The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture

Malcolm Chapman

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000435238
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sozialwissenschaften
• Categoría: Kultur- & Sozialanthropologie

Originally published in 1978, this book explores the relationship between the Gaelic and English spheres of life, from the life of the bilingual Gael, in the confrontation of Highland and Lowland Scotland and the literary expressions of these. It is argued that the picture of Gaelic society that is popularly accepted does not owe its form to any simple observation, but to symbolic and metaphorical requirements imposed by the larger society. Beginning with the birth of the Romantic movement and moving on to modern Gaelic literature and anthropological studies, aspects of the relationship of a dominant to a 'minority' culture are raised. The racial stereotypes of Celt and Anglo-Saxon that were widely accepted in the 19th Century are also discussed, and the understanding of how a dominant intellectual world has used Gaelic society in the process of seeking its own definition is pursued through a study of the concepts of 'folklore' and the 'folk'.

1
INTRODUCTION: HISTORY AND THE HIGHLANDS

The Highlands and Islands of Scotland occupy a place in Scottish history whose importance is out of all proportion to their economic significance, or to the small population that now occupies these remote and infertile regions. The face that Scotland turns to the rest of the world is, in many respects, a Highland face. When Scottish identity is sought, it is often by the invocation of Highland ways and Highland virtues that it is found. At the same time, both the Gaelic language and the Highland way of life have suffered persecution at the hands of their southern neighbours. Indeed, the history of Scotland since the Reformation reads in many ways as a sustained confrontation of the Highlands and the Lowlands.

This work is an attempt to show how the Highlander has come to occupy this paradoxical place in Scottish and British history. I have not, however, attempted a history of the Highlands, or of Gaelic culture and life. The place that the Highlander occupies in the Lowland imagination cannot be understood by a simple reading of Highland history. This is not to deny the importance of this history, but rather to recognise that the importance it assumes is something we need to explain. Every country has its minorities, its histories of lost opportunity and its vanished and vanishing traditions, few of which come to dominate their history in the way that the Highlander looms in the Scottish imagination. The past only offers its message at the enquiry of the present, and it is the nature and structure of that enquiry, as it has been turned towards the Scottish Gaidhealtachd,¹ that I attempt to examine and explain here.

This is an often tortuous exercise, and it does not produce results that can be laid out in chronological sequence, although for conventional convenience the chapters are laid out in roughly such a sequence. History might be said to make itself forwards, but it is always written backwards, and within this tension we have always to be looking both ways. Yesterday’s commentary leads to today’s, and is then re-interpreted in the light of the latter. It is not only the consciousness of the historian that we are concerned with here, however. The very objects of study, the Highlanders themselves, have long been conscious of their place in our history, and in acting with such knowledge further tangle the relationship of the present to the past, of fact to fiction, and of ‘reality’ to the mere ‘printed word’. Each chapter within this work has complicated and sometimes only implicit repercussions in others, and the ideas here discussed play themselves out through one another in a way that defies simple linear exposition. This is not an academic pretension, nor an apology for lack of clarity. Ideological structures, by their very existence, show themselves to have a multifold capacity for self-validation and self-regeneration, and the power that inheres in their complexity must make us shy of too readily reducing them to step-by-step explanation.

The history of the Gaels and Gaelic in Scotland is easily accessible in several publications, notably J.L. Campbell (1950) and K. MacKinnon (1974). In spite of the frequency with which this history is referred to in speaking of the Gael, it is in many respects curiously irrelevant to an understanding of the position that the modern Gael occupies. I only intend to give here the barest outline, partly as conventional background, and partly to establish the claim to national antiquity that the Scottish Gael can make (more detailed information on the early history of the Scots in Scotland can be found in, for example, J. Bannerman, 1969, 1974; M.O. Anderson, 1973).

The Gaelic language was introduced into Scotland by settlers from Ireland in the early centuries of the first millennium AD. These Irish settlers came from the kingdom of Dalriada in Northern Ireland, and the date at which they assumed political importance in Scotland is generally reckoned to be about 500 or 600 AD. By 844 the Gaelic king Kenneth Mac Alpin had emerged as ruler of the Piets and the Scots, inhabiting a kingdom united north of the Forth/Clyde line. By the eleventh century the Gaelic language was at its most widespread, spoken throughout most of the area covered by modern Scotland. It is commonly felt that it was at this period that Scottish nationhood was first fully realised, under the Gaelic-speaking monarch Malcolm Canmore. Smout has said of the Scotland of this period that ‘it would be wrong to think of it in any sense as a state, Celtic or otherwise’ (T.C. Smout, 1975, p. 20). It can also be said, however, that ‘The kingdom had therefore a strong Irish-Celtic emphasis, for it had been men of Dalriada who proved themselves strongest in arms and subtlest in diplomacy’ (ibid.).

The memory of this Gaelic hegemony has not been entirely lost, and modern Gaelic speakers can claim, even if for many it is a claim retrospectively established by scholars rather than one handed down by tradition, that Scotland belongs de jure to the Gael, and that the de facto occupancy of the Anglo-Saxon and his tongue is an injustice that history might one day be expected to repair.

Malcolm Canmore went to the English royal house for a bride, and his prize, the ‘great, formidable and religious English queen, Saint Margaret’ (ibid., p. 21) brought both English religious forms and southern nobility with her. After this, the Gaelic language began a slow decline in prestige and influence, and the successors of Malcolm Canmore and Margaret ‘held the values of European civilisation more dear than the traditions of Celtic Alba’ (ibid.)· Independent Gaelic power survived for much longer in the near-autonomous Gaelic/Norse Lordship of the Isles which was established by Somerled in the twelfth century, and which comprised the Western Isles and Coastlands northwards from Kintyre. The Lordship of the Isles was forfeited in 1493, and attempts by Clan Donald to re-establish it in the sixteenth century failed.

With the departure of James VI to London in 1603, and the parliamentary Union of 1707, Gaelic culture lost all contact with its claim to legitimate power and greatness. Gaelic politics henceforth became a rather scrappy and bloody affair, as internal loyalties and disloyalties were exploited and manipulated by distant powers. Even so, however: ‘a rich and varied world existed behind the clouds of political and military turbulence that for most people represents the “history” of Gaelic Scotland’ (J. Maclnnes, 1976, p. 59).

Gaelic-speaking Highlanders have exercised considerable if fleeting political power at various times in recent centuries, when their antipathy to government from the Lowlands coupled with the martial prowess of a pastoral mountain people were recruited to serve a political cause within a larger Scottish or British context. We can mention here the campaigns of Montrose in the civil wars of the seventeenth century, the campaign of Claverhouse that culminated in the battle of Killiecrankie in 1689, or the risings provoked by the exiled Stuart monarchy in 1715 and 1745. This military prowess did nothing, however, to effect any reversal in the fortunes of the Gaelic language, which was probably widely regarded by non-speakers who knew of its existence with the same contempt, as that expressed in the Statutes of Iona² of 1609, where it is described as ‘one of the chief and principall causis of the continewance of barbaritie and incivilitie amongis the inhabitantis of the lies and Heylandis’ (cited K. MacKinnon, 1974, p. 35). The military prowess of the Highlander was, indeed, his undoing, since it provoked severe repressive and retributive measures by the central authorities. Smout says: ‘From the point of view of London the main problem after the Union was the Jacobites, whose stronghold in the hills beyond the Tay might yet have proved the Achilles heel of the whole British Protestant Establishment’ (T.C. Smout, 1975, p. 206). This diseased member of the body politic was ruthlessly cauterised after the ‘’Forty-five’, and the martial ambitions of the Highlanders were diverted into the service of the legitimate Crown: ‘The raising of Highland regiments, upon commissions granted to their chiefs, took sullen and resentful men away from their despoiled glens, and used them in the creation of an imperial Britain’ (J. Prebble, 1973, p. 302).

The Gaelic language has been subject to persecution, denigration and neglect, both officially and unofficially, since the early seventeenth century. This has been particularly operative within the field of education, and as a consequence an unfavourable attitude towaŗds Gaelic as representative of ignorance, old-fashioned ways, and the like, is still prevalent among many Scottish people, both Gaelic- and non-Gaelic-speaking. Recent years have seen, however, a resurgence of interest in Gaelic throughout Scotland. Evening classes in Gaelic are popular and well attended throughout the Lowlands, and Gaelic publication is in a stronger position than it has ever been, in spite of the continuing steady decline in the number of native speakers.³ John Prebble says of the Scottish Gaels: ‘The Scots of Dalriada gave the land its name and its kings, the spirit of its history and the substance of its dreams, but their language would die with them’ (ibid., p. 31).

The image of the Gaelic world as the ever-departing spiritual substance of Scottish life is very compelling, and while we might wonder about the ‘spirit of history’ and the location and status of the dreams of a nation, and question the inevitability of fate when it asks for the disappearance of the Gaelic language, Prebble’s imagery here is of a type that we find again and again in discussions of Scottish history. We are faced with the problem that a language not understood by over 98 per cent of the Scottish people, with a modern literary tradition that only begins to assume any importance in the late eighteenth century and is still very small (although substantial enough considering the size of the community from which it springs), and spoken by a people who have been regarded for centuries by their southern neighbours as barbarians, should now be regarded as the quintessence of Scottish culture. As Billy Wolfe, the chairman of the SNP, says: Ι want to learn Gaelic. I see that as a symbolic assertion of my being Scottish’ (B. Wolfe, 1973, p. 161).

Today this is often explained as a waning of the influence of things English, as the virtues of Scottish nationhood are reasserted, and Scotland sees itself as ‘the Scotshire Ghost of itself left by the corrosive “Union”’ (T. Scott, 1970, p. 9). The suppression of Gaelic is often judged, popularly if not always in considered judgement, to have been due, in some sense, to ‘English’ oppression and influence. The easy association of the English language, by which Gaelic was replaced, with the kingdom of England and its institutions, makes it possible to deny Scottish political and moral responsibility for the suppression of Gaelic culture and; language. This denial gives to the high esteem in which Gaelic is now held a place in a newly coherent and continuous Scottish history, uninterrupted and untroubled except by outside influence.

The paradoxical position of Gaelic in Scotland today, as both spiritual substance of the nation and struggling minority language, cannot be explained by simply looking to the history of the Gaels, and attempting objectively to assess their importance in Scottish history. We must remember that the fact that Prebble can speak, along with many, of the Celtic spirit of Scottish history as a continuing and vital thread unbroken since the Gaels of Dalriada first set foot on Scottish shores, does not mean that this thread has always been recognised or highly valued. James VI and I and his courtiers would surely have found little value in the notion, and to the majority of the inhabitants of eighteenth-century Edinburgh it would have been an incomprehensible claim to an ancestry best hidden.

Since the eighteenth century, however, the Scottish people have increasingly looked to the Highlands to provide a location for an autonomy in which they could lodge their own political, literary and historical aspirations. They have thereby been allowed to reap all the benefits of Union, while at the same time retaining a location for all the virtues of sturdy independence. This has of course occurred over a period when Highland society was being reduced and scattered by clearances and forced emigrations, and by religious and cultural imperialisms of various kinds. We can illustrate this paradox in various ways. Traditional Highland dress was proscribed by a governmental decree of 1747, but two generations later George ΓV was visiting Edinburgh and making Highland dress fashionable by wearing it himself. The Highlands have long been derided as the barbarous antithesis of southern civilisation and sophistication, but they have at the same time become the location of all the virtues that civilisation has felt itself to lack. Gaelic hasŁqng been kept from the lips of Gaelic-speaking schoolchildren by derision and by the threat of corporal punishment, and the place of Gaelic in the education of such schoolchildren is still tenuous, yet at the same time more and more people throughout Scotland are learning Gaelic. The economy of the Highlands is now, and has been for a long time, depressed and depressing, and yet many thousands of people go there to take their holidays, and to look for a secure and changeless way of life.

It is not only the holidaymaker and the Gaelic-leamer that can find fascination in the Highlands. Martainn Domhnallach, in a recent issue of the West Highland Free Press, complains of another regular visitor:

An tug sibh an aire cho deidheil’s a tha sgoilearan -neo co-dhiubh feadhainn a tha ag gabhail orra fhein a bhith ’nan sgoilearan—air fas air a bhith a’ rannsachadh’s ag cnuasachd feadh na Gaidhealtachd bho chionn ghoirid? Cha mhor nach eil iad cho lionmhor ris a’ mheanbhchuileig agus a cheart cho feumail! (M. Domhnallach, 1978, p. 2)

Have you noticed how enthusiastic scholars—or at least people that claim to be scholars—have been getting recently about researching and investigating in the Gaidhealtachd? They are almost as plentiful as midges, and about as useful! (my translation)

It is often claimed by aggrieved Highland scholars that Scottish school-children are taught to regard the Highlander as a violent and feckless barbarian. As MacLean complains:

Now that Gaelic is no longer spoken, the use of Gaelic sounds in English speech must be avoided at all costs. There is nothing worse than having the epithet ‘Heilant’ hurled at one. That is one of the results of the Scottish educational system. There has always been some subtle insinuation that Highland and barbaric are synonymous. Formal Scottish historians did not quite say so. Nevertheless, they implied as much (C. MacLean, 1959, p. 41)

At best the Highlander is credited with a peripheral glamour; at worst children are taught to view him as a mere stumbling block on the road to civilisation and Union. J.L. Campbell has written that ‘The official history of Scotland used in schools today, even in Gaelic-speaking areas, is that of the late Professor Hume Brown, whose sympathies were strongly Whig and anti-Gaelic’ (J.L. Campbell, 1950, p. 12). The relationship between what is actually written in the textbooks and the impression that schoolchildren get from reading them is by no means simple. Such pedagogic processes operate as much through tacit oral suggestion as through the printed word, and are not very susceptible to demonstration. It is perhaps worth noting that Campbell’s complaints about the education of Scottish children cannot, at least from my own school experience, be extended to English schools. Scottish history was largely ignored as a separate study, it is true, but I managed to acquire, through what process of tacit suggestion and private reading I am not sure, a view of the Highlands and of Scotland in general that gave them every credit. England and its people seemed pale and lifeless by comparison.

There is, I think, little doubt where the majority of public sympathy lies in looking at the civil wars between ‘Cavalier’ and ‘Roundhead’ in the seventeenth century (see, for example, 1066 And All That, W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman (1930), 1976, pp. 71–88). Although eclipsed temporarily by the constitutional rectitude of William of Orange, by the time Culloden came round the Stuart dynasty was thoroughly restored to its dashing and cavalier place. Opposed to the dull and faceless Electors (not even proper kings) of Hanover, the Bonny Prince of the ’Forty-five takes all the sympathies. My early appreciation of Scottish history was informed by a keen regret that his gallant enterprise had failed. I do not think that I was alone in this. J.L. Campbell admits, in writing his history of Gaelic in Scotland, that his ‘personal sympathies are Jacobite’ (J.L. Campbell, 1950, p. 12). I think that I can add, on behalf of my primary school colleagues, that ours were as well, although we little knew what exalted company we were keeping—‘George IV himself had Jacobite sympathies’ (D. Daiches, 1973, p. 324).

Exactly who among the population of the British Isles has been taught to view Highland culture as barbarous and worthless must remain a matter for impression and conjecture. Even so, the vehemence with which Highland scholars will deny this judgement makes it dif· dicult to avoid the conclusion that several generations of Highlanders have been so taught. It is also clear that this apparent self-denigration was externally orientated, and that southern ways were held up as a model for emulation. We can readily understand that those who found no virtue in this emulation would interpret it as an imposition from the south. On the other hand, it should be emphasised that those who gave to the Highlands their enviable place in our literature were predominantly Lowlanders, and that many of those who have been foremost in deriding the old Highland ways have been young and laudably ambitious Highlanders, impatient of ‘Tìr nan Òg’. We should also note that the old lore and customs of the nineteenth century are available to us as much through the efforts of cosmopolitan scholars as through the efforts of Highlanders, and that it was a cl...