The late Campbell of Islay to the late J. G. Campbell.
Travellers’ Club,
Feb. 27, 1871.
My Dear Sir,
I’ll get you the books you name and send them soon. With regard to sàil there was once an actor who amused an audience by putting his head under his cloak and squealing like a pig. A countryman rose and said that he would squeal better next day. So a match was made and tried. The audience applauded the actor and hissed the countryman. But he produced a pig from under his cloak. I know what the man meant who signed Sàil Dhiarmaid. The man who spoke no other language pointed to the place in his foot which he meant by Sàil, so I learned the lesson, and anybody who will try may learn a good deal about Gaelic in the same fashion.
If a man starts with the conviction that knowledge is to the unknown as a drop in the ocean—he will get on.
I have MacNicol, and know his remark about Ossian’s leg.
I have now got the only copy that ever was written, so far as I know, and I shall be glad to get more. But we must all take what we can get. As far as fixing the king or the country and the date, that is perfectly hopeless. I have about 16 versions of one story in Gaelic, and no two have the same name. I suppose that there must be sixty versions of it known in other languages, and no two are alike. The oldest I know is scattered in ejaculations and separate lines through the Rigveda Sanhitâ, which is a collection of hymns in Sanscrit, and the oldest things known. St. George and the Dragon is a form of the story. Perseus and Andromeda is another. In Gaelic it is generally Mac an Iasgair, or Iain Mac somebody, or Fionn Mac a’ Bhradain, a something to do with a mermaid or a dragon, the herding of cows and the slaying of giants. The stories to which I referred were told me by John Ardfenaig as facts (the Duke of Argyll’s factor in the Ross of Mull). A man built a boat. Another, to spite him, said that the death of a man was in that boat—no one would go to sea in it, and at last the boat was sold by the builder to an unbeliever in ghosts and dreams. The other was how the turnips were protected in Tiree. If you know these you have got far, but if not you have a good deal to learn in Tiree.
I wish you success anyhow,