Clan Traditions and Popular Tales of the Western Highlands and Islands

by Unknown

Highland Monthly.

Vol. I. No. 10. p. 622, Introduction, &c.

Waifs and Strays of Celtic Tradition.

Argyllshire Series, No. I.: The Good Housewife (p. 54–69).

Argyllshire Series, No. IV.: The Fians: or Stories, Poems, and Traditions of Fionn and his Warrior Band. Collected entirely from oral sources. 1891.

In presenting his material to the English reader Campbell may profitably be compared with Islay. In few ways was the work of the latter more fruitful than in his mode of rendering Gaelic into English. It is impossible, for instance, to look at the work done of late by the distinguished Irish folk-lorists who are adding a new chapter to Gaelic romance, at the work of Douglas Hyde and W. Larminie and Jeremiah Curtin, and not recognise how much in point of colour and tone and smack of the soil their translations excel those of the pre-Campbell generation. Islay may, at times, have pushed his theory of idiomatic fidelity too far, occasionally where he aims at a rendering he achieves a distortion, but as a whole the effect of strange, wild, archaic atmosphere and medium is given with unerring—one would call it skill, did one not feel that it is the outcome of a nature steeped in the Gaelic modes of conception and expression, and bold enough to invent the English requisite to give an adumbration of them. For indeed the speech of the Popular Tales is a distinctive variety of English, deserving study both from the philologist and the artist in words. Islay himself never handled this speech to better effect than did John Gregorson Campbell in the fine tale, for instance, of Sir Olave O’Corn (Gaelic Soc. of Inverness, Vol. XIII.), or in the Muileartach (Waifs and Strays, Vol. IV.), though as a rule he keeps closer than Islay to the ordinary standard of English expression. Readers of this volume cannot fail to note the exceeding skill with which the pithy, imaginative turns of thought, so plentiful in the original, are rendered into English. The reader is at once taken out of nineteenth century civilisation, and, which is surely the first thing required from the translator, by the mere sound and look of the words carried back into an older, wilder, simpler and yet, in some ways, more artificially complex life. The difficulty of rendering Gaelic into English does not lie in the fact of its possessing a rude simplicity which the more sophisticated language is incapable of reproducing, but rather in that, whilst the emotions and conceptions are close to the primitive passions of nature in a degree that our civilisation has long forsworn, the mode of expression has the richness of colour and elaborate artificiality of a pattern in the Book of Kells. To neglect the latter characteristic is to miss not only a salient feature of the original but to obscure the significance of a dominant factor in the evolution of Gaelic artistry.

That Campbell, like Islay, felt the paramount necessity of endeavouring to reproduce the formal characteristics of his Gaelic text is certain; like Islay, he too, had the true scholar’s regard for his matter. To put down what he heard, to comment upon what he found, was his practice. It seems obvious, but many collectors neglect it all the same. Nor in his essays at interpretation is he other than in full sympathy with his subject. He not only understands but himself possesses the mythopoeic faculty, and if this is endowed with a wider knowledge, a more refined culture than belonged to the Gaelic bards who first gave these songs and stories their present shape, or to the peasants and fishermen who lovingly repeat them, it differs in degree only, not in kind. It may be doubted that the framers of the Muileartach consciously embodied the conceptions which Campbell has read into the old poem (Waifs and Strays, IV. pp. 131–135), but I think it certain that he does but give shape with the precision of a a higher culture to ideas which, with them, never emerged from the stage of mythic realisation.

The Present Work.

Most of the matter contained in the present volume had been partially, if not definitely, prepared for press by the author. The choice and arrangement are largely due to his sister, Mrs. Wallace, his devoted fellow-worker. Still it must not be forgotten that we have here a collection of posthumous remains which have not enjoyed the benefit of the author’s final shaping and revision. But it has been judged best by the editors of the series to preserve these remains substantially as they were left, with a minimum of indispensable revision. The volume may lose in other respects, but it is, at all events, the work of the author and not of his editor friends. The latter have felt that regard for the genuineness of Mr. Campbell’s text was the first of their duties towards his memory.

This volume thus represents the contents of Campbell’s note-books rather than provides such an ordered collection of material, bearing upon a particular section of Gaelic folk-lore, as he has furnished in the preceding volume of this series. But for this very reason it yields better evidence to the wealth and variety of Gaelic popular tradition. A large portion of the book is local legendary matter, and is closely analogous to what the Icelandic Sagas must have been in one stage of their development, a stage overlaid by the artistry of a greater school of prose story tellers than ever took the sagas of Gaelic Scotland in hand. Professor York Powell has well analysed the phase through which such stories as those of Burnt Njal or Egil Skallagrimm’s son must have passed before they reached the form familiar to us.[4] He describes the popular narrator working up a mass of local, fairly authentic detail about his hero, running it into a conventional mould, and then fitting the result into a scheme of wider historic scope. The Gaelic matter preserved alike by Mr. Campbell in this volume and by Mr. MacDougall in the first volume of the series has not got beyond the local anecdote stage, though, as in the variant forms of the tale of the Grizzled Lad and MacNeill (p. 5, et seq.), we can see the conventionalizing process at work, accentuating certain details, discarding others, with the view of transmuting the blurred photographic variety of life into the clear-cut unity of art. But the process is rudimentary. It is strange that this should be so considering the wealth of conventional situations that lay ready to the hand of the Gaelic story teller in the highly elaborated sagas of Cuchulainn and of Finn, for the purpose of moulding the achievements of historical Campbells, MacLeans and MacNeills, into a satisfactory artistic form. Such convention as is apparent in these scraps of sagas is related to that of the folk-tale rather than to that of the great heroic legends. An interesting example is afforded by the story of Mac an Uidhir. This may well have a basis of fact, indeed Campbell cites an actual analogue, but it has been run into the shape of an ordinary separation and timely-recognition folk-tale. Other instances will present themselves to the reader and afford instructive study of the action and reaction upon each other of folk-life and oral narrative legend.