The Dean of Lismore's Book: A Selection of Ancient Gaelic Poetry

by Unknown

The Dean’s MS. has a double value, philological and literary, and is calculated to throw light both on the language and the literature of the Highlands of Scotland. It has a philological value, because its peculiar orthography presents the language at the time in its aspect and character as a spoken language, and enables us to ascertain whether many of the peculiarities which now distinguish it were in existence three hundred years ago; and it has a literary value, because it contains poems attributed to Ossian, and to other poets prior to the sixteenth century, which are not to be found elsewhere; and thus presents to us specimens of the traditionary poetry current in the Highlands prior to that period, which are above suspicion, having been collected upwards of three hundred years ago, and before any controversy on the subject had arisen.

It has been found impossible to present so large a collection entire, but the selection has been made with reference to these two objects. Each poem selected for publication has been presented entire. There is a literal translation of the poem made by the Rev. T. M’Lauchlan, and appended is the original Gaelic text of the poem in the Dean’s orthography, exactly as it appears in the MS.; and, on the opposite page, the same Gaelic has been transferred by Mr. M’Lauchlan into the modern orthography of the Scotch Gaelic, which is nearly the same as that of the Irish, so as to afford the means of comparing the one orthography with the other, and the modern spoken dialect in the Highlands with the language of the poems collected by the Dean upwards of three hundred years ago, as well as to furnish a test of the accuracy of the translation, by showing the rendering given to the Dean’s language.[14]

The present spoken language of the Highlands of Scotland is, as is well known, a dialect[15] of that great branch of the Celtic languages termed the Gwyddelian or Gaelic, and to which belong also the Irish and Manx, or spoken language of the Isle of Man. These three dialects of the Gaelic branch of the Celtic languages, the Irish, the Scotch Gaelic, and the Manx, approach each other so nearly, as to form in fact but one language; and the peculiarities which distinguish them from one another are not of a nature sufficiently broad or vital to constitute either of them a distinct language.

The language spoken by the Highlanders of Scotland is termed by them simply Gaelic; but the name of Erse has occasionally been bestowed upon it during the last few centuries by the Lowlanders.[16] As early as the year 1690 a short vocabulary of Scotch Gaelic words was appended to an edition of Bedel’s Irish Bible, to adapt it to the use of the Scotch Highlanders; and a somewhat fuller vocabulary, by the same author, was published in Nicolson’s Scottish Historical Library in 1702.

In 1741, a more complete vocabulary was published by the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge, for the use of their schools in the Highlands. It was compiled by Mr. Alexander M’Donald, schoolmaster at Ardnamurchan. Another vocabulary was published in 1795 by Robert M’Farlane; and, in 1815, a further step in advance was made by the larger vocabulary of Mr. P. M’Farlane.

In 1825, a large quarto dictionary of the Scotch Gaelic was published by R. A. Armstrong; and in three years afterwards the splendid dictionary compiled by the first Gaelic scholars, under the auspices of the Highland Society of Scotland, appeared. In this dictionary Gaelic words from all quarters are inserted; but those which belong to the vernacular dialect of the Scotch Highlands are carefully distinguished.

The small dictionary compiled by M’Alpine, a schoolmaster in Islay, affords a genuine representation of the Gaelic spoken in that island.

The only grammar of the Scotch Gaelic which it is necessary to notice, is the able and philosophic grammar by Alexander Stewart, Minister of the Gospel at Dingwall, the first edition of which was published in 1801, and the second in 1812. As a first attempt to reduce the spoken language of the Scotch Highlanders to a grammatical system, it is a work of rare excellence and fidelity, and all other grammars have been more or less taken from it.

This grammar, then, and the vocabularies and dictionaries above referred to, contain the Gaelic language as spoken, at the time of their compilation, in the Highlands of Scotland, and afford the materials for judging of the character of those peculiarities which distinguish it from the Irish and Manx Gaelic.[17]

The differences between the spoken language of the Scottish Highlands and the Irish exist partly in the pronunciation, where the accentuation of the language is different, where that peculiar change in the initial consonant, produced by the influence of the previous word, and termed by the Irish grammarians eclipsis, is unknown except in the sibilant, where the vowel sounds are different, and there are even traces of a consonantal permutation; partly in the grammar, where the Scotch Gaelic prefers the analytic form of the verb, and has no present tense, the old present being now used for the future, and the present formed by the auxiliary verb, where the plural of one class of the nouns is formed in a peculiar manner, resembling the Anglo-Saxon, and a different negative is used; partly in the idioms of the language, where a greater preference is shown to express the idea by the use of substantives, and the verb is anxiously avoided; and in the vocabulary, which varies to a considerable extent, where words now obsolete in Irish are still living words, and others are used in a different sense.[18]