THE DAN-NAN-RON
NOTE
This story is founded upon a superstition familiar throughout the Hebrides. The legend exists in Ireland, too; for Mr Yeats tells me that last summer he met an old Connaught fisherman, who claimed to be of the Sliochd-nan-Ron—an ancestry, indeed, indicated in the man’s name: Rooney.
As to my use of the forename ‘Gloom’ (in this story, in its sequel “Green Branches,” and in “The Anointed Man”), I should explain that the designation is, of course, not a real name. At the same time, I have actual warrant for its use; for I knew a Uist man who, in the bitterness of his sorrow, after his wife’s death in childbirth, named his son Mulad (i.e. the gloom of sorrow: grief).
THE DAN-NAN-RON
When Anne Gillespie, that was my friend in Eilanmore, left the island after the death of her uncle, the old man Robert Achanna, it was to go far west.
Among the men of the outer isles who for three summers past had been at the fishing off Eilanmore, there was one named Mànus MacCodrum. He was a fine lad to see, but though most of the fisher-folk of the Lewis and North Uist are fair, either with reddish hair and grey eyes or blue-eyed and yellow-haired, he was of a brown skin with dark hair and dusky brown eyes. He was, however, as unlike to the dark Celts of Arran and the Inner Hebrides as to the Northmen. He came of his people, sure enough. All the MacCodrums of North Uist had been brown-skinned and brown-haired and brown-eyed; and herein may have lain the reason why, in bygone days, this small clan of Uist was known throughout the Western Isles as the Sliochd nan Ròn, the offspring of the Seals.
Not so tall as most of the North Uist and Long Island men, Mànus MacCodrum was of a fair height and supple and strong. No man was a better fisherman than he, and he was well-liked of his fellows, for all the morose gloom that was upon him at times. He had a voice as sweet as a woman’s when he sang, and he sang often, and knew all the old runes of the islands, from the Obb of Harris to the Head of Mingulay. Often, too, he chanted the beautiful orain spioradail of the Catholic priests and Christian Brothers of South Uist and Barra, though where he lived in North Uist he was the sole man who adhered to the ancient faith.