Luirgean Eachainn Nill

Joe Neil MacNeil holds in his memory a wealth of Gaelic folktales, learned in his youth in Cape Breton. For over a decade, he has told his tales to John Shaw, a specialist in Celtic folklore and fluent speaker of Gaelic. Shaw has recorded, transcribed, edited, and translated the tales and folklore into English. This rich and entertaining collection is the result of their collaboration. Folktales, anecdotes, proverbs, expressions, rhymes, superstitions, and games are presented in translation and, in the cloth edtion, in the original as well. All variations of the genre are represented: a fragment from the Ulster cycle, some items from the Fenian cycle, hero and wonder tales, fairy and witch lore, romantic tales, tales of the exemplum type, tales of cleverness, "numbskull" stories, animal tales, and tall tales. MacNeil also describes his early years in a Gaelic-speaking rural community, where story-telling is still a basic element of community life. He explains how he learned the tales and the customs and practices associated with their telling. He also introduces us to the families and individuals who were custodians of the tales. John Shaw's introduction outlines the informant's tradition and its place in the world of the European story-teller. The commentaries of MacNeil and Shaw, the tales, the games, and the other folk material offer a rich and unique perspective on the Gaelic culture generally, and as it has developed on Cape Breton Island in particular. (From McGill-Queen's University Press and Edinburgh University Press)

ffn" srudy of contacts between b{orse storytelling rradirions and Gaelic traditions. Throrrrsh necessiry, my discussions of Norse, and especially lcelandic, rrrateriars have also bee'confrned to their r.lation ro scot_ land. Frrnlll', I wilr briefly review dhe recent work thar has taken prace in the.fielcl of migratory legends, highrighcintr; exampres thar q,ith furdrer study seem likely to produr:e resultso, u. leus. ,o-" fruidul questions.

The Bottle Imp, 2022

An exploration of what we know about the people who told these tales to see what we can learn about their personalities, motivations, aspirations, and inspirations. Both the Gaelic language and the storytelling tradition itself were targets of attack for centuries, and yet communities largely managed to resist efforts to pry them away from their cultural values and practices until the post-Culloden era. The narratives that survived long enough to be collected systematically in the Scottish Highlands, from John Francis Campbell’s coordination of fieldworkers in the mid-nineteenth century through the meticulous researches of the School of Scottish Studies in the twentieth century, demonstrate that Gaels had nurtured and sustained an interest in folktales to an exceptional degree in European terms. There must be social factors that help to explain this cultural focus and I hope to identify some of them in this article by examining a selection of the documentary evidence preserved by and about these remarkable people.

The aim of this study is to give as broad a prospectus as possible of the Gaelic oral tradition of Brae Lochaber. No one exemplifies the Gaelic tradition of the Braes better than John MacDonald who belonged to Highbridge. Our purpose here, then, is not simply to delineate John MacDonald as a story-teller but rather to analyse the representative content of his repertoire. By far the greater part of this corpus consists of historical traditions and supernatural tales. For that reason this study has attempted to give these aspects greater prominence and has included examples from other local tradition bearers and accounts from the literature, and thus John MacDonald is not exclusively foregrounded in the chapters dealing with historical legends and supernatural tales. Also, in order to reflect the content of John MacDonald’s repertoire these particular tales are the ones studied in greatest depth. John MacDonald can be described as the last Lochaber seanchaidh as he was the last person of a long line who not only composed over a hundred songs but had a vast knowledge of Lochaber traditions, passed on from his father, James MacDonald. Somewhat unusually John only learnt these traditional tales later in life, shortly before his father died.

Scottish Studies, 2017

There is a need for haste' formed the editorial message in An Gàidheal in May 1947, more pithily expressive in Gaelic, calling for the urgent collection of the oral tradition of Gaelic Scotland. Shortly thereafter, The Folklore Institute of Scotland (FIOS) was formed with the stated object of recording song and story and the oral cultural heritage of the country. 1 Just over four years later, The School of Scottish Studies was established with the same broad aim, symbolising the outcome of a process of scholarly argument that had emerged in the 1930s in the context of 'folkloristics' espoused by European nation-states. This essay examines the emergence of FIOS to rediscover some of the arguments adduced for the founding of the School of Scottish Studies. 2 'Tha feum air cabhaig' was the title and conclusion of a long editorial by the Rev. Thomas Murchison in An Gàidheal, the magazine of An Comunn Gàidhealach. He concluded with an oratorical flourish: 'Tha cus de'n ùine air ruith cheana, agus tha gach latha ag cur ri ar call. Dèanamaid cabhaig anns a' chùis.' 3 John Lorne Campbell was one of the names behind this initiative and, significantly in the light of his efforts, was elected President of FIOS at its meeting in Glasgow in September 1947. He had been campaigning for the support and salvaging of Scottish Gaelic and for the recognition of the extraordinary legacy of the language -its literature, its oral tradition and the many facets of the language itself. In developing his arguments, he drew on his personal experience of collecting stories and songs in Barra, Uist and Nova Scotia since 1933, and on the example of the Irish Folklore Commission. He and others placed this cause in a wider context by recalling the work of collectors of the oral tradition since the late eighteenth century, principally the initiative of his namesake, John Francis Campbell of Islay, who had collected nearly 800 stories between 1859 and 1870, and worked according to criteria which marked the emergence of a 'scientific' methodology (Campbell 1949: 9). An able and energetic writer, John Lorne Campbell appealed for national recognition of the value of Scottish Gaelic in the face of rapid cultural attrition and official indifference. His particularist argument for a vox populi before an apparently hostile government had been honed with the Sea League, founded by him and Compton Mackenzie in Barra in 1933, which drew inspiration from the activities of the nineteenth-century Land League and from the fishery policies of Norway, Iceland and the Faeroes. 4 The context of what seemed to Campbell a lonely campaign

Gaelic oral narratives recorded from the Nova Scotian community about their relations with Indigenous Americans, from their first encounters through later settlement, do not reflect the essentialist notions of racialism (inherent superiority rooted in biology) or even the presumptions of linear social evolution dominant in imperial discourse. They instead depict a meeting of kindred peoples who resolved competing interests on commonly understood terms, even if these resolutions involved contests of strength and brawn. At the same time, the tales reveal a sense of guilt about occupying territories once inhabited by Indigenous Americans.

including the islands of Mull, Coll, JTiree,Jura and Islay, has provided evidence ofan oral tradition rivalled only by that which has come to light in the Outer Hebrides from the nineteenth century, then beginning with the work of John Francis Campbell and Alexander Carmichael. This shared lore, largely orally transmitted and dating from the time of the first Gaelic settlements in Argyll from lJlster by the D6l Riada from sometime before 5oo AD, embraces a wide variety ofgenres: custom and belief, songs ofall kinds, international folktales, hero tales and romances, legends, word games and ritual formulae.

Estudios Irlandeses, 2017

Folklore, as a historical and cultural process producing and transmitting beliefs, stories, customs, and practices, has always thrived and evolved in the broader context of history and culture. Consequently, tradition and modernity have long coexisted and influenced one another, in particular in the world of folk narratives, orality and literature, storytellers and writers. Since the nineteenth century, folklorists (a category including a variety of figures) have collected, transcribed and published pieces of oral tradition, thus giving folklore a textual form and nature. However, folk narratives continue to be also a living and performed experience for the tradition bearers, a process giving rise to ever new and different expressions, according to the changing historical, social, cultural, and economic conditions. To be sure, folklore – and folk narrative – needs to be constantly lived and performed to remain something actually pertinent and significant, and not only within the oral and traditional contexts. Interestingly, between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, folklore increasingly came to be regarded as and transformed into an inheritance, a valuable, national heritage particularly fitting for those countries, such as Ireland, in search of a strong, national identity. In this light, folklore and folk narratives, beside their routine existence within their original contexts, were consciously " performed " by the official culture, which employed them in politics, education, literature, etc. In the process, it could happen that folk materials were dehistoricised and idealised, " embalmed " according to Máirtin Ó Cadhain, and even trivialised. This situation was turned into a fruitful and significant source of inspiration for the literary parody of Myles na gCopaleen (Flann O'Brien) who, in his Gaelic novel, An Béal Bocht, revealed the funny yet distressing truth of the Irish folklore being misunderstood and betrayed by the Irish themselves. Resumen. El folklore, como proceso histórico y cultural que produce y transmite creencias, historias, costumbres y prácticas, siempre ha evolucionado en el amplio contexto de la historia y la cultura. Por consecuencia, la tradición y la modernidad se han influido mutuamente a lo largo del tiempo, particularmente en el campo de las narraciones populares, la oralidad y la literatura, los contadores de historias y los escritores. Desde el siglo XIX los folcloristas (que es

International Review of Scottish Studies, 2008