At the same time, the transcription and publication of oral literature boosted its perceived prestige and slowed down the inevitable mutations and variations brought about by oral transmission:
No corner of the Gaelic world was immune to the influence of print, which soon began to displace the oral medium in the very centre of Gaelic cultural life itself—the traditional céilidh-house. ... Once the concept of the book had been internalised, Gaelic printed texts after 1800 became a vital means of stabilising the Gaelic language and its culture in an age of considerable change.60
The injection of texts read aloud from newspapers into the aural medium of the céilidh is described in an account from Sagart Àrasaig (Raonall MacGilleBhràth, 1835-1892) of Nova Scotia, who describes how a Gaelic newspaper was used to enhance the evenings:
The Cuairtear was read with great delight and avidity by the Gaelic-speaking people of this county. The writer being then five years of age, remembers still the pleasure and delight the advent of the Cuairtear, month after month, brought to the family. When the Cuairtear arrived in the evening, the neighbours gathered in, the candles were lit, and the old man began to read out its contents from the first to the last page, while the audience listened to its tales, songs and stories with the most intense interest and pleasure.61
I have done my best to discover the identity of the authors of these texts and, when analyzing them, sometimes allude to the voice of the author. Sources that have been in oral circulation, or that are oral compositions modelled on previous texts, create complexities for speaking definitely about “authorship” (see in particular texts 2.2, 4.2 and 4.3). This should actually be seen as an asset when looking at the cultural importance of these materials. The poet was expected to voice concerns, encapsulate experiences and values, and advocate positions exactly because they were in the interest of his or her community. Songs continued to circulate in oral tradition because performers and audiences continued to value them, but they could mutate and accumulate contemporary resonances in the process of transmission. Such texts, then, are an important record of the ideals that met with the approval of at least a significant segment of the wider community.62
About this Volume
I used several criteria in choosing the sources in this volume: breadth of topics, geographical coverage, literary merit and intertextual allusions. In other words, I have tried to represent a wide diversity of subjects and viewpoints that have been expressed by Gaelic spokespeople in as many different locations as possible across Canada, giving extra weight to literary merit, texts that are enmeshed in dialogues with other Gaelic literary expressions, and unique historical testimony. The texts herein stop in the period between the World Wars, at which time most immigrant communities experienced a terminal decline in the number of Gaelic speakers and literary activity essentially ceased everywhere except for Nova Scotia.
This volume exposes just the tip of the proverbial iceberg and I hope that it will inspire others to follow the trails I have discovered and pursue even further other texts which I have not been able to include. This can only help to improve our understanding of the history and development of Gaelic immigrant culture in Canada. Others will no doubt build upon my efforts by improving my translations, augmenting information about the authors and contexts of the original texts, and offering new insights into these sources as literary and cultural expressions.
It is only very recently that Gaelic song-poems have been given titles as a regular practice, and these were usually assigned for convenience by editors rather than authors. I have honoured any assignments designated by authors in this volume and acknowledged them in context. I have indicated with quotation marks the titles for sections that are comprised of extracts from the original text. Whenever I have used an English translation from a source along with the original Gaelic text, the bibliographic reference is placed at the end of the English text; most translations in this volume are my own and thus the reference is placed after the Gaelic text, which always precedes the English.
Rendering both sound and sense from a Gaelic source into an English translation in a complete and consistent manner is an all but impossible task. There are, for example, many Gaelic words in these texts that convey the general sense of the English adjective “beautiful” but with a greater range of associations and intensities than is available in English and, interestingly, hardly any are gender-specific in Gaelic. The people addressed and described in the song-poems in the volume are often referred to with terms and names that liken them to animals, plants, parts of trees and legendary heroes. The lexicon of Gaelic poetry is full of deep and rich resonances from oral tradition, medieval literature, the natural environment and spiritual practice that have no clear contemporary equivalent in modern English.
I have made silent emendations to the original text only when these are merely a matter of updating the orthography or correcting mistakes to the spelling of a word whose meaning is reasonably certain. Some of the sources used for the texts were illegible or damaged, leaving parts missing or hard to read. I have marked with
A radical interpretation of the Gaelic Orthographic Conventions (GOC) has become the de facto standard for writing Gaelic in Scotland since the 1990s. It is a significant break from aspects of the written forms of Gaelic of the past and, in some respects, favours dialectic features of the Outer Hebrides, the part of the Scottish Gàidhealtachd where Gaelic has remained strongest to the present.63 Although I have applied most of the aspects of GOC on the historic Canadian texts in this volume, I have chosen not to impose the extreme forms of these Scottish conventions.64 I have retained a somewhat more conservative orthographical standard that is closer to the original texts and is a better representation of the dialects of Gaelic that remain strongest in Nova Scotia.
