Narrative Song Rhythm in the Lays of Fionn mac Cumhaill: Performance Practices and Insights into Medieval Gaelic Heroic Song

By Andreas Hirt

An Honours Thesis Submitted to the Department of Celtic Studies Spring 2008 In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Saint Francis Xavier University Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada

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Hirt, Andreas. M.A.: Celtic Studies. Saint Francis Xavier University. May, 2008. Narrative Song Rhythm in the Lays of Fionn mac Cumhaill: Performance Practices and Insights into Medieval Gaelic Heroic Song. Major Professor: Michael Linkletter, Ph.D.

Narrative singing is all but nonexistant. With the rise of instruments in the sixteenth century, repetitive rhythmic groupings of three or four became the standard for musical expression. The common rhythm of narrative speech became overwhelmed and forced to alter to fit this exaggerated musical pattern.

Today, narrative singing exists in ecclesiastical chant, recitativo secco, sean-nos

Irish traditional singing, but most importantly, recordings of medieval Gaelic heroic song of the mythological hero, Fionn mac Cumhaill.

Beginning with a survey of extant recordings of these lays, timing patterns of various languages including English, French, Italian, and Gaelic are investigated to better understand performance techniques and the nature of Gaelic poetry.

This analysis also clarifies appropriate rhythmic compositional considerations whatever the language.

By studying narrative vocal practices of this almost extirpated musical form, all modern musical styles and forms may be refreshed and invigorated.

iii iv Preface

I am indebted to a great number of people who helped me with this work; their wisdom and encouragement have resulted in this thesis. My principal thanks is owed to Dr. Michael Linkletter, professor at St. Francis Xavier

University and thesis advisor, who tirelessly endured my confused presence for two years as I struggled with what I found was an incredibly vast and profound subject. I also owe a great debt of gratitude to all those who encouraged me and gave me such a love of music, language, and performance; In chronological order they are: Carmen Savoca and Peyton Hibbitt (voice teachers), Thomas Kremer

(actor and director, student of Stella Adler), Catriona Niclomhair Parsons

(Gaelic), Dr. Kenneth Nilsen (Gaelic), and Dr. James MacDonald (Gaelic). I am also indebted to Effie Rankin for indicating that three versions of "Catriona

Nighean Dughaill" existed; she also was a fount of knowledge during my stay at

Saint Francis Xavier University.

These people shared a common characteristic: they allowed me to make my own mistakes. There is a wonderful expression in Italian, Chi non fa, non falla

(He who does nothing makes no mistakes). If you want to learn, you have to understand that you will fail; it is a part of learning. I did a lot of learning; I failed often. The aforementioned mentors allowed me to make my own mistakes and forgave me my ignorance; their patience allowed me to come to a deeper understanding of the world. Thank you all so much.

v vi Table of Contents List of Figures ix

1. Introduction 1

2. The Fenian Lay 5 2.1. Characters and Social Situation 6 2.2. Corpus of Lays 11 2.3. Dates of Composition 14 2.4. The Influence of Macpherson's The Poems ofOssian 18

3. Oral versus Literary Composition of Lays 23 3.1. The Written Genesis 26 3.2. The Oral Genesis: The Work of Parry and Lord 29 3.3. Literacy and Illiteracy Coexistence 33

4. How Gaelic Poetry was Created 41 4.1. The Gaelic Caste System 41 4.2. Composition Practices of the Filidh 43

5. Narrative Song Conventions 51 5.1. Performance Practices of the Baird 51 5.2. Musical Accompaniment 56

6. Metre in Fenian Lays 61 6.1. Basic Construction of Fenian Lays 61 6.2. Vernacular Changes to Fenian Lays 63

7. Rhythm of the Words: a Brief Survey of Languages in Europe 69 7.1. Syllable-Timing in the Classical Languages 71 7.2. Stress-Timing in Most Northern European Languages 75 7.3. Syllabic and Stress Confusion 79 7.4. Timing in the Gaelic Language 82 7.5. Annotating Poetry According to Attributes of Each Language 83 7.5.1. Classicist Method 83 vii 7.5.2. The Structuralist Method 84 7.5.3. The Generative Method 85 7.5.4. The Temporalist Method 85 7.5.5. Stress and Silent Stress 86 7.5.6. Blankenhorn's Method for Gaelic 90 7.6. Poetic Structure versus Performance 91

8. Rhythm in Music 93 8.1. The Hierarchy of Beats 93 8.2. Fitting the Gaelic Language into a Strong Rhythmic Pattern 96 8.2.1. Forcing Gaelic Poetry into the Hierarchy of Beats 98 8.3. Pitch Inflection in the Indo-European Languages 104 8.4. Church Chant Forms that Match Speech Patterns 105

9. Musical Propensities of which to be Careful 109 9.1. Mispronunciation of Words 109 9.2. The Propensity to Structure Music Ill 9.2.1. The Propensity to Add Notes Ill 9.2.2. The Propensity to Structure Rhythm 113 9.2.3. The Propensity to Rhythmically 'Flatten-Out' 114 9.2.4. The Propensity to 'Flatten-Out' Pitches 115 9.3. Vibrato Reduction 115 9.4. Lack of Rhythm in Fenian Lays 118 9.5. Transcribing Recordings of Gaelic Music 120

10. Conclusion 123

Appendix A (Laoidh Fhraoich) 127

Appendix B (MacFarlane's Lay Tunes) 129

Bibliography 133

viii List of Figures

Figure 1: Laoi na Mna 53

Figure 2: King David Playing a Lyre 59

Figure 3: A Reproduction Lyre from Sutton Hoo 60

Figure 4: Timing of Stressed Syllables in an Average Sentence 76

Figure 5: Timing of Stressed Syllables with Added Non-stressed Syllables 76

Figure 6: Timing of Stressed Syllables with Removed Non-stressed Syllables 77

Figure 7: 'Hallelujah' from Handel's Messiah 94

Figure 8: Catriona Nighean Dubhghaill 102

Figure 9: Catriona Nigh 'n Dughaill 102

Figure 10: Catriona ni'n Dughaill 103

Figure 11: The Four Authentic Modes 107

ix X 1. Introduction

Although at one time quite popular, narrative singing is all but extinct today.

Culled from a once vast landscape of musical styles, narrative singing was a highly prised and important performance medium. This type of singing was characterized by solo, monophonic melodies. Pitches were pre-determined, but the rhythm of the words varied as speech naturally did. The subject of these songs overwhelmingly focused on heroic sagas in the Indo-European tradition.

Such songs were created in the Early to Central Middle Ages. References made to such songs describe a remarkably similar set of performance practices.

Confusion of authentic performance practices often originates from written records of societies where narrative singing has been extirpated by the unbending force of rhythmic dance music. Narrative singing does still exist in crippled forms through the performance of operatic recitativo secco and liturgical chant in Europe. One extant example of narrative singing can be seen in the heroic songs concerning the Gaelic mythological hero Fionn mac Cumhaill.

These songs no longer exist within the living Gaelic tradition, but there are extant recordings made in the last fifty years that have preserved, though altered slightly, this unique narrative singing performance practice. These songs date from the ninth century C.E. but were coalesced thematically by the twelfth.

While there were prose tales, many of these tales were put into verse and were sung. The lays of Fionn mac Cumhaill show a remarkable similarity to heroic

1 sagas from other European cultures in the narrative manner of their performance.

The sung poems of Fionn mac Cumhaill, called lays, were fairly long in length, often consisting of over fifty verses of four lines per verse syllabic poetry.

Although these lays have been assumed to have been composed by the professional poets of Ireland and Scotland, it is quite possible that these poems were actually created by the non-aristocratic Gael and were a part of everyday communal life. The songs could have been sung to the accompaniment of the harp or lyre, but were just as easily performed without such instrumental support.

One remarkable feature of these songs is that the rhythm of the song was not sung to a repetitive musical measure; that is, measures did not contain an even number of beats. Indeed, there were no measures or bar lines as is insisted upon in modern European art music forms. The rhythm of each syllable was not elongated or truncated in order to fit within a set time interval. Therefore, the rhythm of the song was the rhythm of speech.

If one could travel back in time and sample performance practices of heroic lays from one culture to the next, the pattern of the song rhythm would be seen to match the pattern of each culture's language. This is one of the key determining features of a culture's "national" music. Unique musical styles can ultimately be traced to a language's rhythmic pattern. In investigating the lays of

Fionn mac Cumhaill, the basic pattern of the Gaelic language can be seen to

2 define the rhythmic pattern of the lays. In order to highlight this Gaelic linguistic pattern, rhythmic patterns of Italian and English will be analysed as well.

Therefore, it is the purpose of this thesis to explore the musical performance practices of the now nearly extinct musical medium of narrative song with particular emphasis placed upon the lays of Fionn mac Cumhaill. In order to accomplish this, the lays of Fionn mac Cumhaill will be explored by investigating their history, thematic elements, characters, and the contextualization of the performance practices of these lays. This analysis will not only allow re-creators of Fenian lays to perform Fenian lays in a more authentic manner, but provide a basis for scholars and performers to understand their own nation's music and perhaps serve as an impetus for modern musical form renewal.

3 4 2. The Fenian Lay

According to Gaelic lore, the great heroic figure Fionn mac Cumhaill and his band of hunter-warriors, the fianna (Fenians), protected Ireland from mythological beasts and invaders in the Early Middle Ages. These tales, grouped together, were often called the Fenian Cycle. Fionn had a son, Ossian

(Ir. Oisin, ScG. Oisean), who was the supposed author of a number of poems that documented the heroism of his father (see Dooley and Roe, Tales of the Elders of

Ireland (Acallam na Senorach), 1999); therefore, the whole of these tales are also referred to as the Ossianic Cycle. These tales were transmitted through written and oral prose and poetry. The surviving prose texts are the older of the two forms, although often a poem would be inserted into a prose tale. However, significant bodies of works exist which are poetic in nature and were often sung; in English, these are called lays (Scots Gaelic, laoidh; Irish Gaelic, laoi, French: lot).

Various other terms in English have been used to describe this type of sung poetry; for example, the word "ballad." Unfortunately, the term ballad tends to make one think of nineteenth-century English romantic verse (Meek,

"Development" 132). Therefore, the term "lay" will supplant other English terms such as ballad, narrative -poem, song, or Gaelic words such as dan, duan, laoidh, or laoi (Maclnnes, "Twentieth" 103; Meek, "Development" 132) in this thesis.

5 2.1. Characters and Social Situation

A common re-occurring social situation that seems to extend across time, place, and cultural boundaries is the rite of passage. For males in early medieval

Ireland, this interface between settled adulthood and immature youth was not breached by a simple ritual, but actually occupied a unique, independent social group. Thus, a male could not be defined as either a boy or a man, but as having three separate and distinct social stages: boy, boy-man, and man.

This tri-male maturity spectrum existed in medieval Ireland. McCone notes that a male in the boy-man stage, called afian, was separated from the rest of society. The senior warriors were active members of the tuath, and the sexually mature but unmarried males were segregated from the rest of society; this was true in the case of the Irish fian, and was a not uncommon method of minimizing the potentially disruptive effects of their wildness upon settled society as a whole (McCone, Pagan 210). A young man who wished to avenge some perceived wrong and not wanting to embroil his family in clan retribution would make the decision to renounce society and voluntarily banish himself.

Once a man had done this, he could not return to society without expecting to be punished. Therefore, once he had renounced society, he would leave and seek revenge. Once sated, he could not return but was forced to live outside civilized society. He was literally an outlaw. These men were outside the law and were forced to live apart from communal groups.

6 These individuals formed groups, or bands, and were known throughout

Ireland as fianna (also O.lr.fiana as an individual group, or as individuals known asfeinid), generically known today as Fenians:

There can be no doubt that the oldest form of the word variously written fian and fiann is fian [...] genitive singular feine [...] plural fianna. This is the spelling when the word makes its first appearance in two manuscripts of the ninth century, the Book of Armagh and the St. Paul codex. (Meyer, Fianaigecht v)

Also, Maclnnes defines the Scottish Gaelic of this term to be fiantaiche; plural, fiantaichean ("Recordings" 103). Moreover, the electronic Dictionary of the Irish

Language defines the fian (pi. fianna) to be:

[A] band of roving men whose principal occupations [is] hunting and war, also a troop of professional fighting-men under a leader. In later application esp. the warrior-bands under Finn son of Cumall, who are described as constituting a military caste: [...]. ("Fian")

The scholar Sjoestedt traces the word used to describe these men to mean "war" in Old Slavonic; the root of the word also means "to hunt" (100). She states that the etymological definition matches the behaviour of the fianna as described in the sagas: "The fiana are companies of hunting warriors, living as semi-nomads under the authority of their own leaders" (Sjoestedt 100). Meyer states that "the word has come to denote 'a band of warriors on the warpath'" (Fianaigecht vi).

The theme of hunting may liken a subset or separate group of the fianna to ravening wolves. McCone pointed out that in the Togail Bruidne Da Derga:

They [the fianna] took up diberg with the sons of the nobles of Ireland around them. A hundred and fifty of them under

7 instruction when they were wolfing in the territory of the Conachta. (McCone, "Werewolves" 4)

These men were outside the community, hunted, and wore animal skins.

Indeed, there is even speculation that the myth of the werewolf comes from the behaviour of this subset of fianna who engaged in dibergach (brigandage) as packs of these young, violent men ranged outside the confines of society:

Less precisely similar werewolf expressions are also attested in Latin, Sanscrit, Greek, Russian, and Armenian [...]. Use of the word "wolf", more often than not a reflex of the IE form, as a personal name or a designation for outlaws is found in early Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Indie, Iranian and Hittite Sources [...]. (McCone, Pagan 214)

McCone also pointed out that Lily Weiser connected fianna with early

Norse berserkers in her Altgermanische Junglingsweihen und Mannerbunde. These men were also referred to as ulfhe(eth)nar (wolf skins). Additionally, McCone noticed that the fanciful characters depicted on the Gundestrup Cauldron

(approximately 100 B.C.) may indeed refer to this perception of the boy-man pack roaming the countryside. The cauldron shows a scene of a company of male shield and spear bearing wolves (Pagan 214).

Fionn mac Cumhaill was only one of the many leaders of these numerous groups that ranged over Ireland:

Other leaders of the fiana famous in history or romance were Maelciarain mac R6nain [...] mentioned in the Annals of Ulster, A.D. 869; Asal, son of Conn Cetchathach [...]; Foibne fennid, Dinds of Benn Foibni; fennid Fliuchna [... and] F6elan fennid [...]. The first rigfenid [leader of the fiana] of whom we read in Irish history was Maelumai mac Baitain [...]. His death is mentioned in the annals under the year 610 [...]. He took part in the battle of Degsastan [in

8 Britain] (A.D. 608) [...]. Perhaps this expedition was the subject of the lost tale called Echtra Mdilumai Bditdin. (Meyer, Fianaigecht xiii)

Eventually, the various leaders of their particular band oifianna coalesced in the minds of the collective Irish Gael as well as scholars into one individual leader:

By the twelfth cent., scholars thought: 'A place therefore should be found for him [Fionn mac Cumhaill] in that vast scheme of pseudo- history which had gradually been worked out in the native schools between the eighth century and the twelfth [...]. Finn had been captain of the professional soldiery of Cormac, king of Tara, in the middle of the third century of our era. His Fian, the band of hunter-warriors with whom ancient tradition had always associated him, were actually identified by these medieval Irish scholars as Cormac's professional soldiery.' (Murphy, Acallam 120)

It is therefore important to recognize that the origin of the tales of the

Fenians pre-dated the exclusive captaincy of the Fenians to Fionn mac Cumhaill.

The stories of the Fenians led by Fionn mac Cumhaill are more about the adventures of the packs of the boy-men Fenians than of Fionn mac Cumhaill himself. As Meyer states,

Many of those who have written on the origin and development of the Ossianic cycle have based their investigations almost exclusively upon the tradition of the twelfth and following centuries, quite forgetting that or ignoring the fact that this later phase is preceded by centuries of gradual growth from small and obscure beginnings, in which Finn and his fiana do not play the part assigned to them by later and modern legend (Fianaigecht xv).

The rigfenid [note the dot over the/which signifies lenition in Clo Gaelach, or as Sjoestedt points out rig-fheinid (king-of the feinid) (101)] was the leader of each individual fian. In rare instances this leader could even be female, as in the

9 case of Creidne (Sjoestedt 108), who showed, apart from her sex, every trait of a

Fenian. This is a rare and singular exception. The members of the fianna were most often young men on a vendetta. Their ranks included landless nobles waiting for their parents to expire, men who were in open conflict with their king, or merely roving brigandish men in search of sustenance:

The early Irish fian catered for the propertyless males of free birth who had left fosterage but had not yet inherited property needed to settle down as full landowning members of the tuath. (McCone, Pagan 205)

Moreover, McCone believes that "[f]rom this it would follow that many an early

Irish king had a youth in the fian behind him [...]" (Pagan, 209).

Various terms have been used to describe a feinid (member of fian) depending upon his condition. The individual feinid who had left his clan was called ecland. One who was without land was called dithir. McCone adds that a male between the end of fosterage and owner of property was an oen-chiniud

"sole-kin," not necessarily a feinid (Pagan 205). Oddly, a feinid was not without rights or outside all law. He was outside tribal, clan law, but was not considered an outlaw, thief, or murderer. Fianna were outlaws, but not brigands. A brigand murdered travelers and stole money from innocent people. The term diberg was often used for brigand.

The fian were seen as necessary to the well-being of the tribe. Perhaps this was due to the removal of violent elements from society with the young man's

10 absence, or because each local fian protected its community from attack by another community'sfian or true brigands that may roam the countryside.

2.2. Corpus of Lays

For the scholar interested in researching both the prose and poetry of the

Fenian tradition, there are many resources available. From Fianaigecht (1910), by

Kuno Meyer to Acallam na Senorach (Tales of the Elders of Ireland), ed. and trans, by

Dooley and Roe, (1999), to even Silva Gadelica: A Collection of Tales in Irish, ed. and trans, by Standish O'Grady, (1857), there is a vast choice of English translations available.

More to the point of this thesis, there are also books of lays available.

These resources include Duanaire Finn and Leabhar na Feinne which are well- known examples of these tales in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, respectively. Some of these are becoming increasingly available online: Duanaire Finn, The Fians: Or,

Stories, Poems, & Traditions of Fionn and His Warrior Band (1891), and other documents can be found in various formats including searchable text and

Adobe® .pdf files (see: http://www.archive.org/index.php). Unfortunately, written music for these lays is scarce. However, some examples of written music include: Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness Vol. XXVII from a presentation by MacFarlane; The Gesto Collection of Highland Music by Keith

Norman MacDonald which contains a few lay tunes; The Ancient Music of Ireland by Edward Bunting where the music was separated from the words; "Laoidh

11 Dhiarmaid" exists in an unnamed collection by John Lome Campbell (#18) which is from a Seamas Ennis' transcription in the Saint Francis Xavier

University Special Collections section; "Laoidh Fhraoich" has been transcribed in

Tocher 35, 1981; and Narrative Singing in Ireland by Hugh Shields lists eighteen airs without texts. There is also an example of one lay as transcribed in Songs

Remembered in Exile entitled "Teanntachd mh6r na Feinne" (Campbell, Songs

220). An attempt has been made to display these in Appendix B of this thesis.

Much more valuable are the recordings of Fenian lays that are extant.

These songs must be approached with care as the extant recordings were often sung by those who had been exposed to western European art music. European art music is the name given to music which derives from the Christian ecclesiastical system of mainland Europe. It is a system based on the Ionian and

Aeolian ecclesiastical modes which solidified in the early sixteenth century. In the vernacular, this music is called "classical music." Because singers have heard this different type of music, there is a tendency in some of the recordings to show

"flattening out;" this is a term used to denote the intrusion of repetitive rhythmic music into a narrative delivery. Although requiring critical listening, the extant examples are important. Extant examples include two recordings in the John

Shaw Collection at Saint Francis Xavier University (available free online at www.gaelstream.ca), a recording by Micheal and Seamus C» hlghne from county

Donegal, Ireland singing a Fenian lay as notated in Scealamhrdin Cheilteacha, a version sung by Dr. William Matheson from the International Congress of Celtic

12 Studies at Edinburgh in 1967, and Mrs. Archie MacDonald singing "Latha dha'n

Fhinn am Beinn Iongnaidh" (A Day when the Fenians were in the Mountains of

Marvels) from an LP entitled "Music From the Western Isles." This last example is from the School of Scottish Studies archives at Edinburgh University.

Additionally, the School of Scottish Studies archives has a great many recordings of Fenian lays that are unfortunately not generally available to the public. As

Bruford states, "[F]or though only two recordings of a Fenian lay in syllabic metre are known from Irish traditional singers, there are thirty or more recordings of such lays from Scotland [...]" ("Song" 62).

The reader may notice that the above examples are from apparently different geographical areas; however, the connection between Ireland, Scotland, and Nova Scotia is not strange in that the people in these places once shared roughly the same culture. The Irish of the Dal Riada dynasty who invaded

Scotland in the twelfth century brought with them their language; emigrating

Gaels from Scotland settled in Nova Scotia, Canada in the early nineteenth century, bringing their language, customs, and songs with them. As Moloney says concerning the connection between Ireland and Scotland of Fenian lays:

A number of 'Ossianic' airs [...] are amongst the more unusual items collected from traditional singers. As the Ossianic tradition was shared with Scotland, it is not surprising that it might be strongest in the north-eastern counties of Ireland, those closest to Scotland. (130)

13 2.3. Dates of Composition

Fenian lays became solidified in thematic nature during the twelfth century. Fionn mac Cumhaill as the leader of one band of fianna became prominent; other bands and leaders receded in the collective Gaelic mind. The exploits of Fionn's friends and members of his fian also developed in thematic structure and increased in mythological importance. The personalities of Cailte,

Oisin, Oscar, Diarmaid, and other members of Fionn's fian became somewhat solidified. Additionally, most of the poetry, as opposed to prose, that exists was created during the twelfth century or later and therefore names Fionn as the leader: "The ballads that we call Fenian or Ossianic make their first appearance in literature in Ireland in the twelfth century" (Maclnnes, "Twentieth" 101).

Breathneach agrees: "[0]ne must look to the surge of literary activity which marked twelfth century Ireland for the origin of the Fenian lay" (24). Meek believes the beginning to be slightly later and believes them to have been created no earlier than the thirteenth century:

The ballads [Fenian lays] [...] were composed [...] in the classical period of Gaelic culture, between 1200 and 1600. They were composed in Classical Common Gaelic, the shared literary language of Ireland and Gaelic Scotland, and they employed loose forms of syllabic metre. ("Gaelic" 20)

In Fianaigecht, Kuno Meyer published hitherto (1910) unknown Fenian prose tales which included poetry (prosimetrium) that he dated to the ninth century. Nagy perhaps had Meyer's Fianaigecht in mind when he believes that

"[i]t is with Irish literary 'renaissance' of the period from the tenth to the

14 thirteenth century that the Fenian tales began to appear more frequently, prominently, and elaborately in literature" (Outlaw 2). The known span of composition of poetic Fenian tales encompasses at least six hundred years: "The composition of narrative lays [of Fionn mac Cumhaill] of some sort is attested between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries; [...]" (Shields, Narrative 13).

It is particularly difficult to specify the date of composition of these lays.

This is primarily due to a dearth of original manuscripts. Most manuscripts that survive are transcriptions of older, worn, or damaged manuscripts that are now lost. Therefore, carbon dating or other scientific processes are not valid indicators of age, including paleographic analysis. However, through linguistic analysis, it is possible to identify linguistic segments that survive in particular lays and therefore speculate on the possible date of composition of a particular lay. Dating in this manner is highly speculative, mainly because older grammatical forms are preserved, albeit imperfectly, in tales created at a later date. That is, there is a great momentum in the grammar in a high register that is maintained even when it no longer exists in vernacular form. The register of a language is the degree of formality that the speaker uses when communicating.

Generally, the higher the register, and hence the more formal the speech, the greater its resistance to change.

Another manner of dating Fenian tales is through genealogical means.

There are individual persons named in the lays who are known to have died at a particular time from other, legal documents whose dates are known. In

15 Fianaigecht, Meyer states, "The first reference we have [of a Fenian tale] is from the genealogic tract of Rawl by the poet Senchan Torpeist in the seventh century"

(Fianaigecht xvi). Whatever the proposed date of creation of any particular lay, the evidence is overwhelming that "[n]arrative lays and especially the lays of

Fionn mac Cumhaill are the oldest form of storytelling in song which survived the Middle Ages into modern Irish Society" (Shields, Narrative 10).

Although it is not possible to date lays of the fianna before the ninth century, it is possible to intelligently speculate that the lays were actually composed from tales that were quite a bit older than this. The tales themselves relate the exploits of Fionn mac Cumhaill and his band of warriors, which supposedly took place during the sixth century A.D. The nature of these lays indicates an entirely non-Christian perspective; this may be a continuing tradition from earlier sagas as Jackson notices that "these stories [Ulster heroic sagas] are strikingly like the epic of other early literatures, as has often been pointed out; not only Homer but also Beowulf, the early German heroic poetry, and the rest" (Irish 3). Additionally, although referring to the older tales of the

Ulster cycle, Jackson's observation does serve to illustrate the archaic nature of the Irish literary tradition:

We know that the latest archaeological expression of the pre- Roman European Iron Age, the so-called La Tene culture, lasted in a vestigial form in Ireland, where there was no Roman occupation to swamp it, until at least [...] the fifth century [...]. I shall attempt to show that the background of the Irish epic tales appears to be older [...]. [T]he stories provide us with a picture—very dim and

16 fragmentary, no doubt, but still a picture —of Ireland in the Early Iron Age. (Irish 5)

The Fenian lays that were recorded are rife with references to magical beasts, giants, and persons with incredible powers with awesome fighting abilities. They share some similar characteristics with the well-known Old

English tale Beowulf, which is arguably to have been created between the seventh and tenth centuries C.E. In fact, all lays created in North-Western Europe (what is now Britain, Germany, France, Scandinavia, etc.) during that time, share many intriguing similarities. The foremost among them is the supernatural behaviour of a hero; this superhuman nature of particular men (and at times women) is in sharp contrast to the Christian ethic. This can be particularly noticed from Irish sagas of the Ulster cycle which pre-date those of Fionn mac Cumhaill, but undoubtedly influenced them. As Jackson says, "[I]f we want to know what it was to be a late La Tene Celt, and what life in the Early Iron age was like, we can get some notion of it by reading the Irish Ulster cycle of hero stories" (Irish 55).

Indeed, the conflict between Christian and pagan worlds is blamed for the actual extirpation of the fianna as a socio-cultural unit:

The evidence points rather to a marked clerical aversion to the fian in the early period because it embodied values that were perceived as a threat to the hierarchical, settled society of the tuath in which the church had a vested interest. (McCone, "Werewolves" 2)

The church recognized a distinction between those fianna who behaved badly and those who did not: "[T]he pagan dibergaig or feindidi [were] diametrically opposed as maic has [sic] 'sons of death and perdition' to the

17 monastic maic bethad 'sons of life and salvation'" (McCone, "Werewolves" 5).

Therefore, the treatment of Christian scribes in Ireland during this time toward the old sagas and tales was one of respect (or a "sneaking regard") more than tolerance when it came to right-behaving fianna. In Acallam na Senorach, Saint

Patrick is disturbed that the warriors' tales upset his concentration of prayer.

Angels come in the night and command him to "see to it that what they say be written on poets' staves and in learned men's words, for it will be a delight to gatherings of people and to noblemen in later times to listen to those [Fenian] tales" (Murphy, Acallam 128).

2.4. The Influence of Macpherson's The Poems ofOssian

No discussion of Fenian lays would be complete without mentioning the eighteenth-century work The Poems of Ossian (collectively: Fragments in 1760,

Fingal in 1761, and Temora in 1763) by James Macpherson. This work was popular throughout Europe, a favourite of Napoleon, and partly translated by

Goethe. Some have even been so bold as to suggest that The Poems of Ossian started the literary Romantic Age. Unfortunately, there is controversy concerning this work. Almost immediately after the publication of The Poems of

Ossian, the authenticity of the work was questioned. This controversy concerns the functioning of memory within Gaelic society and therefore bears particularly upon this thesis. It is therefore important to briefly investigate The Poems of

18 Ossian since the publication of this work caused controversy that continues today; for example, in de Gategno (1989) and Porter (2001).

In the late eighteenth century, James Macpherson went into the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, collected Fenian lays, translated them into English, and published them. Shortly after this, The Poems of Ossian was translated into

Italian, German, and French; the process continues: a Japanese translation appeared in 1971, and a Russian translation was completed in 1983 (Thomson,

Companion 189).

Unfortunately, Macpherson's lays, while containing many elements of actual Fenian lay compositional components, were inundated by non-Gaelic,

Greek forms: "[Macpherson] brought to bear his knowledge of the Classics, of

Milton and of the Authorized Version of the Bible to produce his measured style" (Thomson, Companion 190). Macpherson took the raw bones of the deeds of Fionn mac Cumhaill and his Fianna, rearranged them, and threw on the flesh of English prose. This, understandably, has caused many Gaelic scholars great angst: "The Fenian cycle ranked as a national epic for both Irish and Scottish

Gaels long before James Macpherson tried to construct a fake epic in English prose [...]" (Bruford, "Oral" 25). Although this controversy is not debated today, the negative repercussions are still being felt.

The fulcrum of the debate rested with the difference between a basically illiterate Scottish Gaelic population, and an English literate one. The acknowledged English moralist, Dr. Samuel Johnson, roundly criticized

19 Macpherson. Johnson noticed that The Poems ofOssian contained very long, epic tales. In Johnson's mind, it was not possible to memorize such lengthy tales; hence, Macpherson must have gotten these tales from a written source. Johnson demanded to know where the literary works were, and Macpherson felt obligated to produce them; unfortunately, since the lays were not literary,

Macpherson fabricated manuscripts. While Macpherson did drastically alter the tales, the characters and events do actually occur in the lays. He simply felt free to re-arrange the sequence of events and give an extremely florid, imprecise translation of the stories. Macpherson had grown up among illiterate

Highlanders and had heard these long tales; Johnson had never heard such long, poetic tales in his own society. In Johnson's mind, since he did not have the ability to memorize an extended poem (certainly over forty verses), then an illiterate Highlander could not as well. As will be discussed below, this is a prejudiced assumption. Literacy has many benefits, but can often be used as a crutch to support a weak memory. Most people do not consider literacy to hinder mental acuity, but there are very limited instances where illiteracy can increase memorization skills of extended verse.

After being challenged by Johnson, Macpherson then began creating fake

"original" manuscripts. Macpherson took what he had made in English and translated it (supposedly "back") into Gaelic. Fortunately, modern analysis of this allegedly authentic Fenian lay Gaelic verse has proven this work to be false:

"The metre of this piece is a lame strophic one, clearly fabricated as a Gaelic

20 version of Macpherson's prose" (Thomson, Ossian 257). It should be pointed out that "[h]e [Macpherson] had a pernicious effect on later Gaelic writing [...] but also indirectly stimulated much Gaelic collection and research" (Thomson,

Companion 190).

21 22 3. Oral versus Literary Composition of Lays

It is important to understand how a Fenian lays singer memorized poetry.

This is important not only to understand the process by which such a singer memorized poetry, but in order for modern-day re-creators to succeed in memorizing extended passages of Fenian lays. As it was with Dr. Johnson in the eighteenth century, so too have many scholars in the more recent past considered any long poem to be the work of a literate tradition. This is particularly true concerning debate in the late nineteenth century concerning the origins of

Homeric verse. The popular conception is that a literate person's mental ability and acuity is superior to that of an illiterate one. Yet, as linguists believe in a

"Sufficiency Principle," that people will alter a language until it sufficiently allows them to express themselves, so too illiterate individuals find ways of coping with a lack of written words and the necessity to remember them.

Drs. Milman Parry and Albert Lord brought one mental advantage of illiterate people to light. Initially, Milman Parry was involved in the dispute of whether the Iliad, Odyssey, and other works thought created by Homer were written works or the scribed oral tradition of a number of different poet-singers.

They therefore attempted to find similarities between an oral heroic narrative tradition which existed in Serbo-Croatia and the works of Homer: "It must be stressed that Parry himself did not choose to collect the Yugoslav songs because he believed in a genetic relationship with Homer, but simply wished to observe

23 the oral method generally; [...]" (Franklin 2). Therefore, Parry went to Serbo-

Croatia (southern Slovakia) and recorded the performances of heroic epic poetry still being sung there. What Parry and Lord discovered has changed the study of narrative poetry significantly:

The Singer of Tales [the book which discusses this process] has not only become a classic for the general study of oral and written literatures but has also evolved into a standard textbook within folkloristics. (Lord xix).

These Serbo-Croatian singers routinely memorized and performed upwards of sixteen thousand lines per song of ten-syllable per line epic verse. In the introduction to the new edition of Lord's work (2003), Mitchell (Lord xii) cites

Lord's typewritten manuscript "Across Montenegro Searching for Gusle Songs" which describes one of these narrative singers. He writes, "Avdo's songs were longer and finer than any we had heard before. He could prolong one for days, and some of them reached fifteen or sixteen thousand lines." By comparison,

Beowulf, when written by line, is only thirty-two hundred lines long. Lord and

Parry found this poetry to be formulaic; that is, the poet-singer would memorize groupings of words or sounds and juxtapose groups together to create appropriate, functional poetry. However, this process was not one of composition; the singers were using this technique only to memorize the songs.

This same formulaic structure was found in the works formerly attributed to

Homer:

Parry's work on Homeric phraseology and the technique of oral composition, largely influenced by his field work on the living epic

24 tradition of Yugoslavia, showed that formulas functioned as the 'building blocks' of Homeric verse. (Watkins, Dragon 16)

Therefore, this work demonstrated that the works of Homer were from an oral tradition. Furthermore, upon returning to the Balkans much later, Lord determined that the poets, who had thought that they were repeating the poetry unchanged and exactly as they had before, were subtlety altering the words over time. Therefore, the declamation was actually a fluid process that involved the artistry of the singer as a poet, unconsciously creating fairly complex poetry.

Lord and Parry not only showed how Serbo-Croatian heroic song was formulaic, but used the same techniques to show Homeric poetry was formulaic as well. Moreover, formulaic analysis of heroic poetry of other Indo-European languages has shown much poetry to be formulaic:

The formula is the vehicle for the central theme of a proto-text, a central part of the symbolic culture of the speakers of Proto-Indo- European itself. The variations rung on this formula constitute a virtually limitless repository of literary expression in archaic and preliterate Indo-European societies, and their careful study can cast light in unexpected places, and bring together under a single explanation a variety of seemingly unrelated, unconnected text passages in a number of different but related languages. (Watkins, Dragon viii)

The question now brought to the fore is whether the Fenian lay is a formulaic construct, or just a series of mid-length heroic poems. Are Fenian lays created by literate or illiterate persons? Are they formulaic?

25 3.1. The Written Genesis

How is it possible to determine if a poetic work was the creation of a literate or an illiterate person? "The integral part of Parry and Lord emerges most clearly if we look more closely at their comparative methods, which typify the academic discipline of Comparative Literature" (Lord xvii). Lord and Parry noticed that there are several key formulae that define non-literary genesis. If there are several manuscripts that are almost exact, then the work was probably literary:

When there is exact line-for-line, formula-for-formula correspondence between manuscripts, we can be sure that we are dealing with a written tradition involving copied manuscripts or with some circumstance of collection in which a fixed text has been memorized. (Lord 203)

Unfortunately, there are not many manuscripts of Fenian lays to compare to each other in Classical (or older forms of) Gaelic. This does not imply that the scribes were not proficient. Their work is of the highest quality: "The earliest manuscripts penned by Irish scribes all of a scriptural nature, have a deserved reputation for accuracy" (Slotkin, "Medieval" 440).

Gaelic scholar Meek in "Development" has assumed that the Fenian lays flowed from a written tradition. Maclnnes concurs ("Bard") but further adds that the Fenian lay was the provenance of the aristocracy that was then transferred to the common people after the demise of the Gaelic court system.

This is sensible since the lays are very long and include many seemingly complex poetic devices: alliteration, assonance, and aicill. Moreover, Fenian lays were

26 composed with a set number of syllables per line; although lays of eight syllables-per-line are known, the vast majority were composed with seven syllables per line. Since the average, non-aristocratic Gael composed in accentual verse; that is, stress-timed poetry, scholars have concluded that the average person was not capable of composing in syllabic verse. There are many references to this, one being the fourteenth century Leabhar Meig Shamhradhdin

(The Book ofMagauran) where in Poem 27, the poet complains that any person can now receive payment for a "crooked" poem. Since the professional poets composed completely in syllabic metres, they have been assumed to be the creators of Fenian lays. The bard (pi. baird) merely performed the complex poetry of the filidh; the baird did not compose it (Newton 83). Yet, the bard was familiar with poetic forms; therefore, there is speculation that perhaps it was the baird not the filidh who composed Fenian lays since it is less complex than the dan direach forms preferred by the filidh (Maclnnes, "Bard" 149).

The question of whether the Fenian lays were created in the same way as were the heroic poetry of the Serbo-Croatian poets is an interesting one. Slotkin points out that there is a tremendous difference between oral composition in seven syllables (Irish epic poetry) and eleven syllable per line Serbo-Croatian epic poetry:

However, there is considerable difference between an eleven or twelve syllable line and a seven syllable line. I would suggest that while eleven syllables to a line makes a convenient vehicle for narration, seven syllables [4/3] is not quite long enough or flexible enough to narrate very much easily [...] I would suggest that Serbo-

27 Croatian meters have immensely greater flexibility than the Irish cadenced heptasyllabics. (Slotkin, Evidence 267)

What Slotkin does not point out is that each language has its own flavour, its own series of strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, the specific formulae of heroic epic poetry as discovered by Lord and Parry will be different depending upon the language in which the poetry is created. For example, English and

Italian are dense and fascinating languages in their own right, but are patterned differently. Important English words are stressed by making important syllables louder than the syllables of other words. These loud sounds are separated in time somewhat equally. In Italian, word importance is indicated primarily by elongating the vowel sound of the word. Longer syllables are not placed necessarily equally apart. Therefore, Italian equates to a series of long and short

(not loud and soft) sounds strung together. It is therefore probable that the poetic forms found composed in the Italian language will organize the long and short sounds into a pattern, while native English poetic forms will structure loud sounds into a rhythmic pattern. The fruit of each language will express itself in different ways.

Therefore, Slotkin is merely stating that the pattern of the Serbo-Croatian language does not match that of Classical Modern Irish Gaelic or Modern

Scottish Gaelic. This is to be expected. Each language has its unique properties which make certain aspects of it susceptible to a particular pattern or formula.

28 Gaelic cannot be expected to follow the exact formulae of Greek or Serbo-

Croatian.

3.2. The Oral Genesis: The Work of Parry and Lord

It is possible that Fenian lays were not composed by the filidh or baird at all, but by the average, non-aristocratic, illiterate Gael. If this is so, how could an illiterate person learn such a massive quantity of material? Understanding the learning process was therefore significant to Lord and Parry's goal; as Lord states, "Our immediate purpose is to comprehend the manner in which they compose, learn, and transmit their epics" (Lord xxxv). They discovered how such long poems could be memorized by illiterate persons:

Summarized in its essentials, the work of Parry and Lord has proved to be important for having dispelled the mystery of how oral epic poetry can be maintained in tradition over long periods of time without the aid of writing. (Niles 33)

Lord and Parry then tried to determine if the works of Homer were composed in a like manner. They determined that the poems were. As Franklin states about Lord and Parry's work, that "[nevertheless, it is now universally accepted that these poems [the Iliad and the Odyssey, and others] are at least derived from a living, preliterate tradition. This poetic art was one of song" (2).

Serbo-Croatian epic poetry is often rife with intense rhyming schemes, assonance, alliteration, and a complexity whose creation is thought to be possible only of literate people. Moreover, the works thought to have been composed by one person, Homer, were actually composed by a number of people.

29 Additionally, it seems that initial illiteracy, or a conscious disregard for literacy, is necessary for developing the skills needed to memorize these long poems.

Lord and Parry discovered that literate and illiterate minds do not function with regard to memory in the same way. It seems that literate persons, relying on the aid of writing, do not develop their ability to remember verse as well as illiterate persons: "But it does not follow that the oral poets were literate — literacy seems to kill the oral technique [...]" (Dodds 15). Again, in the introduction of The

Singer of Tales, Mitchell states, "For Parry and Lord, empirical evidence show[s] that the ideology of the printed word destabilize [s] the oral traditions of the various South Slavic cultures that they were analyzing" (Lord xiii).

This is an intriguing point: illiteracy has value. Most literate persons believe that writing and reading is an enhancement. The scholar is taught to believe that all things of value are put to paper:

The modern reader may be quick to suppose that written literature tends to length because there can be no such thing as fatigue in letters once set down, whereas oral literature should tend to brevity because every word of it must be remembered by a human brain. Yet quite the opposite is the case; for writing is slower and more arduous than speaking, and reading is a more toilsome accomplishment than reciting. (Carpenter 15)

Another example on this point might make things more clear:

In a community where oral literature flourishes, there must be some special occasion or incentive to justify the otherwise pointless expenditure of energy involved in manuscript notation. The Brothers Grimm wrote down the old wives' tales in the Germanic- speaking provinces, but the old peasant women themselves would never have done so [...]. [Likewise in the ancient world it would not have been the rhapsodes [sic] themselves, but someone outside

30 their profession with a different interest at stake, who could have inaugurated so tedious a project as that of taking down on papyrus rolls nigh on thirty thousand verses to the slow tempo [...] carefully spelling out each word in dictation. (Carpenter 14)

Additionally, Lord suggests that literacy is more important in larger towns and cities; therefore more rural people tend to keep to older poetic forms and maintain a cultural continuity better than those living in a literate society:

"Archaic forms, once esteemed by all classes of an ethnic group, can survive longer in geographical and social spheres less subject to the cultural ferment of court and city" (Franklin 1). Therefore, it is not unexpected that Fenian lays were remembered in Ireland and Scotland where the population has historically been considered more rural.

Lord and Parry's work has been used to analyse the epic poetry of another stress-timed language; that of Old English. However, earlier analysis (Niles,

1983) does not take into account that languages are different, and therefore, that their narrative poetic formulae must also be different. This confusion can be seen by the statement of Niles: "With Old English verse [...] Parry's methodology begins to crumble. Old English poetry does not observe fixed syllable count"

(40). Niles may be forgiven for this, since it was perhaps not made clear by Lord and Parry that each language has its own particular strengths and weaknesses.

Among other things, Serbo-Croatian is a syllable-timed language (as will be discussed in section 7.1, below); English is a stress-timed language (as will be discussed in section 7.2, below). The memorization advantage that is afforded by

31 syllable-count could have been replaced by a different advantage provided by stress-count.

Lord believes that Beowulf probably belongs to the category of oral composition (200). What many fail to realize from Lord and Parry's investigation was that skill in composition often flowed from a deliberate removal of literary tools. An example of this can be seen in the compositional practices of the filidh.

As Jackson stated, a file would shut himself in a room without windows, and seal the door so as to be in complete darkness. Then the file would compose without the aid of writing. Once the poem was completed through non-literate means, the poem was then written down and given to a bard for performance (Irish 25)

(the characteristics of this bardic performance is more fully described in section

4). It seems reasonable that the poet was doing this for a reason, that the poetry improved through the lack of literary aides. Slotkin, and many others

(Blankenhorn, Maclnnes, Meek, etc.) point out that medieval Celtic literature was an oral tradition written down (Slotkin, "Folkloristics" 213). It was therefore composed orally/aurally and then put down on paper.

Lord and Parry's work was not universally accepted, and in 1968, Dodds states, "His [Parry's] work was received with hostility by the aesthetic school

(this was not their notion of how great poetry is produced), and it appears to be still largely unknown in Central Europe; [...]" (Dodds 14). However, it should be noted that Lord and Parry's work has rapidly gained acceptance since Dodds made the above statement:

32 Since Parry, for better and worse, Serbo-Croatian epic has been the primary comparandum for imagining Homeric performance. This is due to a general unfamiliarity among classicists with other examples of oral epic: the publications of Lord remain the best- known and most consulted studies, and are [...] of immediate interest since the comparison with Homer is explicit and detailed. Naturally, scholars with a special interest in the oral epic are better informed, and in the last twenty years other narrative song traditions have attracted increasing scholarly attention. (Franklin 2)

3.3. Literacy and Illiteracy Coexistence

How can illiteracy and literacy coexist? Are they not mutually exclusive?

"Still, the reader may ask, is not literacy the deathblow to oral tradition? If so, the death need not be instantaneous" (Niles 48). The Gaelic literary tradition is important; as Slotkin states of old Irish Sagas:

Those of us whose chief interest lies in early Irish secular literature must show some concern for and interest in Irish scribal practice as, obviously, early Irish saga has passed through the hands of scribes. Every saga we evaluate for orality [...] must first be evaluated in terms of its manuscript tradition. ("Medieval" 440)

As Slotkin suggests, there must have been at one time some kind of transition period between when Gaelic poetry was composed orally and when it was composed through the medium of writing; could the scribes themselves have had the ability to memorize long, epic poetry? One of Lord's singers and his transcriber, Nikola Vujnovic, was both literate and could remember thousands of verses of heroic poetry at one sitting. The Irish scribes themselves must have been able to memorize extended poetry or they would not be able to remember tales that took five hours to sing. However, literate scribes who had

33 limited memorization ability would be able to work with orally composing poets. Some Old English poetry came to be recorded through this symbiosis:

"Old English poetry was recorded through the partnership of an illiterate poet and a lettered scribe" (Niles 34). In a somewhat similar manner, Irish scribes attempted to adapt themes from classical epic poetry utilizing patterns of classical languages (see section 7.1, below) into Gaelic patterns: "The translator/Irish scribe was writing a seel, adapting a foreign work into a pattern which had been largely determined by orally composed saga" (Slotkin,

"Medieval" 447). This can be done using excerpts: "Significantly, both tales

[Siaborcharpat Con Culainn, and Acallam na Senorach] serve as 'frame-tales' within which heroic narratives told by the hero to the saint are inserted" (Nagy,

"Encounters" 131); this can also be done by re-writing Gaelic history using

Biblical stories. The translation of these biblical texts would be translated using oral formulae (Slotkin, "Medieval" 446). Writing about an early Middle Age

Irish translator of a classical work, Slotkin states, "In other words, as far as possible, the translator has attempted to bring the Aeneid into the recognizable form and shape of an Irish saga" ("Medieval" 445). This is the "anti-nativist" perspective, that Christian and classical influences strongly influenced Irish literary development. What Slotkin does not mention is that the two forms may have been already linked: "It has [...] been shown successfully by Professor

Calvert Watkins that this Irish heroic verse has a common origin with Greek and

Vedic meters, and is an ancient Indo-European inheritance" (Dillon, Realms 227).

34 This is the "nativist" perspective, that there is a common Indo-European inheritance from which the Irish literary tradition may have sprung.

Classical language poetic forms were often rejected by local English scribes accustomed to their English stress-timed language poetic forms: "Anglo-

Saxon poets consciously failed to abandon their old verse form, even after models of rhymed, metered poetry had become available to them in the form of the Latin hymns of Ambrose and others" (Niles 45). However, once scribe and poet began to work with one another, native poetic forms were bound to change:

Once this revolutionary step was taken [when two people, the singer and the scribe, united their gifts to record religious poetry using the traditional methods of the scop with themes from the tradition of Latin letters] the joining of Germanic and Mediterranean literary traditions had begun. (Niles 35)

As the technique of writing improved and flourished by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, "a certain gulf must have existed between those who composed only through oral techniques and the literary men in control of the technique of writing" (Slotkin, Evidence 234). The patterns of poetic form shifted as those who wrote did so in ever increasing numbers; this must surely have changed the poetic form to be more in line with Roman and Greek poetic models:

Does the poem [BeowulJ] derive its form and strength from being grounded in the traditional art of the Germanic scop? Or is it a product of generations of monastic experience in fashioning poetry on themes derived from Latin letters? The answer, of course, is both. (Niles 32)

Mitchell points out that many scholars romanticize literacy itself as if it was some kind of uniform and even universal phenomenon, and conversely,

35 others have romanticized the oral tradition itself (Lord xiv and fn. 27). So how does a Fenian lay fit between these two extremes? Current scholarship considers the Fenian lay (laoidh fiannuiochta) to be a type of poetry derived from the rannaiocht metre of classical poetry (Blankenhorn 9). However, it might not be erroneous to attempt to apply some of Parry and Lord's techniques to the Fenian

We have still to consider what is perhaps the most important single discovery about Homer made during the past half-century, the decisive proof that the poems are oral compositions [...]. On the other hand he [Parry] showed (and it has been independently shown by the Chadwicks) that techniques broadly similar to Homer's, though less elaborate, have been developed for a similar purpose in the oral poetry of other societies. (Dodds 13)

Rote memorization of long poems is extremely difficult; illiterate people in other lands may well have developed a way to do this as did those in Serbo-

Croatia. It was known that one singer of Fenian lays of the late eighteenth century was illiterate: "John MacCodrum, in Gaelic known as Iain Mac

Fhearchair, lived and died in the Island of North Uist. He was, in the technical sense of the term, illiterate [...and was] bard to Sir James MacDonald of Sleat"

(Campbell, Songs 246). In a letter describing MacCodrum, Sir James MacDonald states that,

The few bards that are left among us, repeat only detached pieces of these poems [Fenian lays]. I have often heard and understood them, particularly from one man called James [sic] Mac Codrum, who lives on my estate, in North Uist. I have heard him repeat, for hours together, poems which seemed to me to be the same with Macpherson's translations. (MacKensie 142)

36 It would not be an easy task to prove that the genesis of the Fenian lay was of oral composition based upon similar work done by Parry and Lord. Here

Slotkin warns against being casual in this regard:

Celticists have felt rather smug, it seems to me, about their knowledge of folklore if they talked to an old man in the Gaeltacht for a week or so or collected some songs at a wake. Even very extensive collecting is of no value for understanding the medieval literatures if one does not know the proper or useful questions to ask about the material collected. We need well formulated theories of oral literatures, rooted in empirical data, if we are to draw comparisons with the medieval literatures which survive in manuscript. ("Folkloristics" 225)

As mentioned previously, Parry and Lord's technique that was used to prove the oral basis of Homeric epic poetry cannot be exactly applied to each language; each language must be analysed by its own nature and structure: "One task still facing students of oral and archaic literature is to refine the tools of oral- formulaic analysis so as to approach each tradition in terms of its own poetics"

(Niles 129). Niles continues on this theme referring to Beowulf:

Does or does not poetry accord with what we would expect the results of oral composition to be, given the unique requirements of the Old English alliterative verse form? As one works toward an answer to this question, studying Homer will help to a point, and study of the songs of Avdo Medjedovid, Duncan Macintyre, or Nelson Mabunu may help to a point, but soon one must look at the Old English tradition itself, secure in the knowledge that the literature of any social group is likely to have its own special characteristics that make easy cross-cultural comparison impossible. (Niles 42)

However, Niles does not believe that Gaelic poetry is formulaic:

Fixed formulaic diction is not characteristic of non-Germanic oral poetry within the British Isles [...] In fairness to Parry and Lord one

37 should keep in mind that Scots Gaelic poetry is generally not narrative, and memorization appears to play a large part in its performance. (Niles 41)

While this may be true with most simple songs in Gaelic, it may not be true with the complex forms of the poems created by thefilidh or the long narrative Fenian lays. Stressed, fixed formulaic diction is very noticeable in the lays concerning

Fionn mac Cumhaill; memorization by rote is extremely difficult with these epic poems, thereby implying some other technique of memorization was used.

Although Fenian lays are not specified by Slotkin, the oral nature of early epic verse is quite clear: "What we find in early Irish saga is a survival of a once healthier formular oral verse" (Slotkin, Evidence 268).

Conversely, Ross does believe that bardic poetry was formulaic. Here he states in 1968:

Formulaic passages of considerable length, sometimes known as "runs" and corresponding in general type to the longer passages in the songs, occur in some of the tales at certain clearly defined points in the narrative. The preparation and sailing of the hero's ship, his dressing or arming for battle, his reunion with friends, and his actual combat with his enemies are the most prominent points in the plots at which one can expect to find sustained formulaic treatment. These "runs" fall into rhythmic phrases characterized by marked alliteration and internal assonances, and much of the vocabulary is archaic. (Ross, "Formulaic" 10)

It has been suggested that there were heroic lays in Ireland in the Indo-

European model, but they simply died out. Bruford states in 1990:

The researches of the Parry-Lord school can be said to have established a reasonable presumption that epic poems from the Iliad to the Chanson de Roland or later are based to some extent on orally improvised songs which in many ways, if not in all, used

38 similar techniques to those of recent Balkan "singers of tales". The Celtic languages, particularly Old Irish, alone in Western Europe preserve an extensive body of early heroic narrative recorded almost entirely in prose with little trace of a comparable body of verse [...]. The reason is quite simple if that poetry was recomposed each time it was recited, like most other heroic poetry. When syllabic metres of increasing complexity took over from a method of composing line by line, it was no longer possible to improvise in the same way. The fili who must originally have recited his own divinely inspired verse as he composed it in public now had to retire for hours or days to a darkened room to perfect his assonances and alliterations in his head, emerging too exhausted to sing his own songs. The narrative songs there had been, which lived as a whole only while they were performed, died out because they were not performed. (Bruford 73)

Bruford apparently makes some assumptions here. Firstly, he is inferring that the narrative heroic poetry of the Parry-Lord school was deliberately recomposed ("The fili who must originally have recited his own divinely inspired verse as he composed [...]"). The singers in Lord and Parry's investigation were trying to sing the poem exactly as they had heard it, with no change; they were not deliberately composing. There may have been changes over time, but they were not deliberate embellishments or improvisations intentionally made by the singers. Secondly, he is suggesting that the narrative poems were composed originally. Actually, the lays were considered community property and were not created, but re-sung; they merely evolved over time. Thirdly, he is suggesting that the provenance of performance belonged solely to the file; that was not true in Lord and Parry's study in Serbo-

Croatia where shepherds sang narrative lays, nor was it true in Greece with

39 Homeric poetry. Fourthly, he is assuming that a file did not sing a song because he was exhausted instead of merely deferring to someone who sang better.

Most conclusively, Dillon disagrees with Murphy and others who have assumed that syllable counting followed the church and Latin influences: "[T]he seven syllable line was the basic long line of a native tradition of poetry going back to Indo-European times" (Dillon, Realms 232). Therefore, there is no basis to believe that the filidh created a new form of poetry with the introduction of the

Christian church into Ireland and that the common Gael was excluded from this new form. Having a fixed number of syllables per line is a very ancient native practice in all Indo-European languages (Dillon, Realms 232).

40 4. How Gaelic Poetry was Created

According to Meek and Maclnnes, Fenian lays were composed by a small group of intelligentsia at the Gaelic court. This understanding is mainly due to the syllabic nature of the poetry created there. The current understanding is that the common Gael composed in what is called amhrdn meter; that is, creating an even number of strong sounds in a line, while the intelligentsia created poetry in specific forms by counting syllables. This is a rather arbitrary distinction to make. Although it is true that court poets always composed in a form where syllables were counted and looked down upon those people who did not (The

Book of Magauran, v. 27); conversely, it is quite possible that the average person looked up to court poets, and when composing something important, probably tried to emulate forms employed by court poets. So, who were these court poets, who performed their poetry, and how did their performance relate to the average person?

4.1. The Gaelic Caste System

In the society of Gaelic Ireland and Scotland, the aristocracy was formally organized, into a caste system, under various descriptions: draoi (the Gaelic equivalent of 'druid'), fili, later file (poet-seer), breitheamh ('brehon' or lawgiver) and seanchaidh (historian-antiquarian) (Maclnnes, "Bard" 148).

41 As mentioned above in section 3.1, the term for the professional poet at court was file (the plural is filidh). Additionally, there was a class of musician considered of lower rank than the filidh: the bard. The word bard was used by the

English to describe a singer at a Gaelic court in the sixteenth century (Irish

Gaelic: bard, plural baird; Scots Gaelic: bard, pi. baird, barda, etc.). Although the term bard in English came from Greek and Latin, the Greeks and Romans themselves had taken the word from the Old Celtic word bardos (Maclnnes, Grove

147).

As early as the Early Middle Ages (The Book of Magauran, v. 8), the filidh and the baird worked together, dividing their responsibilities. The filidh were the creators of complicated verse; the baird then performed the verse: "The bard is the lower rank of poet, who often took the role of reacaire (from a Latin word which appears in English as 'reciter'), performing the poetry of the file" (Newton 83).

Thus, as mentioned above, the current practice of calling praise poetry composed by filidh "bardic poetry" is somewhat misleading (Murphy 203).

During the thirteenth century, powerful Gaelic lords became the patrons of trained poets, who became the professional intelligentsia of the new Gaelic order (Newton 81). This new order persevered into the seventeenth century in

Ireland and the eighteenth-century in Scotland. This order preserved and maintained an artificial learned language which remained virtually unchanged during this period, which began in the thirteenth century, while the modern spoken Gaelic language was slowly differentiating in these areas.

42 6 Baoill points out that since 1200 C.E., this old social system had maintained a limited hereditary class of professional encomiastic poets, declined toward the end of the seventeenth century until the last exponent, Niall

MacMhuirich, died in 1721 (20). It should be mentioned that this order of poets extends far back in time:

Despite enormous differences in tone and cultural outlook the system, the structural position of the poet in each society, is remarkably similar in India and Ireland, and the Irish system remained basically static over the 1000 years from the beginning of our documentation to the collapse of the Gaelic world. (Watkins, Dragon 75)

4.2. Composition Practices of the Filidh

A file who was qualified to be taken into the service of a Gaelic lord and designated as that lord's poet was given the title of ollamh (Newton 82), the highest rank of the professional order. He was considered a professional, was paid by, and gave various services to the lord. These services consisted of creating poetry in praise of the lord, serving as a messenger, and counsellor. He was also responsible for teaching the next generation of poets:

Students were given tests in composition by the ollamh who assigned them a topic and a metre in which the poem was to be written. They were to compose the verses during the next day, keeping themselves in the dark and having no recourse to writing but using only their memory. The ollamh entered their rooms the next evening, lit the room, and allowed them to commit the poem to writing. (Newton 82)

Thus, the training of the filidh was rigorous, but more especially, it was aurally based; that is, the poetry was not meant to be read silently, but spoken

43 and heard. Poetry is often composed today with all of the senses of the poet employed; poets sit in a room with various distractions at a table with pen and paper and write. The filidh did not do this but sat in a darkened room devoid of visual stimuli:

The poet shut himself indoors for a whole day, and lay on his bed in the dark, with his head covered with his plaid, while he composed a panegyric. This tradition of oral composition, not written, is very remarkable at this late date. 0ackson, Irish 25)

Therefore, this dedication to the aural nature of words was heightened by the filidh focusing their attention on human speech by removing other sensory distractions. Since the filidh did not write, they did not focus their eyes and awareness on letters and paper; with their vision removed, the filidh focused on the sounds of words, not their spelling and visual harmony. Filidh were also well trained: "[T]he filid and the baird were likewise trained in schools, where they were taught by a qualified fili. The course lasted from seven to twelve years [...].

Their songs were recited to the music of the harp" (Jackson, Irish 25).

With this focused attention to fine vocal nuance, the resulting poetry of the filidh was certain to be highly complex and detailed. The poetic structure of the filidh can be classified under the umbrella term dan direach (lit. straight versification). A good example of the complexity of the filidh's Classical Gaelic poetry can be seen in an example of (here, non-Fenian) dan direach verse:

Fiche meisge linn gach laoi - nochar leisge linn na le' fiu i neart ar mbeathaidh do bhi, ceathair, a tri, a seacht le se.

44 The rules here require seven syllables per line, and there are rules for elision so that when two vowels occur together (in certain circumstances) one of them is elided and therefore only one syllable is counted: here we elide the word i in line 3 and the word a following tri in line 4. The final words of lines 2 and 4 must rhyme together...and the vowels on the finals of all four lines must agree in 'quantity' (i.e. long or short), as they do here: laoi has a single long vowel. Internal rhyme (which in Gaelic means rhyme within the couplet) occurs twice in each couplet, giving us the rhymes meisge: leisge and linn: linn in the first couplet; in the second couplet the rhymes mbeathaidh: ceathair and neart: seacht are also 'perfect', because of complex Gaelic rules of consonant grouping whereby, in rhyme, -dh- and -r- belong to the same group, and the consonant 'clusters' -rt- and -cht- (by even more complicated rules) rhyme together. (Anything as simple as the popular English rhyming system, where bill rhymes with fill but not within, would probably have been regarded by these poets as childish.) The metre of this poem...also demands aicill, a rhyme between the final of line 3 and the non-final word of line 4, here provided by the rhyme bhi: tri. Every line must contain at least one alliteration, as between linn and laoi in line 1 [...] and there is double alliteration in line 2; [...] For line 4 of all quatrains a further rule states that the alliteration must occur between the last two stressed words (seacht and si). (G* Baoill 20)

Yet, it was the Christian church that introduced some of this rhyming ornament:

This combination of end-rhyme, internal rhyme and alliteration [...] constitutes the 'new form' (nua-chruth), recognized by the Irish metrical tracts. It was doubtless the invention of monks who were heirs to the old metrical tradition, and acquired the new ornament of rhyme with their Latin learning. (Dillon, Realms 231)

It should be noted that 6 Baoill's above-mentioned "complex Gaelic rules of consonant grouping" are indicators of formulae. Each of the different groups of consonants is grouped not so that they sound alike, but that the mouth is

45 placed in a similar position. 6 Cuiv points out ("Phonetic" 96) that there are six classes of consonants:

1. b, d, g (voiced plosives)

2. p, t, c (unvoiced plosives)

3. bh, dh, gh, mh [aspirated b, d, g, m], 1, n, r (voiced continuants)

4. m, 11, nn, rr, ng, (emphatic voiced continuants)

5. ph, th, ch [aspirated p, t, c], f (voiceless continuants)

6. s (voiceless sibilant)

One can see that if these consonants are pronounced properly in Classical

Modern Irish, the mouth organs make similar movements; for example, the liquids , <1>, are grouped together because the tongue is placed in roughly the same place. So although sounding quite different, they are nonetheless grouped together. Therefore, it is possible that the filidh were not attempting to make uniform sounds, but rather uniform motions. Perhaps the formulae that they were creating were based on repetitive mouth movements and not necessarily aural pleasantries.

The very interesting work of historical-linguist Calvert Watkins' How to

Kill a Dragon shows how the common heroic theme of killing a dragon crosses linguistic boundaries. He uses the comparative method to reconstruct ancient poetic formulae from the written records of the oldest language tracts that exist.

He demonstrates that there are very small formulae that can be seen to exist in many Indo-European languages that stem from an ancient root. Even snippets of

46 this practice can be seen to exist in Modern English. He uses the examples of

"Last but not least" and "Fleet of foot" and then parallels this with the Old Irish

"clu (fame) and cnu (nut) and duan (poem) and duas (reward for poem)

(Watkins, Dragon 30). In effect, he is suggesting that these small elements serve as small formulae in both English and Irish Gaelic that can be combined with other types of formulae to create a larger group of formulae. Not only are there small chiming parallel sounds as mentioned above in consonant groups, but also grammatical formulae. For example, there is the form of the argument plus the negated argument, "[t]he seen and unseen, gods spoken and unspoken"

(Watkins, Dragon 43); there is the argument plus the counter argument, "both here and elsewhere, gods above and below" (43); the argument and negated counter argument, "[t]rue and not false, girt and not ungirt" (44); the argument plus the synonymous argument, "[s]afe and sound [...] Latin sane sarteque [...]

[w]hole and roofed" (44). Additionally, there are kennings which can act as formulae: "Milk of grain (ale-O.I. melg n-etha) [...] Whales' sanctuary (sea-O.I. nemed-mbled) [...and] Whales' road (sea-O.E. hron-rad)" (45).

Moreover, there can be longer constructions that show more sophistication such as:

"Oats, peas, beans, and barley grow" (47)

ow ow

47 Here one can see the end and initial rhyme as well as the bilabial plosives

(both voiced and unvoiced) in the start of each word in the middle of the sentence.

The above examples were used by Watkins to show that there are many different types of formulae; each language has its own constructs, but the root grammatical form, or the actual words used in a formula crosses the boundaries between Indo-European languages and cultures. Watkins believes that there is a poetic momentum that is carried on by an Indo-European caste of poets that continued in each fragmented society rooted in an Indo-European culture

(Dragon 75).

Since Watson has shown that Vedic priests used these poetic formulae, there may be a link between those who used poetry in their capacity as priests of various religious practices and those who used poetry for their own secular ends.

Franklin concurs with Polome that the piety of the Indo-European created a set of interdictions against writing down religious tradition (Indo-Iranian Cosmology

20); furthermore, he links this with the observation of Caesar that there was an injunction against this also by the Celtic druids/bards, and that Edgerton believed that the Bhagavad Gitd was a secularized work of an ancient esoteric tradition (Indo-Iranian Cosmology 20).

It could very well be that there was an Indo-European religious practice of creating poetry, not in order to sound structured, but rather to weave a spell through repetitive behaviour. If this is so, then there may be a linguistic key, a

48 formula for learning vast tracks of not only Fenian lays quickly and easily, but also encomiastic poetry created by thefilidh.

49 50 5. Narrative Song Conventions

The rhythms of Fenian lays were not sung to a strict metre, but to the natural pattern of the spoken word (Blankenhorn 358). Re-constructing this music from written sources has been difficult:

The oral components in musical documents, or rather the lack of them, has been one of the major problems and hardest strands to capture in attempts to reconstruct the musical world of a period performer or a period listener [...]. The lack of detailed instructions in written documents may lead to the misconception that mediaeval music must have been easy to play, but at the same time that it was also boring and simple. In other words, it was 'not developed', since the prevailing notation in many cases is sparse. (Toivanen 23)

However, there are vestiges of this type of singing extant in ecclesiastical and secular sources. Not only do references exist which compare Fenian lay singing to ecclesiastical chant, but actual performances have been recorded on audio recorders. These lays were performed as monophonic songs, occasionally accompanied by a plucked string instrument. Although the tuning of the instrument is beyond the scope of this present thesis, the approximate notes used, rhythm of the notes, and possible accompanying method will now be discussed.

5.1. Performance Practices of the Baird

After a file composed a particular piece of poetry at the Gaelic court, the responsibility of performance fell upon the bard. With such great stress placed upon the subtlety of the internal assonance (rhyming vowels), rhyme, and

51 alliteration, forcing a simple rhythmic metre on such delicate complexity would be a tremendous task. Moreover, the subtlety of the expression would be lost if the stress patterning was "flattened out;" that is, stress placed inappropriately to match a repetitive rhythm (see section 9.2.4). Why would so much time be invested in poetic nuance if it would then be delivered with inappropriate stress?

The answer is, of course, that it was not. Only the subtlety of relaxed, natural human vocal expression can give flower to the flow of words which were deliberately spliced together to be spoken and heard naturally. The rhythm of the speaking voice was therefore necessary, and it is precisely this rhythm that was employed, not a structured repetitive musical metre. Therefore, there is little distinction in the Gaelic language between the words for a "song" and a

"poem" (Newton 83). Shields says, "Even so, a kind of singing must have been the rule which was closer to speech than we generally know today [...]"

(Narrative 16).

Additionally, there are many examples of music collectors in Ireland who, upon hearing Fenian lays, made comments similar to those of a Mr. Ousley who, as quoted by Joseph Walker, stated, "In rehearsing any of Ossian's poems [...], he chant[ed] them pretty much in the manner of our cathedral-service" (Shields,

Narrative 16). Shields also summarizes other collectors: "More recent writers who have studied the lays or heard them sung give an impression of a 'free' or

'wandering' rhythm, and some add a comparison to 'plain chant' or reference to

'a chant-like quality'" (Narrative 19). Moreover, Meek states:

52 The absence of metrical straight-jackets mean[s] that ballads [here referring to Fenian lays] could employ a less specialized type of vocabulary than bardic poems, and that the syntax of quatrains approximate [s] more closely to what we today would regard as 'ordinary' speech. ("Development" 136)

As an example of how difficult it is to try to transcribe Fenian lays into the

European musical metrical system, examine "Laoi na Mna," Figure 1, admirably attempted by Shields, below:

m = 78 rubato parlando j1, p r:j u * LT r r -^ CJ OfL'T A la bhi Oi - sin a - gus Fionn I nGleann Mhic Smoil an ghl - oi - r ghrinn.

Figure 1: Laoi na Mna

(Scealamhrdin 23)

One can see in the above example that without bar lines, the rhythm is extremely difficult to perform. The western European art music instrumentalist would be extremely hard-pressed to perform the rhythm as written. This is because instrumentalists are taught to count groupings of 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, etc., within bar lines. The instrumentalist is lost if there are no bar lines enclosing a set number of beats. In the example above, the singer being musically transcribed by Shields is probably not trying to sing to a memorized rhythm, but is using the rhythm of natural speech; it is the transcriber who writes note values and attempts to group spoken patterns into groups of 2, 3, 4, etc. As Maclnnes states, "Like the vast bulk of traditional Gaelic poetry, these compositions are all designed for singing or chanting [...]" ("Bard" 149). This is also supported by the

53 fact that Fenian lays are reported to be sung in the manner of a priest at Mass; this is almost always done in a free-flowing manner. Here, Shields quotes

Peadar Mac Fhionnlaoich in 1902 as having said:

Chan fonn amhrdin do bhi leis ar chor ar bith acht ceol mar bheadh ag sagart ag canadh Aifrinn.

He did not sing it to a song air at all but to the kind of music a priest would use to sing Mass. (Narrative 20)

If a repetitive metre was not used, the question arises: was and is it possible to have instrumental accompaniment? The answer is that it is possible, but only in certain tightly controlled and limited circumstances. Since instrumentalists who accompanied singers did not know exactly when a singer would shift syllables, or even what the words were, metres were made so that the singer and player(s) would shift together. It is possible, however, to have only one instrumentalist accompany a singer singing in free rhythm: the time discontinuity between sung pitch shifts and instrumental pitch shifts on one instrument is not very noticeable. However, if more than one instrument is used, the musical result is rather cacophonous; the instrumentalists will shift pitches at slightly different times. To lessen time delays between sung and played pitch shifts, the singer himself might play the instrument as he sang; he would know when he would shift pitches when singing and would make instantaneous shifts on the accompanying instrument. This may account for the assumption that a harp might have been used to accompany a singer of Fenian lays (Shields,

Narrative 17). The harp is physically distant from the singer's face and would not

54 noticeably adversely effect the singer's communication. It also suggests why the accompaniment of sung narrative poetry to a single lute was favoured by people on mainland Europe. Although well attested that harps were used to accompany the singing of heroic lays, the lyre pre-dated this practice.

Bruford summarizes the rhythmic performance possibilities of the singing of dan direach which is closely related to the singing of Fenian lays thusly:

In brief and without musical technicalities, the [singing performance with regard to rhythm] possibilities can be described as follows: (1) The method some might prefer to believe in involves singing the words virtually in their natural speech rhythm, like recitative, to a fixed series of notes, more like Anglican chant than plainsong. [...] (2) In other cases the words were fitted to a tune with a regular beat without losing the natural stress pattern, by exploiting the ability of triple time - usually 6/8, like a slowish double jig, but in at least one case 3/4, like a minuet-to accommodate virtually any normal speech rhythm. (3) The conventions of the metre best known from the waulking songs, which I propose here to call choric metre, might be applied. These exploit the tension between a strong musical beat and a more or less syllabic metre, creating stress patterns which may be quite opposite to those of speech - the so-called 'wrenched stress'. [...] (4) The majority of recent recordings in practice display a hybrid between two or all three of these treatments, most often (2) modified by (3). It is, of course, impossible to prove that any of these is a survival of medieval practice, and quite possible that more than one may have obtained at different dates and places. Nor can we rule out the possibility that there may have been other techniques, for instance a slower and more ornamental use of a rhythmic chant than Scottish technique (1), which might be an ancestor of the So-called sean-nos style in modern Ireland. ("Songs" 63)

The first point mentioned above is extremely difficult for singers to accomplish since there is almost no tradition that remains of narrative singing in modern society. This does not mean that this possibility is incorrect, merely that

55 re-creating this performance practice would be difficult. The second point by

Bruford, above, does not apply to Fenian lays since there is no Fenian lay with a regularized stress pattern. Additionally, any song fitted into this pattern would have syllable lengths of non-realistic lengths: the force of the metre would make the syllables either longer or shorter than normal speech. Moreover, the third point he mentions would indeed provide an unacceptable "wretched stress."

Nevertheless, the present author believes that Bruford's comment that recordings seem to utilize some combination of the above-mentioned possibilities is correct.

William Matheson speculated that the correct performance practice of Fenian lays, and indeed dan direach in general, is Bruford's first possibility (Blankenhorn

358). Since rhythmic music was the only type of music heard on the radio and television by native Gaels, it is quite likely that this condition forced narrative lays to be sung more rhythmically. It is the current author's opinion that the

Fenian lays were at one time performed in a narrative manner (Bruford's option one, above). This is in keeping with performance practices of ecclesiastical chant and recitativo secco, two extant forms of narrative singing practices.

5.2. Musical Accompaniment

By far, the most prevalent instrument in the Early, to Central Middle Ages was a variant of the lyre or lyra. There are many names for the lyre depending at" upon the language: crwth (bowed Welsh lyre), emit or crot (Irish), crowd, crout, or crouth (English), rote (French) rotte (German), jouhikantele (Finland), rootsikannel

56 and tallharpa (Estonia), nars-yukh and sangkultap (Western Siberia), gusli (with hand-hole, Russia), etc. As the holes used to stop the vibrating strings from behind were filled in, they became psalteries, called kantele (Finland), kannel

(Estonia), kokle (Latvia), kankles (Lithuania), gusli (without hand-hole, Russia) and husli (Belarus) (Crane 8). All of these instruments are of the Geek kithara form.

Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales) in his The History and Topography of

Ireland, written in Latin during the twelfth century, departs from his harangue of the Irish when he states that "Ireland uses and delights in two instruments only, the harp, namely, and the timpanum. Scotland uses three, the harp, the timpanum, and the crowd. Wales uses the harp, the pipes, and the crowd" (104).

A more accurate translation might be this: "Ireland uses and delights in two instruments only, the cithara and the tympanum. Scotland uses three, the cithara, the tympanum, and the chorus. Wales uses the cithara, tibiae and chorus" (Robinson

!)•

These instruments all share not only a common shape, but also a common usage: they were used to accompany heroic lays. Indeed,

[t]he antiquity of these instruments, essentially lyres, among the Slavic peoples adds to the evidence that the lyre was a universal Indo-European instrument, and therefore older than the development of the branches of the original Indo-European people. (Crane 9)

Most examples of these instruments are evidenced by iconography, but a number have been recovered from grave sights and have been re-constructed.

These instruments have been found in the northwestern European burial sites of:

57 Sutton Hoo, Taplow, Abingdon, Bergh Apton, Morning Thorpe, Snape, and

Prittlewell, and in Trossingen and Oberflacht, Germany. These instruments date from 500-700 AD and were used to accompany heroic verse:

From the fifth to the tenth century the use of lyres was widespread in north-west Europe; they were the court instruments used in the accompaniment of epic recitation, praise poetry, and general entertainment of the nobility. As with Irish cruit players, their counterparts in England, Germany and Scandinavia were also holders of important appointments in the service of the king. Lyres appear to have predominated until c.1000 when triangular harps were in the ascendant. (Buckley, "Instruments" 21)

An example of a lyre in iconography (eighth century) can be seen below in

Figure 2:

58 Figure 2: King David Playing a Lyre (from the eighth-century Canterbury VespasianPsalter: http://www.engl.virginia.edu/OE/Tour/Manuscript.images/Vespasian.html)

This universality of the lyre in Europe is supported by Bessaraboff who stated that there was a lyre (rotta) found in the Wiirtemberg Black Forest at

Oberflacht, which was buried in an Allemanic grave buried approximately between the fifth and seventh century A.D. (211). Additionally:

The earliest evidence for stringed instruments in that greater region [northwest Europe] is provided by excavated fragments of lyres from Scandinavia, Germany, and England suggesting that these were the most common stringed instruments up to c.1000 AD. (Buckley, Instruments 20)

Interestingly, the above-mentioned instruments used in northwest Europe were strikingly similar to the kithara and lyre. The northwest European lyre consisted, as the Greek kithara, of six strings. Discussing the iconography of Irish lyres Buckley (Instruments 19) states,

Noteworthy, however, is that all of them appear to have six strings [...] which is a strong argument in favour of the influence of lyre- type instruments on the stone-masons' consciousness, since the six- stringed lyre was the most common chordophone throughout north-west Europe in this period.

Although there are many names for the lyre, it should be remembered that the instruments were basically the same. The resonating space of the lyre was hollowed out from one piece of wood, normally maple, with a face panel attached to the front. The arms up the side were also slightly hollowed out. An example of a re-constructed Anglo-Saxon lyre from the excavation at Sutton Hoo

59 in East Anglia dated to be from the seventh century can be seen below in Figure

if .JB i-' v- l^^wSk'®' il

•

J "iWijIH " -

Figure 3: A Reproduction Lyre from Sutton Hoo (from: http://www.michaeljking.com/Taplow%201yre.htm)

The specifications of Sutton Hoo lyre re-constructions are generally: length-

740mm; maximum width-205mm; depth-27mm; string length-580mm; tuning- variable in the pentatonic scale.

60 6. Metre in Fenian Lays

In understanding the Fenian lay, an understanding of the poetic structure is necessary. All poetry is some type of linguistic structure, whether of sound, movement or otherwise, that attempts to organize speech in some way. This organization consists of three parts: formulaics, metrics, and stylistics (Watkins,

Dragon 12). This should not be confused with the structure of the language itself, which is intricate in its own right. Poetry condenses language and makes it more dense. It is also repetitive, which has the benefit of re-enforcing important points. Watkins states, "Put as simply as possible, linguistics is the scientific study of language, and poetics is the scientific study of "'artistic' language"

(Dragon 6).

6.1. Basic Construction of Fenian Lays

The laoidh that have survived, although not as complex as other Classical

Gaelic poetry examples, do have a formal and recognised structure and derives from Classical Gaelic poetry: "The fenian lay (laoidh fiannuiochta)use s a metrical form derived from the rannaiocht metres of classical poetry" (Blankenhorn 9).

McCaughey believes that "[t]he majority of laoithe which have survived either in

MSS or in oral tradition are in some form of dan. Most are in the classical language or a close approximation to it" (40). Dan was not just written but performed, and the performance practices of Fenian lays probably match that of dan direach: "[W]e follow Dr. Breatnach who [...] goes on to guess that the style of

61 performance of laoithe by Scottish singers 'most likely resembles closely the manner in which dan direach was performed in the older period'" (McCaughey

43).

Although a stressed-timed language, modern classical Gaelic counts syllables in verse as does syllable-timed languages:

The fenian lay (laoidh fiannuiochta)use s a metrical form derived from the rannaiocht metres of classical poetry. The poetry is composed in four-line stanzas of the 2(A+B) type, with three of four accented words per line. Each half-stanza is ornamented with aicill [rhyme between one line's end word and another's middle word], and the final foot of the 'B' lines contains an assonating vowel. (Blankenhorn 9)

Here Blankenhorn is making the common assumption that laoidh fiannuiochta is classified as subset of dan (the dan direach form employs a particular form of dan). It might be argued that the poetic form of laoidhean (not necessarily that of Fionn mac Cumhaill) came first and dan direach followed as a more complex form through the introduction of end-rhyme: "By the sixth century the use of end-rhyme appear [ed]" (Dillon, Realms 227). However, the basic form of the Fenian lay was that there was some type of assonant rhyme and that "[t]he Fenian lay was usually set in stanzas of four-line verses, each line generally having seven syllables" (Breathnach 24). Therefore, the structure of the lay was seven (or eight) syllables per line, four lines per verse. There is aicill rhyme (vowel consonance), and assonance in the last word of the second line and the last line.

62 6.2. Vernacular Changes to Fenian Lays

As mentioned above, Ossianic verse is believed to have been composed by the filidh, not the baird (Maclnnes, "Bard" 149); however:

The original language of the majority of surviving ballads, composed in the period from c.1200 to c.1600, was Classical Common Gaelic, the shared literary language of Ireland and Scotland, but it often made concessions to vernacular speech in matters of morphology, rhyme, and lexis. (Meek, "Development" 136)

In other words, Fenian lays tended to be composed more in the vernacular as "the overall style of a ballad [was] much less esoteric, much less 'scholastic' than that of a finely wrought bardic poem" (Meek, "Development" 136). With the downfall of the patronage of the Gaelic lords by the seventeenth century in

Ireland and eighteenth century in Scotland, the baird began to assume some of the roles of the filidh: "The Scottish bards of the seventeenth century can be seen as taking on the mantle of the file [...]" (Newton 88). Thus, with the ascendancy of the baird who were not experts in Modern Classical Irish and the existence of

Fenian lays which tended toward the vernacular, the Fenian lay existed only in the arena of the non-aristocratic Gael as the Gaelic courts declined:

When the bardic poem showed itself to be largely incapable of existing without the life-support system of the bardic schools, the ballad continued to breathe, and found a welcome home among the ordinary people of Gaelic Ireland and Gaelic Scotland [...]. (Meek, "Development" 136).

With the ascendancy of the baird who filled the vacuum created by the disappearance of the filidh, the baird then began to compose poetry that was not

63 nearly as complex or formal as that composed by the filidh; however, this poetry did suit the common person, "and by the 17th century, Scottish bardic poetry was dominated not by the strict metres of Classical Gaelic but by vernacular Scots

Gaelic" (Maclnnes, "Bard" 149). Fenian lays were therefore kept and remembered by common Gaels in their vernacular. The original poetry of these

Fenian lays was most assuredly compromised over time, but the lays were kept alive nonetheless:

Now if the Fenian ballads appear [ed] as early as the twelfth century in literary form, the fact that oral versions exist[ed] at all in a living tradition is undeniably a remarkable instance of cultural continuity and survival. Yet, whatever may be true of the melodies, so far as textual transmission goes, this is true only in a broad, general sense. (Maclnnes, "Twentieth" 103)

John Maclnnes has compared a literary version of a Fenian lay from a collection of Fenian lays, Duanaire Finn, composed c.1400 with a version that was recorded from a living person ("Recordings" 110-115). He states, "I take the

Duanaire Finn text to be the original of the oral versions: comparison of the Gaelic texts leave little doubt that they are ultimately derived from it" (Maclnnes,

"Twentieth" 110). That they are similar is unquestionable; that the oral version derives from the Duanaire Finn is not so certain. Written documents may simply be a record of an existing oral tradition. That oral version may change over time, and in this case, the oral version may be simply shorter and may not have an introduction. This does not necessarily mean that one follows from the other.

That Duanaire Finn was a transcription of an oral tradition can only be

64 determined through observing formulaic constructions in Fenian lays as Lord and Parry did in Greek and Serbo-Croatian heroic song. This has not as yet occurred with Fenian lays although Watkins has done a great deal of work with the earlier Irish sagas. That Fenian lays have undoubtedly changed in vocabulary and grammatical forms is true, but that is certain to occur regardless of whether the lays have a written or oral genesis.

Average Gaels sang songs to accompany their everyday tasks; therefore, a repetitive, highly rhythmic musical form was needed. In addition, the common people did not have access to harps whose long, sustained tones suited admirably the unequal stresses of spoken/sung verse:

During the seventeenth century Gaelic-speaking society ceased to use harpers, whose instrument was perhaps unsuited to consorting with the new regularly stressed praise song. (Harrison, "Music" 208)

Less expensive instruments included the emit (lyre) or tiompdn (bowed lyre). The emit especially has a short sustain and therefore requires regular strumming, often done in a repetitive pattern, in order to create musical accompaniment. Thus, the non-rhythmic narrative songs of the Gaelic intelligentsia began to be adapted to the rhythmic songs of the average Gael.

Putting stress on an unstressed syllable in order to match the repetitive pattern of an iambic musical metre has been dubbed "flattening out." Therefore, if Fenian lays were once performed in a narrative manner as were dan direach poetry, then

65 extant recordings of Fenian lays may be too regular in rhythm/stress as they once were.

Concerning the vernacularization of vocabulary and grammar, one can trace this process in Fenian lays where,

[v]ernacular words are substituted for older, archaic and obscure words or phrases [...] In these texts, e.g. imthighis (and even gluaisis) are regularly altered to dh'fhalbh [...]. Verbal forms, prepositions, mutations, etc. are no doubt quite unconsciously transformed from Classical to Modern Irish or Scottish Gaelic forms e.g. [the following is paraphrased]:

Book of the Dean of Lismore William Matheson's Adjustments ni £h6ir mise chart fhoghain sin a do thuiteadar gus an do thuit iad adubhairt thuirt/thubhairt i

(McCaughey 54)

Of special importance when considering who composed Fenian lays, vernacularization did not always affect syllable count; indeed, syllable count seems to be mainly maintained. This can be seen in excerpts from Laoidh Fhraoich sung by Rev. William Matheson. The following lines are not verses; they are taken out of context. In addition, accents have been added from McCaughey:

Book of the Dean of Lismore As sung by William Matheson

Adubhairt Meadhbh nach biadh slan /Thuirt i /ris nach /biodh i /slan go bhfuighbheadh Ian a bos maoth mar /fai'dh (faigheadh) i /Ian a /bos /maoth

'Acht ge maith a dtugais leaf, '/Ach ge /math na /rinneadh /leaf

66 adubhairt Meadhbh as geal cruth... /thubhairt /Mai, 's bu /gheal a /cruth,

(53).

Vernacularization does not always preserve the syllable count:

Sometimes there are too few syllables [...]. Many of the vernacularizations make no difference in the syllable count, [...] [b]ut some do [...]. Restoration of the Classical form of the preposition reduces the number of syllables to the seven required for Rannaiocht Mhor. (McCauley 55)

It might be advantageous to compare additional vernacularizations.

Below, one can see the comparison of "Laoidh Dhiarmaid" from The Book of

Lismore to the singing by Calum Johnson (from Eoligarry, Barra, Scotland) in

1966; the following are stanzas 3 and 4 (stresses from the recording included):

Book of the Dean of Lismore Calum Tohnson

Eistidh beag, madh ail libh laoidh /Eistidh /beag ma's /ail libh /laoidh

ar an chuideacht chaoimh-seo uainn, air a' /mhuinntir a /dh'fhalbh /bhuainn, / A

ar Bheinn Ghulbainn's ar Fionn fial air mac /Cumhaill 's /air Fionn /fial

' s ar Mac Ui Dhuibhne, sgeal truagh. 's air an /Fhein da'n /robh sgeul /truagh. / A

Guidhear 16 Fionn, -truagh an sgealg- /Dol a Bheinn /Ghulbainn a /sheal / A

ar Mhac Ui Dhuibhne as dearg le, air an /tore nach /dearg na /h-airm /chli;

dhul do Bheinn Ghulbainn do shealg /seanntorc /nimhe /'s e ro- /gharg,

an tuirc nach fead arm do dhith. air /Mhala /Li 'na (air?) /shealbh /muc.

(McCaughey 53)

Not only does the vernacularization occasionally affect syllable count, it also affects the rhyme. One word may slowly shift in pronunciation while its

67 rhyming counterpart may not; for example, the once rhyming "love" and

"prove" no longer rhyme in English as they once did. The question is now before a modern-day performer/re-creator of a Fenian lay performance: should vernacularizations and pronunciation shifts be altered so that a modern speaker of Gaelic can understand the story, or should older forms be used so as to make the poetry and syllable count correct? Ultimately, this is a decision that only the performer can make. Therefore, it would not be inappropriate for the performer of a Fenian lay to attempt either to regress a Fenian lay lately recorded to its older form using older pronunciations, nor would it be inappropriate to modernize the language into present-day usage. For example, a Scottish Gaelic lay may annotate the word for house as teach, or tigh, when it is now pronounced taigh. Such decisions to alter the poetry should not be made lightly.

68 7. Rhythm of the Words: a Brief Survey of Languages in Europe

The pattern of words and the distinction of emphasis that each language uses are of profound importance to the performer. Not only are these points of supreme importance to the performer when different languages are used, but the very nature of each nationality's music alters depending upon the stress patterns of the nation's language. A great deal of speculation exists as to why music of various nationalities seems to match the corresponding language; that is, why do particular nations, whose citizens speak almost one language exclusively, seem to have music that sounds distinct? A cursory glance at the musical composition practices of various European musical styles would easily answer the question.

Unfortunately, few people are interested in investigating the impetus that led to the creation of, for example, the Italian Baroque if they are keenly focused on how Highland canntaireachd piping techniques match the Scottish Gaelic language.

The stress of syllables, if any, and how that stress is expressed in each language is vitally important in understanding the resulting music of differing nationalities. Language stress can be categorized as either stress-timed or syllable-timed. Stress-timing is indicated where syllables that are stressed are placed at roughly equal distances apart within a spoken phrase. Syllable-timing is indicated where syllables are of about the same length and are stressed equally; therefore, the timing of utterance has more to do with the total number

69 of syllables that can be spoken within the phrase. Gaelic is considered a stress- timed language (Blankenhorn 364).

Poets compose so that their expression can be maximized. It therefore follows that the strength of each language is brought forward while the weaknesses are minimized. As Zeps pointes out, "[m]etre involves counting syllables, word-breaks, rhymes, lengths, tones, stresses, etc. What individual features can be regulated, depends on what is available in the language in question [...]" (247). It therefore follows that poetic forms will tend to be unique to each language, or more to the point, forms that are created for one language will not perfectly suit another if adopted:

The traditional prosody of a language always selects phonetic features immediately audible to native speakers—such as pitch, quantity, syllable counts, accent, assonance, alliteration—and arranges one or more of them in expressive patterns. (Gioia 1)

A perfect example of this is the sonnet form imported from Italy into

England. Comparatively speaking, it is much more difficult to compose a sonnet in English than it is in Italian.

The accent of most Northern European languages is indicated by volume- stressed syllables; these volume stresses are therefore of paramount importance and act as way-points in a spoken phrase. Unstressed syllables are minimized to fit in between the stressed syllables which in turn are shortened in length to keep the point of stress evenly spaced in the phrase.

70 The Romance languages have been generally considered syllable-timed:

"Further investigation brought to the classification of most Romance languages as syllable-timed and of most Germanic and Slavonic languages as stress-timed"

(Mairano 1149).

These two systems are not absolute. Most languages fit somewhere on a line between the two:

[OJne should not aim at classifying languages as either syllable- timed or as stress timed, rather at determining at which point of the continuum ranging from total stress-timing to total syllable-timing a language finds its natural collocation. (Mairano 1152)

Since the lays of Fionn mac Cumhaill are declaimed, that is, sung to the speech rhythm of the Gaelic language, how Gaelic is spoken with regard to length and volume stress is important. Additionally, the pitch in narrative song often rises on the stressed syllable and descends on an unstressed syllable. Since stress shifts from verses to verse; that is, the position of the stressed syllable moves from line to line and verse to verse, the music must be adapted to match this shifting pattern. Therefore, it is imperative that the structure of the Gaelic language be investigated.

7.1. Syllable-Timing in the Classical Languages

The languages classified as that of the Italic branch (Latin, Italian, French,

Portuguese, Spanish, et al.) and Hellenic branch (Greek) share the characteristic of having a metre based upon evenly spaced syllables. This can be seen most clearly in French:

71 Every syllable in French has a medium stress, and the final syllable of a group usually has a somewhat longer stress [...] In French the length of time required to pronounce a sentence is determined by the total number of syllables. Two sentences containing an equal number of syllables are therefore of equal duration. (Woods 2)

We can see an example of this. The size of the dots below indicate the strength of the syllables:

• • • • •••••• Le cours d'anglais est vraiment exitant

Whereas in English:

The English course is really exciting

(Woods 2).

Syllable length in French is almost uniform, but consider the Italian language where this is not true. In Italian, some syllables are given an emphasis by extending their length by almost twice the length of other syllables. However, the long syllable and its following short syllable are grouped together in the speaker's mind as a unit, a neum. Each neum is the same value as every other neum. Therefore, Italian is considered syllable-timed since two sentences containing an equal number of neums are therefore of equal duration.

As an example, consider the Italian words from a song in the vocal Metodo pratico di canto of Nicola Vaccai, "Senza l'amabile." Here the length-stressed syllables are highlighted as sung,

"Senza l'amabile, Dio di Citera. " (app. xv).

72 [neum 1] [neum 2] [neum 3] [neum 4]

Here one can see that long and short syllables alternate somewhat regularly. So, senza I'a- is the first neum consisting of one long and two short syllables. The next neum is -mobile which also consists of three syllables; the next neum Dio di Ci- has three syllables if the io in Dio is considered a diphthong, and this neum consists of a long syllable followed by two short syllables; the last neum is of two syllables consisting of a long and a short syllable. Each neum is of approximately the same length. This analysis is not meant to be all-inclusive, it only approximates some mechanics of the language, but it does give a basic stress pattern to the reader.

Each neum acts as a footstep as the reader's eyes march across the page.

Therefore, as the reader scans the poetic line, this scansion is called a metrical footprint. Greek metrical feet are also much like Italian metrical feet:

Greek meter is "quantitative," that is, a long syllable is held longer than a short, on the analogy of a quarter note and an eighth note. There is then, a close relationship between Greek meter and music. English, on the other hand, is "qualitative," for its rhythm is determined by the stress, not length, of syllables, and its scansion consists of "heavy" and "light" syllables. (Race 12)

As an example of this, the author Race differentiates between these two forms by using the symbols ( ' ) to mark volume stress (in a stress-timed language), ( - ) to mark length stress (in a syllable-timed language), and ( U ) to

73 mark an unstressed syllable (in both stress-timed and syllable-timed languages), as can be seen here:

Greek has no appreciable stress, and the accents printed in the texts represent pitch. Thus Tennyson's playful line of dactylic hexameter, "Jack was a poor widow's heir, but he lived as a drone in a beehive," is scanned 'UU'UU'UU'UU'UU" because it consists of a series of stressed and unstressed syllables. The first line of the Odyssey (also dactylic hexameter), "andra moi ennepe, Mousa, polytropon hos mala polla," is scanned — UU — UU — U U — UU — UU because the longs are held twice as long as the shorts. (Race 12)

This dichotomy between Northern European stress-timed languages and

Classical syllable-timed languages as well as some of the characteristics of their individual languages can be seen by the comments of the famous American linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir (1884-1939):

Probably nothing better illustrates the formal dependence of literature on language than the prosodic aspect of poetry. Quantitative verse was entirely natural to the Greeks, not merely because poetry grew up in connection with the chant and the dance, but because alternations of long and short syllables were keenly live facts in the daily economy of the language. The tonal accents, which were only secondarily stress phenomena, helped to give the syllable its quantitative individuality. When the Greek meters were carried over into Latin verse, there was comparatively little strain, for Latin too was characterized by an acute awareness of quantitative distinctions. However, the Latin accent was more markedly stressed than that of Greek. Probably, therefore, the purely quantitative meters modeled after the Greek were felt as a shade more artificial than in the language of their origin. The attempt to cast English verse into Latin and Greek molds has never been successful. The dynamic basis of English is not quantity, but stress, the alternation of accented and unaccented syllables. This fact gives English verse an entirely different slant and has determined the development of its poetic forms, [and] is still responsible for the evolution of new forms. (Sapir 244)

74 Poetry based on syllabic length is often called Syllabic Poetry.

7.2. Stress-Timing in Most Northern European Languages

Poetry based on volume-stress (or weight) is often called strophic poetry or accentual poetry. In order to understand this type of poetry, the characteristics of stress-timing must now be investigated. Since the present reader probably speaks English, explaining volume stress using the English language will undoubtedly be the most demonstrative. The poet Dana Gioia gives an excellent synopsis of English linguistic poetic forms. Note that poetry designed utilizing stress patterns is often called accentual poetry.

The basic principles of accentual verse are stunningly simple. There is, in fact, only one steadfast rule: there must be an identical number of strong stresses in each line. (If the poem is stanzaic in structure like a ballad, then there must be the same number of strong stresses in each line of the stanza.) All other rules of stress meter are only qualifications of this single principle. Stress verse does not require any set number of syllables per line or any set arrangement between stressed and unstressed syllables [...] Nursery rhymes can have between one and seven stresses per line, but the most popular form-and indeed the most common measure for all English accentual verse-is the four-beat line with a medial caesura.

/ / / / Starlight | | Star bright, (4 syllables)

/ / / / First star | | I see tonight (6 syllables)

/ / / •/ I wish I may | | I wish I might (8 syllables)

/ / / / Have the wish | | I wish tonight (7 syllables)

75 Although every line in this famous folk charm has a different syllable count, the meter is constant-four strong beats per line. (Gioia 1)

Another way of looking at the spacing of stresses in English or any other stress-timed language is described below:

English, typically, has a predetermined rhythm, and the syllables seem to scramble to accommodate this beat. The rhythm requires a major stressed syllable every 0.6 seconds, and there are normally one or two unstressed syllables near each major syllable [see Figure 4, below]:

oof joo

0.6 0,6 sec

Figure 4: Timing of Stressed Syllables in an Average Sentence

The rhythm is maintained by the stressed syllables. If there are several unstressed syllables around the stressed syllable, its duration is shortened, and the unstressed syllables must be glided over very rapidly [see Figure 5, below]:

0000 0000 0000 00

0.6 0.6 0.6 sec sec sec

Figure 5: Timing of Stressed Syllables with Added Non-stressed Syllables

76 If there are no unstressed syllables nearby, the stressed syllables are naturally lengthened in order to fill the spaces of 0.6 second intervals [see Figure 6, below]:

Figure 6: Timing of Stressed Syllables with Removed Non-stressed Syllables

(Woods 3)

Here are additional examples given by Woods to demonstrate in actual sentences how English speakers evenly space stressed syllables, but as more minor words are added, unstressed syllables are forced between the stressed syllables which in turn become shorter in length. This type of stress-timing is characharistic of the Gaelic languages as well:

1. a. Kids hide t6ys. b. Some kids hide toys. c. Some kids hide our t6ys. d. Some kids have hidden our toys. e. Some kids will have hidden our toys.

2. a. Cars need gas. b. The cars will need gas. c. The cars will need some gas. d. The cars will be needing some gas.

3. a. Men beat rugs. b. The men beat rugs. c. The men beat their rugs. d. The men will beat their rugs. e. The men will have beaten their rugs.

4. a. Deer lick salt.

77 b. A deer licks salt. c. A deer has licked the salt. d. A deer has licked some of the salt.

e. A deer will have licked some of the salt. (15)

In English, the stress occurs on nouns, strong verbs, adjectives and adverbs; non-stressed words are often conjunctions, articles (both indefinite and definite), pronouns, and modal verbs. The vowels of these non-stressed syllables often are not pronounced as written, but shift to a neutral vowel, the resting place of the language. This vowel sound, or resting place, is the sound made when someone does not quite know what to say. In English, the sound is,

"Uhm;" in Irish, "Ehm;" in French it is the French or, "Peu." In English, the unaccented vowel mentioned above is called the schwa and is a mid-back velar vowel. The name schwa is used to describe a vowel sound in Hebrew, but may derive from the name given to the intrusive vowel, or epenthesis, in Sanskrit termed the svarabhakti. The schwa is specifically the name given to an unstressed vowel and is often just written phonetically as [a]. However, it actually takes on a number of sounds depending upon the consonants which surround it. This can be understood as the sound made when the speaker is moving from the stressed vowel to the resting place, but not quite getting there. It is analogous to a static picture of a jump-rope. The ends of the rope represent two different stressed vowels; the low point of the rope represents the attempt to reach the resting place. The higher the tension of the ends, the less close to the resting place the rope comes. Therefore, there are a few slightly different sounds that flow from

78 the speech organs relaxing to this place but not quite achieving relaxed placement, including [a], [o], and [I]. It is often difficult for a singer to relax between stressed vowels as normally occurs when speaking. In this case, it is as though the rope does not quite lower all the way to the ground; the schwa then is not pronounced, but its stressed counterpart. This is quite noticeable.

As an aside, it should be noted that in the Gaelic languages, the intrusive vowel matches the sound of the preceding vowel; in German in a word with a number of syllables, the reverse can be true: the preceding vowel in a word may take on the characteristics of a following vowel (umlaut). Thus, an unaccented syllable in English often takes on a character that is quite different from what it appears to be; for example, "begin" is often pronounced incorrectly by singers as

[bigl:n] and not [baghn].

This propensity of altering vowel sounds due to stress position is very noticeable in English. Other languages do not have nearly so great a tendency since other languages are not so strongly stress-timed. Therefore, English speakers should be wary of vowel shifting when speaking in a foreign language.

There are many other problems facing speakers who wish to properly pronounce a foreign language. The following section investigates some of these problems.

7.3. Syllabic and Stress Confusion

When a foreigner to a culture or language chooses to speak in that language foreign to that person, the foreigner clearly sounds odd to the native

79 speaker. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, the language learner must learn the pivot-point of the new language. All vowels and consonants swing forward to front vowels and consonants and backwards to back vowels and consonants. The schwa of each language is slightly different.

Secondly, the learner must compensate in volume and duration for the new language; this often does not occur. An example of this can be seen in the way that native English speakers sing in Italian. Italian music is specifically designed to match the language; therefore, there are many long notes followed by one, two, of three short notes. The stressed syllable is placed on the long note, the unstressed syllables on the short notes. English speakers therefore improperly de-volumize the shorter notes. They therefore appear to be barking from a native Italian speaker's point of view. Short notes should have almost the same volume as long notes. The reverse is also true; Italians often do not shift to the English schwa when singing on unstressed syllables.

Another example of this can be seen in the manner in which plainchant is performed today. French, German, English and other language speakers have focused on the fact that each neum has been decreed to be of the same length.

They have improperly slurred this to mean that each syllable is of the same length; yet, each neum consists of a long and at least one short syllable. This machine-gun deliverance is unfortunately encouraged by a mis-interpretation of the Roman Catholic Church doctrine that specifies notes should be of equal length. Unfortunately, the church is specifically addressing when there are many

80 notes on one syllable, not many syllables on one note. This is a significant point that is unfortunately missed by choir directors.

Thirdly, every sound in a foreign language is different from the written counterpart in the learner's language. The letters may look alike, but they are pronounced ever so slightly differently.

Since an effective manner of annotating stress is important when analysing the lays of Fionn mac Cumhaill, it might be wise to observe some of the pit-falls that linguists have made when using the wrong stress-descriptive method. Some of the problems which occur when using an inappropriate method is described below:

Prosodists, like all literary theorists, adore complexity, and they are liable to make distinctions where meaningful differences do not exist. Consequently, they have often been flummoxed and outwitted by the simple country sense of strong stress meter. Frequently they try to analyze accentual verse in terms of metrical feet, but the concept of the foot, which is derived from Greek and Latin verse, has no relevance to this Germanic form. The structural unit of accentual verse is the line or half-line. Dividing accentual verse into metrical feet can be done (just as it can be done to prose), but it reveals nothing essential about the generative principles of the form. Let us analyze the same nursery rhyme in the conventional accentual-syllabic manner.

Star | light | Star | bright,

_ U - U - First | star | I see | to-night

U_ U- U- U - I wish | I may | I wish | I might

U - U - U -

81 Have the | wish I wish to | night

This analysis would suggest that the poem is metrically incoherent. In accentual-syllabic terms, the meter seems to change in every line. By seeking too much metrical organization, an accentual-syllabic scansion misconstrues what is there. Yet the English-speaking ear immediately hears the underlying and unifying form, which is created by stress alone without regard to syllables [there are four stressed syllables per line]. (Gioia 1)

As can be said concerning the spectrum of stress-timed and syllable-timed languages, "The meter of Beowulf, to return to a point, is alliterative. It is based on the linkage of two half-lines by the similar initial sound of either two or three stressed syllables. The meter of early Greek epic poetry is quantitative" (Niles

121). The placement of the Gaelic languages within this spectrum is important for a multitude of reasons, not the least is proper performance technique.

7.4. Timing in the Gaelic Language

It is widely held that Gaelic is a stress-timed language (McCaughey,

Blankenhorn, and others). It should be noted, however, that Gaelic makes use of long versus short syllable lengths as well. The written accents in Scottish Gaelic a, e, i, 6, and u and in Irish Gaelic a, e, i, 6, u are there to indicate that the vowels marked with an accent mark are almost twice as long as the unaccented vowels.

However, accent marking of vowels does not necessarily indicate stress; for example, amhrdn is stressed by volume on the first syllable, not on the second.

Having noted this exception, it should also be noted that the overwhelming majority of vowels marked by an accent are also volume stressed. Nonetheless,

82 the basic timing by volume clearly exists, but it is not an overwhelming factor.

Since the Gaelic languages share many factors with Italian and other classical languages, Gaelic also can be treated in a way like a syllable-timed language such as can clearly be shown in dan direach.

Of particular significance is that Gaelic employs long and short vowels.

The neum, therefore, consists of groupings of long and short syllables. Since the first, stressed syllable comes first, and each stress is placed evenly apart, as opposed to Italian, it is quite possible that this is the reason why so many Gaelic songs are written in some form of triplet time.

7.5. Annotating Poetry According to Attributes of Each Language

There are several different approaches to annotating stress in poetry. The best choice depends upon which method delineates the attributes of the Gaelic language in the most illuminating manner. The following is a synopsis of

Blankenhorn's methodology in deciding which form is best for annotating accentual poetry in Gaelic. This might not be the best method for syllabic poetry, but certainly brings out the flavour of Gaelic poetry more than any other method.

The following are the various options available (32-50) and are grossly simplified, but are useful tools for the performer.

7.5.1. Classicist Method

When applied to English verse, the classicist method defines a foot as being composed of either a two or three syllable unit. The foot of classical poetry

83 (Latin, Greek, etc.) was composed as groupings of long ( — ) and short (v^ ) syllables. This was adapted to the English language, substituting volume-stress for length-stress. Unfortunately, this system does not regularize the volume stress in a stress-timed language. That is, the timing of the stresses is not apparent from the notation. For example, here is Shakespeare's thirtieth sonnet described by the Classicists' method:

When to the sessions of sweet sil~ent thought

Looking at the scansion above, there appears to be no visual pattern indicating the timing by stress.

7.5.2. The Structuralist Method

In effect, this system combines the Classicists' method and volume indications. So if syllable length is determined by long and short symbols ( — •

), stress can be annotated by primary ( / ), secondary (A ), tertiary (\ ), and weak

(v ). Blankenhorn points out that Trager and Smith gave a famous example of elevator-dperator contrasting with §levator-6perator (the person is not an elevator mechanic). In effect:

Although this [approach by Trager and Smith] was a very brief treatment of the subject, it differed radically from previous works in its approach to phonology. English was analyzed as having nine short vowels plus three semi-vowels /y. w, h/ which would provide an overall frame for speakers of all English dialects. In addition, supra-segmental phonemes were set up: four different degrees of stress, or loudness; four pitches (following Kenneth Pike); and four junctures, which categorized the phenomena of

84 initial and final allophones of phonemes, of pause, and of terminal rise and fall in pitch. (Davis 275)

Therefore, the structuralist method combines two systems to annotate length and volume stress of syllables.

7.5.3. The Generative Method

The generative method is designed to see the underlying form that the composer utilized. This is a more proscriptive approach than the structuralist method and has many allures for the scholar attempting to ascertain the motives of the poet. Unfortunately, the method is often inadequate in ascertaining the poet's motives. It is too simplistic to adequately define what an underlying form is that makes the language poetic. More importantly to a performer, the proscriptive, versus prescriptive nature of the analysis might encourage improper stress; that is, because of the analysis, a performer may give more weight to a syllable than is done in spoken speech and thereby distance the listener from the communication.

7.5.4. The Temporalist Method

This is a prescriptive method which seeks to the internal workings of each foot is not so important as when the stress occurs over time. In effect, it is a scientific approach where volume is plotted versus time on a graph. That graph may be any arbitrary length as designated on a page with words and syllables spaced so as the written syllables fall on the page with respect to time. A < / >

85 symbol may annotate stress. The stress patterns may therefore be ascertained by looking at the page and observing how far apart the < / > symbols appear. The stress pattern of a following line can be seen to line up (or not) with the previous line.

7.5.5. Stress and Silent Stress

Although the number of accents varied per line, and the syllables were counted, the poetry of Fenian lays still stemmed from a language that was considered stress-timed. The following is a comment on this point and an example of stress patterns in a poem written in dan direach as analysed by

McCaughey:

It goes without saying that stress as such is not functional in dan direach. In the theory of the schools, all syllables count equally, whether stressed or unstressed. This works admirably in a syllable-timed language like French or Latin, but the stubborn fact is that Irish/Scottish Gaelic (like English) is a 'stress-timed' language. Stress syllables come at regular intervals but there is considerable variety in the number of intervening unstressed syllables from zero to three or perhaps four. It follows that the heavily-stressed syllables move about the line, as between one quatrain and the next. Take for example the following sample from Ir. Syll. Poetry [Knott] 67:

[the symbol / is a stress mark which is written immediately before the stressed syllable]

Stanza 1 / Ollamh/ Chormaic,/ triath/ Teamhra is/Cormac na/gcliar n-/iomdha /cas nachair/choir do/labhra /tarla ar/bhfas/d6ibh 'na/dhiomdha,

86 Stanza 5 /Mac/ Airt/Einfhir da/bhfeachadh, /lais 'na/eagmhais dob'/uathadh, /ri 6/bhfuair gach/damh/ditheal /Fitheal/uaidh i/gclar/Cruachan.

From the above it can be seen that the two quatrains, though composed in the same metre, show considerable variation in stress distribution. In a metre with four 7-syllable lines the heavy stresses can be tabulated as follows:

Stanza 1 1 3 5 6 2 5 6 1 4 6 1 3 4 6

Stanza 5 12 3 6 13 6 1 3 5 6 1 3 5 6 (McCaughey 43-44).

McCaughey then points out that there are actually an equal number of stresses per line if one includes "silent stresses."

If one counts the stressed syllables in a line of poetry, occasionally a stressed syllable is missing. Yet when recited, there is a clear time interval that is being occupied during the space where this missing syllable would be. These silences are not unstressed, but are actually stressed. This appears ludicrous at first glance (how can silences be stressed-it is an oxymoron), but an explanation by Blankenhorn should prove enlightening:

To understand the phenomenon of silent stress in verse, it is useful to draw analogy with music: silent stresses operate in Irish verse-as in English-in the same way that rests do in music, [...] to preserve the sense of balance and equilibrium between individual sound

87 units, whether these be equal or of different length, without interrupting the rhythmical flow from one such unit to the next. (63)

Blankenhorn continues with a limerick as an example with the symbol

A marking the silent stress:

A/ smiling young/ lady of/ Niger/ A went/ out for a / ride on a/ tiger:/ A They re/ turned from the/ ride with the/ lady in/ side And the/ smile on the/ face of the/ tiger./ A (63)

This mechanism was also used in the composition of Fenian lays.

McCaughey believes that Fenian lays had an equal number of stresses per line, only some were felt by the absence of sound: "[A]n even number of stress-pulses

(articulated or silent) were felt to be present in each line or pair of lines"

(McCaughey 44). Applying this:

The two lines of, for instance, rannaigheacht ghairid may be compacted together can be seen clearly in stanza 5 of Geisidh cuan (Jr. Syll. Poetry [Knott] 27); a silent stress 'appears' at the end of line 2.

Ba/saoth liom / bas an/ laoich do/ luigheadh/ Horn/ A / mac na/ mna 6/ Dhoire dha/ Dhos, a/ bheith a/-niu is/ cros fa/ chionn (McCaughey 45)

Again, the symbol A marks the silent stress, above.

This point is reiterated by Blankenhorn who notes lays share "[t]he occurrence of the same number of stresses in each couplet (eight), and the occurrence of silent stresses at the ends of lines containing an odd number of stresses" (363).

88 It is quite possible that during these silent stresses, there may have been an interjection by a harp, lyre, or other similar instrument. As McCaughey has states, "First, one notes that the laoithe were almost certainly chanted to the accompaniment of the harp [...]. What the role of the harpist actually was must remain obscure, though there are perhaps some pointers indicating that a chord, arpeggio or strum accompanied some or all the stressed syllables in dan/dan direach, [...]" (43). As many different cultures in northern Europe often shared cultural elements, it is pertinent to note that it was common in the courts of the

Angles and Saxons to accompany the performance of lays with the harp. There are odd, silent rests which begin many lines in Beowulf, and it is probable that these silent stresses were filled up with short musical interludes played by the harp (Pope 88). This tendency to have an equal number of stresses per line

(whether silent or stressed, filled by a stringed instrument or not) does not imply that the performance of these lays was done to strict, repetitive rhythm. The stresses in this poetry did not appear like clock-work, perhaps each every two seconds; since the stresses came at different intervals, the music could not have been performed to a strict rhythm. This is unusual, in that music today is almost exclusively performed in a strict, repetitive metre reflective of syllable-timed poetry. Although somewhat dated, Pope's comments on Beowulf are still valid:

"Furthermore, it is not likely that many readers could keep time with any assurance when required to produce successive measures with such ratios as three to five or five to four" (Pope xii).

89 7.5.6. Blankenhorn's Method for Gaelic

Blankenhorn attempted to combine various notational methods in order to best analyze the structure of both Irish and Scottish Gaelic verse. It should be noted that in her work she strove to delineate accentual verse that had been largely ignored up to that point. Therefore, there is a strong emphasis in annotating stress placement. Blankenhorn also infused her method with a temporalist approach so as to clearly annotate silent stress. Indeed, she agreed with McCaughey that overlaying a temporal structure on verse shows that stress counting was an integral part of dan direach poetry.

She reduced syllables to four major categories:

1. Nuclear-stressed syllables which are strongly stressed syllables that

fall at the beginning of a cadential "foot." These are annotated < /

>.

2. Primary stressed syllables, which include some silent stressed

syllables, that that fall at the beginning or a "foot." These are

annotated < / > as well.

3. Secondary stressed syllables, which also include other silent

stressed syllables that fall at the mid-point of a "foot" in duple

rhythm. These are annotated < \ >.

4. Unstressed syllables. These receive no notation (74).

90 Furthermore, silent stresses are given the < A > symbol and may be preceded by either the < / > or < \ > symbols to indicate primary or secondary stress.

Blankenhorn eventually decided upon a different method to annotate rhythm within a foot. She did this by marking the boundaries of the foot by the

< / > symbol and within that boundary delineating the stress to be —— and unstress to be ^^ . She then placed various letters to specify different types of rhyming ornaments underneath the above-mentioned symbols to show various types of assonant rhyme. Additionally, she used bold letters when pointing out aicill rhyme.

7.6. Poetic Structure versus Performance

It is of profound importance that the performer understands that the annotation of poetry is merely a tool, albeit a useful one. This tool was devised by non-performing observers to better appreciate the art of the composer and the art of the performer. The inadequacies of structural analysis mentioned above should impress upon the performer the necessity not to over-analyse the structure of the poem, but speak the poem truthfully, using natural speech patterns. It is a dangerous trap for the performer to observe the structure of the poem and then exaggerate the timing of the syllables to match the formula of the stress pattern. There is a massive chasm that exists between the competent performer who is attempting to speak and the non-performing intellectual who

91 reads aloud. When the performer believes in the words that are being spoken, there is a slight variation in syllabic length that is eliminated by the effectual reader. It should be happenstance that the stressed syllables have a structure to them, and that structure must be imperfect. Human speech is not exact. If it is made exact, it becomes false and artistic. It is the uneven nature of the world which gives it colour. It must be remembered that "art" is the root of "artifice" and "artificial." Art imitates life imperfectly. The performer should realize that it is the imperfect nature of speech which gives the performer a closer relationship with the earth and reality. Becoming a repetitive machine destroys that connection to the audience.

92 8. Rhythm in Music

Rhythmic music existed not only in the Gaelic court, but also in common society. Yet there has been a great mixing of the two: "Gaelic music cannot be perceived from an inside perspective as simply 'folk music' because so much of it originates in the Classical tradition of the native aristocracy" (Newton 104). The great difference between music at court and music in the home was not so much that of language but of pitch conventions, and the number and type of instruments employed. Although not within the scope of the present work to discuss pitch scale intonations, rhythmic differences will be discussed here.

8.1. The Hierarchy of Beats

The process of "flattening-out" forces unevenly spaced stressed syllables into a "dipodic rhythm" and is employed in ballad metre in traditional English and Irish music (Blankenhorn 70). In order to see how the stress pattern of poetry is manoeuvred into a musical pattern, the traditional organization of stress with a musical measure must be defined. The hierarchy of beats is the name given to this practice of grouping musical stress in repetitive patterns and ordering them by their stress or volume quantity. Repetitive musical metre is normally expressed by duplets in western European art music. This is expressed as 2/4 time (or 4/4 time) where the strong accent is on the first (and third) beat and the unstressed beat is on the second (and fourth) beat of a two (or four) beat measure; all upbeats are less stressed than their corresponding downbeats.

93 Triplets (3/4, 6/8, etc.) are also used where the stress is on the first beat followed by two weak beats. Once this musical pattern is understood, the stress patterns of the words are then determined by their relative stresses to one another and placed appropriately within the musical measure. As an example, observe an analysis of a song from the highly rhythmic western European Baroque era:

"Hallelujah" from Handel's Messiah (Handel 171). See Figure 7, below:

Hal . ls-lu-jali, Hal • le-lu-jal., Hal-U - lu.jah, Hal-lo-lu-iah, Hal - le • lu-jai.

Figure 7: 'Hallelujah' from Handel's Messiah

In the first word of the song, Hallelujah, the strongly accented first syllable

Ha is placed on the first beat of a four beat measure, le is placed on the upbeat of two (even less strongly struck than two), lu is placed on the strongly accented third beat, and the unstressed jah is put on the upbeat of three (less stressed than beat three). The syllable Ha is forced to be performed slightly longer than the way that one would normally say it. It is made into a dotted half note, which is a fairly long time period in an allegro piece; it is longer than the time period that one would use when saying Ha in the word hallelujah normally (this is an English word, alleluia is the Latin). Unfortunately, the strongest syllable in the word is lu, not Ha; therefore, the Ha should be on the third beat and the lu on the first.

94 Although not shown in this example, the opposite is also created by this structuring: a syllable is made shorter in the music than the length that it would normally be when spoken.

Figure 7, above, is actually an example of awkward composition. Besides the strange reversal of Ha and lu in the beginning, the length of the Ha syllable is made much longer than normal speech. This is made understandable if Handel's musical history is known. Musical performance had gone through a metamorphosis prior to Handel's time. The very texturally complex polyphonic music of the Renaissance was thought by some to have become too complex.

Words were not understood. Moreover, words were not being fitted properly into rhythmic patterns properly. Music was therefore revolutionized through the work of Caccini, Monteverdi, and others, so that music matched speech in pitch and duration. This musical style developed in Italy and for the Italian language and does not directly apply to stress-timed languages. Since the neum consists of a long followed by a short, or two, or three short syllables, stress was not only indicated by length. An Italian composer would make a stressed syllable twice as long as an unstressed sound in music notation. Handel learned the Italian form of composition and therefore had to compose in English using

Italian forms. The Ha in Hallelujah was made into a dotted half note followed by an eighth note because that is what would have been done in Italy to match the rhythmic pattern of the Italian language.

95 If this awkwardness can be created with someone of Handel's skill, the performer of Fenian lays should be especially wary of repeating this type of error with Gaelic music. Not only will "flattening out" bring unstressed syllables to positions of prominence, but will also force those false stresses to be in a dipodic rhythm which is foreign to the groupings of three so replete in the Gaelic language.

8.2. Fitting the Gaelic Language into a Strong Rhythmic Pattern

One might believe that with the understanding that there is the hierarchy of beats in existence, it only remains to shuffle the words of a Fenian lay or other

Gaelic poem into this pattern to make it into a well-composed song. This is true in the European art music tradition, but not so in Gaelic culture. In Gaelic traditional music, mainly concerning music used to accompany accentual verse, the tune existed first and then the words were created to match the stress patterns of the music: "Gaelic poets usually wrote their poems to fit an existing tune. This is the reverse of the European procedure, where the words come first and are then set to music" (6 Riada 26). In other words, when marrying words and music, European composers shuffled the words into the hierarchy of beats and then added pitches; for the Gael, the pitches and rhythm existed, only the proper words needed to be discovered that matched the length and pitch of the notes. If this was the norm for folk music song composition; that is, stressed syllables matching stressed beats, then mismatched rhythmic stress was either

96 the result of choosing the wrong tune for a particular poem, or was an attempt to save an important poem by adapting the poem, such as one composed by the filidh, into a folk tune with a strict metre.

Gaelic is stressed-timed, but indicates emphasis by both loudness and length. Therefore, it would be appropriate the lengths of musical notes matched spoken syllable lengths and stressed syllables were placed on stressed beats. It should be observed however, that the exact musical repetitive structure does not exactly match the spoken structure. The lengths of some spoken syllables will be made longer in music notation than as actually spoken, some will be made shorter. The closer the musical rhythm matches the spoken rhythm, the more finely crafted the song.

It must be pointed out that Gaelic is a language where the pattern of syllables often follows a triple-beat pattern: "The results of our survey indicate that Irish poets have, over the centuries, largely preferred triple rhythmic patterns to duple ones" (Blankenhorn 75). This point is often lost on transcribers.

If a musical piece sounds as if it was performed in 4/4 time (four beats per measure, each beat delineated by a quarter note), closer analysis will undoubtedly show that the music is actually performed in 12/8 time (four beats per measure, each beat consisting of three eighth notes).

97 8.2.1. Forcing Gaelic Poetry into the Hierarchy of Beats

Matching the spoken word to a repetitive musical metre is often difficult. Sometimes the results are disastrous. Consider a well known song as annotated by Creighton and MacLeod (68), "An Gille Donn" from Cape Breton

Island in Nova Scotia, Canada ("The Brown Haired Lad", verses three and seven):

Verse 3. Fhuair sinn ordugh a bhi "Marsadh" Got we an order that will be marching We received a command to march

Gu sraid nan ceum comhnard. To a street of the step even To the street of level stepping (or to the street at an even pace).

Verse 7. Luchd nan cotaichean tartain, People of the coats tartan A company of tartan-coats, ' S iad sgairteil-e seolta. And they vigorous cunning Robust and cunning.

The bold syllables highlight where the song is accented when sung (An

Cdmhlan). Unfortunately, one would never say, "Gu sraid" and "sgairteil-e" just as one would never say, "He left the street to see a man." The words are rather brutally crammed into the musical rhythmic structure. That is, the stress-timing of the language is changed into an unrecognizable pattern. This does not just suggest, but demands that the origin of the above song, "An Gille Donn," was

98 much different and was originally performed to a different rhythm. This tendency to place an accent on a hitherto fore unstressed syllable so as to have equidistant spacing of volume pulses in a musical structure has been discussed by McCaughey. Blankenhorn summarizes McCaughey's comments:

Specifically, he [McCaughey] demonstrates how the natural stress- timed nature of the Gaelic language, with stresses rather than syllables being isochronous, has latterly become exaggerated in the musical context so that performance of laoithe by many singers has come to involve the regular stressing and destressing of alternate syllables, thereby raising to positions of stress many syllables which would not normally receive it; he calls this process of rhythmical regularisation 'flattening out/ (363).

This tendency to put unaccented spoken syllables on a strong beat is perhaps the origin of the "Scottish snap" in Scottish fiddle music where the down beat is a note of short duration. As MacFarlane suggests, "[L]ong and short and very short notes come immediately after the bar and receive the accent

[...]. I believe we have here the raison d'etre of the Scottish 'Snap', [...]" (80). This theme is furthered by the piper Allan MacDonald of Glenuig who bemoans the over-structuring of pipe tunes (pibroch) which seem to have drifted away from the spoken/sung nature of Gaelic song,

Why is it that, although pibroch emerged and developed in a Gaelic speaking society in Scotland, where the majority of pibrochs are recognizable by their Gaelic folk titles, this music, today, has little rhythmic affinity with the Gaelic song tradition? (MacDonald, Glenuig 11)

99 MacDonald of Glenuig further suggests that the stress-timing of Gaelic has been superseded by that of English which in turn has corrupted the natural stress pattern of pipe playing,

[P]ibroch's divorce from the rhythms of the Gaelic language and its adaptation to a predominantly English speaking rhythm [...] has left the modern pibroch player unable to interpret pibroch in the way in which it was originally intended to be performed. (MacDonald, Glenuig 12)

The over-structuring of Gaelic song can be seen to exist in the Scottish

Mod (a festival celebrating everything Gaelic). This festival has included competitions in singing traditional Gaelic songs. It has been suggested by many that these competitions were often events where Gaels strove to prove to others that they were a worthy people; they did this by compromising their own Gaelic traditions to appear more sophisticated in the eyes of musicians trained in mainland European art music:

The influences on singing style were such that by the mid 1900s the traditional style was considered to be alien. A traditional singer, Kitty MacLeod was possibly the first person to sing in front of an urban audience in the traditional manner, in unmeasured time and without the characteristics of the professionally trained voice. One reaction to it was a letter to the press, from a Gaelic speaker, complaining about her style of singing Oran Mor MhicLedid [...] What was evident about this reaction was that the Gael's traditional style, with its closer relationship with language rhythm, was now considered inferior to the style which was being adopted by the National M6d from outside Gaelic culture. (MacDonald, Glenuig 48)

A personal conversation with Kitty MacLeod's nephew, Dr. James

MacDonald revealed that Kitty MacLeod believed that she was being chastised in

100 the above quotation for bringing traditional practices to the public stage: that was not to be done. Traditional music was to be sung at home for a native audience, not in public to be criticized by trained European art musicians.

Therefore, to avoid embarrassing her courage-challenged countrymen, Kitty

MacLeod sang in two different ways: one way on the stage (M6d) for the

European intelligentsia and one way for the home or ceilidh.

The tendency to structure traditionally non-structured song certainly applied to lays:

[A singer was] living in an area in which the most characteristic type of women's song the oran luaidh frequently force[d] the stress this way [flattens it out]. It may be added that, as is well known, a number of laoithe were drawn into the corpus of waulking song, undergoing considerable metrical/rhythmical change in the process. (McCaughey 49).

This is supported by Marianne Jewell, the musical notation transcriber for Effie Rankin's As a' Bhraighe who warns that,

[ijt's important to understand that the rhythms shown in the transcriptions will not be the same for each of the other verses. This is because in Gaelic song the rhythm of the air is dictated by the lyrics. Each syllable has its own note, long vowels are stressed and held longer than short vowels and accented vowels are longer still. Thus, the rhythm of the air changes in each verse to match the rhythm of the changing words. Although words may be written for an already existing air, words are not made to fit an existing rhythm of the air, or the pronunciation would be faulty. (189)

The rhythm was often so rhythmically loose in a song that attempts to force it into a repetitive pattern of western European art music failed. This can be seen by the attempts to write down the song "Catriona Ni'n Dughaill"

101 composed by Alexander (The Ridge) MacDonald. The author's grandson,

Angus, later sang the song for John Lome Campbell who recorded it and had it transcribed by Seamus Ennis (unnamed #141); it was entitled "Catriona Nighean

Dubhghaill" and was notated in 3/4 time (see Figure 8 for the first few measures). The version in The Gesto Collection of Highland Music of 1895 given to the collectors by the author and entitled "Catriona Nigh 'n Dughaill" was in 2/4 time (see Figure 9 for the first few measures). Another version in As a' Bhraighe, entitled "Catriona ni'n Dughaill" was notated in 6/8 time (see Figure 10 for the first few measures):

J"1, v * 'I O *ui > tr . \ • MJ * >

<* • * V I | * * * iI 1 » \ . v *" l * * *' •<0-

Figure 8: Catriona Nighean Dubhghaill (Campbell, Un-named #141)

m 3=^4jj-fedi5^ ¥—* W0 f *r»

^^ ^^

•—•- & ^JZ~Lj=3 PP #1 m "• rTIJ^g~-" «//

W—#-

Figure 9: Catriona Nigh 'n Dughaill (The Gesto Collection of Highland Music of 1895)

102 Ca - trio - na niglieiin D& - ghaill tiu ghrinn a chruil chiuil i nuair u sheinn i le silnnd sid na

jj • •

luinrt bn mhnlh gleii - rniilh;hhi l m'in - tinn In iong-narth ri linn dhoiTih hhi rtiVsgmUi mi diiinn-linn a'diiuil sin hu Figure 10: Catriona ni'n Dughaill (Rankin 191)

It is interesting that with an understanding of the hierarchy of beats,

one might now understand how wind instrumentalists can enhance their playing so as to more closely match human speech and the hierarchy of beats; they did this by changing the sharpness of their tongue attack to match that of speech.

The first and third beats were given hard tongue strokes such as a tu or a du stroke; lesser beats were given lighter attacks such as a gu or a lu stroke. Baroque trumpeters belonging to the Trumpeters Guild (Kammeradschaft) did not write their music down. They remembered a tune by recalling the tongue strokes they used. For example, a trumpeter might specify to his trumpet consort that the next song to be played would be TuGuRiDuDo. The trumpeters would then all pick up their instruments and begin to play the same song. Perhaps this is why most pibroch tunes are given Gaelic names; the Gaelic names are remembered long after the words to the songs are forgotten. The inflection and stress-timing of the Gaelic title is an indication of the rhythm of the first line of the tune as well as the pitches used.

103 8.3. Pitch Inflection in the Indo-European Languages

With an investigation of the Gaelic language and its rhythmic pattern completed, the pitch values of the spoken language should now be discussed since stress-timing affects pitch. Pitch values in music and pitch values as spoken should be as close as possible so as to make the musical delivery narrative and not disjointed. This connection strikes most people oddly; most people have never considered that there are pitches to human speech. Yet, when one speaks, air is expelled, vocal chords phonate, and the air-stream is interrupted or altered by the lips and tongue. If the vocal chords are phonating, that is, vibrating, they are creating a sound wave that has pitch. Therefore, if a person is speaking, a pitch is being created. Music is nothing more than structured human speech; the pitch and length of the spoken word is made clearly defined in music. Competent singers know this, and therefore are more concerned with speaking than vocal artistry when they perform. As one is speaking, the pitch of the spoken word travels up and down in frequency (pitch).

This intonation, or frequency spectrum, is clearly discernable to the average listener. Consider an immigrant to the present reader's native English-speaking country. Not only are consonants and vowels different, but the very pitches upon which these sounds are spoken. In effect, immigrants seem to be speaking a different tune. As an example, North Americans are very aware of Irish immigrants speaking with an "Irish lilt." This lilt is merely the inflection, or song, of the Irish Gaelic language; Irishmen speaking English, which is a foreign

104 language to their Gaelic-speaking ancestors, sing an Irish Gaelic "song." Many professional singers know this; in order to improve their performance, singers often respectfully immitate immigrants' language inflections.

There are additional techniques utilized by performers who must sing or speak in a foreign language in a professional capacity. The foreign words are translated exactly, word for word, with no added or reduced definite or indefinite articles; those words translated into English are then spoken as would a foreign immigrant; that is, mocking the immigrant's pitch inflection. The original words are then substituted and the performer then has a more accurate sound. If the performer then looks at the pitch values written for the words, it will be noticed that the written pitches often match the spoken pitches.

8.4. Church Chant Forms that Match Speech Patterns

It is worthwhile to observe the melodic construction of chant by the early

Christian church. This is necessary to understand why Fenian lays have been likened to chant and to understand simple melodic musical construction.

In order to speak, a person must inhale; following this, exhalation begins.

With moving air, phonation is now possible. However, at the commencement of the exhalation, the pressure of the airflow is weak. As the exhalation continues, there is more strength to the airflow and the speed of the airflow increases. After the peak of strength; that is, the middle of the exhalation, the strength of the airflow begins to subside until the termination of the exhalation where the

105 process is repeated. Time has been taken to state this obvious process because pitch is a reflection of air strength and pressure.

There is a concept in physics called Bernoulli's theorem that can be used to describe the relationship in a fluid between velocity and pressure. In general terms, as air speed increases toward the middle of the exhalation, the frequency of vibration of the vocal chords increase. As the airflow is reduced toward the end of the exhalation, the pitch of the vibrating vocal chords decreases. It should also be noted that there is a similar pattern to volume and syllable speed. That is, toward the middle of the exhalation, people speak more loudly and the speed of their words increase.

The early Christian church was not immune to this obvious spectrum of pitch and speed. Chant was therefore modeled after this process. Every phrase in early plainchant begins on a low note, ascends to a fifth, perhaps ascending to the octave, and then returns to its base position. This is called an Authentic

Mode. There were four authentic modes that were determined by the starting pitch of the seven-note (heptatonic) scale: Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and

Mixolydian. Here they can be seen in Figure 11, below:

106 J J Re(DyDorianMode) h J J r r ^^

Mi (E/PhrygianMode) p=p J J Fa (F/Lydian Mode) fa r ^

Soh (G/Mixolydian Mode) ^

Figure 11: The Four Authentic Modes

The two most popular modes today, the Ionian (major) and Aeolian

(minor) were forbidden because they were considered lascivious:

[T]he modes on A and C were excluded from the ecclesiastical list, their effect judged as being 'lascivious' and 'worldly' and unsuitable for religious use since their influence would be pernicious (Vincent 225).

Interestingly, the natural scale; that is, pitches that are created by those instruments which play the harmonic series, fit very easily into the major and minor scales. It should also be noted that the ecclesiastical scale (heptatonic) is an imported scale from Greece. Five and six note scales are often key indicators of indigenous Gaelic music. Therefore matching the lays of Fionn mac Cumhaill to the ecclesiastical seven note per octave scale, regardless of mode, should be viewed askance. As the musicologist Curt Sachs warned about treating folk music from an ecclesiastical viewpoint:

107 As a fatal consequence, they [music historians] have tested all archaic melodies with a modal gauge, whether folk tunes still in use or "art music" written down in the Middle Ages, Icelandic tvisongvar and Corsican voceri, Provengal cansos and Spanish cantigas, have indiscriminately been called Dorian or Phrygian or Lydian and thus likened to Gregorian melodies. (Major 381)

Defining the actual pitches of notes is not the purpose of discussing the ecclesiastical scales, only the general rise and fall of frequencies in a human's utterance.

The ecclesiastical system is introduced here because it shows the basic outline of the melodic line. Low pitch ascends and then falls back to low pitch.

Occasionally, when someone is excited when speaking, the pitch may begin on a higher note, wander around, and then end on a low note. What is important here is that there is generally a flow of pitch; it is unusual for people to pop out two congruent syllables at a great frequency disparity.

Therefore, when singing narrative song, it is imperative that the singer match the stressed syllables to higher pitches in the melodic line. Since unstressed syllables often are spoken at a lower volume than the previous stressed syllable, it is not probable that the following unstressed syllable would be at a higher pitch. Since the airflow diminishes on an unstressed syllable from the previous stressed syllable, the unstressed syllable must fall in pitch. This has the unpleasant effect of changing the melodic line as the placement of stress within the line shifts. Therefore, when performing Fenian lays, it is important not to ascend in pitch on de-stressed syllables.

108 9. Musical Propensities of which to be Careful

As musicologist Edward H. Tarr states in the un-numbered preface to a modern edition of Fantini's trumpet method, "[T]he temptation to praise one's own time and the so-called perfection which has since been attained, is difficult to resist." Unfortunately, this attitude is prevalent in Gaelic communities where the highly esteemed momentum against cultural change is also highly exaggerated. A simple perusal of old Gaelic recordings shows the marked musical shift that has been made in the last fifty to one hundred years.

It is not only Gaelic music that has gone through changes due to contact with

European art music. Music grouped within the umbrella of "western art music" has also seen a great many changes. These changes follow a repetitive and predictable pattern. Although it is outside the scope of this present work to discus why these changes take place, that certain changes take place is undeniable. Therefore, some of these patterns will now be defined so that performers of lays and other Gaelic songs might, if they wish to, bring performance practices back to an older tradition.

9.1. Mispronunciation of Words

It is often the case that when a singer is performing, the singer's tongue will be transformed from a relatively relaxed muscle into a mass of tension. This has the unfortunate result in making pronunciation difficult and the

109 pronunciation of words unintelligible. This tendency is endemic in all singers regardless of style or language.

One of the major differences between folk singers and classical singers is that classical singers combat this tendency by singing on vowels instead of the last sound in a word; that is, if the music elongates a syllable in a word beyond its normal spoken length, the classical singer extends the length of the vowel, leaving the other sounds in the word at their normal length. The folk singer sings the beginning of the word at its normal length and then extends the last sound. Unfortunately, the last sound is often a consonant. Therefore, the folk singer often ends up tightening the tongue to make a consonant for a longer time than one would normally speak it. The tongue therefore quickly becomes stiff.

This tendency is particularly noticeable when a Gaelic singer is attempting to sing with what is called the "Nyahh." This is the term given by Gaels to the understanding that there is a slight puff of air that enters the nose upon the commencement of a vowel. If the nose is closed, this puff cannot occur and the nasal resonance that should occur is absent. This is a well-known feature and all well-trained classically trained singers know of this as well. Unfortunately, if the tongue is tight, the pronunciation becomes exaggerated and the words become unintelligible. For example, singers are warned not to sing lean for the word leat.

110 9.2. The Propensity to Structure Music

Reasons for this tendency aside, it is invariable that once a musical style has been coined, in whatever musical tradition it may be, the musical style will then begin to become increasingly structured over time. More importantly, the music will undergo three changes, one of which is pitch related, the other two concerning rhythm. This phenomenon can be seen in all types of music.

Baroque music became polyphonic and overwhelmed with sixteenth notes: the more the notes, the better. This melismatic embellishment signalled the extirpation of the style. Classical music (Mozart, Haydn, etc.) with its more vertical simplicity supplanted it. Another style of music, Jazz, began as music played in brothels. It was very rhythmic and simple. Now it is highly complex, often played in a number of modes simultaneously. The essence of the music has been lost and hence is less popular; it is played less and less on the radio. The number of recordings sold has plummeted in the last ten years. Unless musical forms such as sean-nos singing change course, a simpler form will replace the highly ornamented style of sean-nos music. Therefore, it is incumbent upon the singer of Fenian lays to attempt to keep ornamentation to a minimum.

9.2.1. The Propensity to Add Notes

It is a universal truth that once a musical style is created, performers will add notes to the form. That is, if there are whole notes and a certain number of total notes in a particular song, if the song is still being sung twenty years

111 later, there will be no whole notes and the total number of notes will increase.

Therefore, as performers add more notes than the previous generation, and the next generation of singers learn from them, more and more notes are added to any given musical style. This occurs in all styles, but is now particularly obvious in Gaelic music. A comparison of old recordings and current recordings clearly shows how much more Gaelic music is ornamented today than it was even seventy years ago. 0 Riada observed this over-embellishment in Gaelic music:

[V]arious abuses had crept into the playing of slow airs. The main one was an unduly luxuriant growth of over-ornamentation, which very often obscured the actual air. A perfect example of this is the version of 'An Raibh Tu ar an gCarraig' in O'Daly's book where the air is almost indecipherable beneath a superstructure of ridiculously elaborate scale passages. (49)

Harnoncourt noticed that the same thing had occurred when

Renaissance music as a new style was created due to the over-floridity of medieval polyphonic music: "Ornaments were not invented because they were necessary for good singing, he says, but rather for ear-tickling for those who are not capable of performing with passionate intensity" (130).

The importance of natural human speech in the performance of Fenian lays (or of Gaelic music of any type) cannot be over-stressed. O Riada points this out with regard to pipe playing:

The tradition of singing slow airs is unfortunately in decline at present. One reason is that many pipers neither speak nor understand Irish, so they are unacquainted with the sean-n6s style of singing which should, of course, be the basis of the chanter style in slow airs. (45)

112 Quoting Matheson's "Some Early Collections Of Gaelic Folksong' from The Scottish Anthropological and Folklore Society (1954) song collection, Allan

MacDonald says:

They [pipers] make a practice of introducing passing-notes and other embellishments such as would have no place in a vocal version. The result is that when the words of an air are found, the number of notes is often greatly in excess of the number of syllables. (MacDonald, Glenuig 76)

9.2.2. The Propensity to Structure Rhythm

There is a tendency also to exaggerate rhythms through force. That is, a performer will often exaggerate the hierarchy of beats to increase the desire in the audience to dance. This is done by making the stressed beats much louder than the corresponding weak beats. While this is admirable in dance music, it is not so in any song designed to convey information. This tendency occurs in every type of music. It has been particularly noticed in religious institutions where rhythmic music has been banned because the result of the performance is the desire in the congregation to dance and not comprehend the meaning of the words. It is not the performers themselves who tend to over-accentuate the rhythmic pulse, but transcribers as well:

But when these notations [written in modern notation] are compared to the sound recordings (2j-m), with their rhythmic irregularity, our suspicions are confirmed that it was the older collectors [Bunting, et al.] who imposed on their notations the strict metres that they knew from written music. (Shields, Narrative 19)

113 The piper Allan MacDonald of Glenuig points out that over- structuring of song has made modern Gaelic song performances unacceptable as a model for pibroch. He believes that this over-structuring came from the added notes and strict structure that overwhelmed pibroch. Pibroch was then taken as a model for Gaelic singing. Here, MacDonald compares two versions of the same song (Macintosh's Lament); one is performed on the pibroch and the other is an annotated sung version: "The singing style which has come to be regarded as being in the genre of 'dran m6r', is not traditional, neither can it be used as a dependable source for research because of the influences of twentieth century pibroch performance style; [...]" (MacDonald, Glenuig 162).

Therefore, the performer is cautioned against exaggerating rhythm and making stressed beats louder than as would normally be done when speaking.

Similarly, unstressed notes should not be made quieter than unstressed syllables when spoken.

9.2.3. The Propensity to Rhythmically 'Flatten-Out'

The third musical structuring that unfortunately takes place has been discussed previously. Unstressed syllables are stressed so as to create an iambic

(strong-weak, strong-weak) metre. As mentioned previously, Terence

McCaughey described the process of bringing unstressed syllables to a position of stress through the process of "flattening-out." He continues, "The conclusion must however be that singers of the twentieth century show a general tendency

114 to increase tempo in performance and rhythmically to 'flatten them out'..." (54).

This was pointed out to occur in Fenian lay singing as well. Maclnnes mentions this when he heard Mrs. Archie MacDonald singing a Fenian lay and remarked,

I have drawn attention to this 'tendency to regularize the tempo, which may point to a break with tradition in the twentieth century' [...]. It is worth noting that her aunt [...] shows a much closer observance of ordinary speech stress, [...]. (Maclnnes, "Twentieth" 129)

This has had repercussions for instrumentalists as well: "The emphasis on competition has ultimately resulted, whether deliberately or otherwise, in standardisation and the rigidity of pibroch performance" (MacDonald, Glenuig

275). Although speaking of pibroch, MacDonald of Glenuig's comments are just as true for singers: "Competition is a most artificial means of preserving pibroch, as it narrows the natural variability which would occur in an oral tradition, to the particular style which will win a competition" (276).

9.2.4. The Propensity to 'Flatten-Out' Pitches

It is also a natural behaviour to flatten out the pitch variation in a song.

Some singers are very stiff when they sing and reduce octave jumps to fifths or even unisons. The next generation hears this and repeats it. This has the result of eventually reducing the range and melodic variation within a song

9.3. Vibrato Reduction

This section has been added for the sake of completeness. It is highly controversial, but is a necessary component in this discussion of proper Fenian

115 lay performance practices. It is irrefutable to the present author who bases his opinion on decades of experience and musical analysis.

It is a myth that traditional singers sing without vibrato. Instrumentalists who see vibrato as something extra that they are required to add to their performance perpetrate this myth. Vibrato is therefore difficult to do for instrumentalists, especially when the notes are of short duration. To a singer, the reverse is true: stopping the vibrato requires added force and effort. If a singer sings as the singer would speak, with no added tension, there is an immediate vibrato on each pitch. This can clearly be heard on old recordings of traditional singers who are regarded as good singers in their community.

It has been suggested (Bodley, Sean-N6s 46) that vibrato is more noticeable when a song is sung loudly. Since most sean-nos is sung quietly, not much vibrato is heard. Others disagree: "The sean-nos singer does not use vibrato; he or she allows the song to speak for itself" (Sawyers 117). Other instrumentalists concur: "The use of vibrato, of dynamic and dramatic effects, is absolutely foreign to the traditional manner, a characteristic which is also shared with plain chant" (Breathnach 101). Here Breathnach is merely pointing out that plainchant may be performed badly as well. Instrumentalists often forget that they are imitators of the spoken word and must at all times mimic natural, human speech.

The work-hand in the field and the carpenter all sing with vibrato while they work. Farm workers, singing outside in full voice would notice that it takes inordinate effort to stop the natural motion of vibrato. As Bodley mentioned, in

116 a smaller room, singing more quietly, a singer would need to use less force to stop the natural motion of vibrato, but it would still take effort that is un-natural to human speech. If the axiom abair amhrdn (say a song) is to be believed, then it is inappropriate to sing in any way that is different from natural speech; since one does not engage those muscles used to stop vibrato when one is speaking, it is inappropriate to engage these muscles when one is singing:

Abair amhrdn [...] means say a song [...] it is deduced that words and the telling of the story are the important factors in traditional singing, and, accordingly, that intensity of emotion must vary with the requirements of the words. This judgement is based solely on a mistranslation of the Irish expression [...] Abair amhrdn [...which] means only one thing: sing a song [...] the mistranslation could be wholly destructive to the native style. (Breathnach 102)

It is interesting to note that some of the most famous of the sean-nos singers, Seosamh 0 hEanai, Sean de Hora, Sean Mac Donncha, Nioclas T6ibfn, etc., can be heard singing with vibrato when they are relaxed. If one listens to very old recordings of traditional singers, especially singers older than the ones listed above, vibrato can clearly be heard. This can also be observed in the singing of songs by Scottish Gaelic singers, notably Kitty MacLeod. Although completely untrained, Kitty Macleod sang every note of a slow song openly and freely. Every note had vibrato.

Singing with vibrato is also particularly evident when the pitch and harmonic basis of Gaelic music is analysed. Traditional Gaelic music is entirely hexatonic or pentatonic. The half-step intervals that define the European Art music heptatonic scale are absent in pentatonic music and when they occur in

117 hexatonic music are decidedly flat. Therefore, the relatively modern conventions adopted by classically trained art music singers cannot apply to Gaelic music.

These singers, who are arguably badly trained, stiffen their voices on leading, passing, and neighbouring tones so as to accentuate the feeling of stress and release that is the foundation of classical music. Unfortunately, they also sound shrill, go flat, and loose their overtones. The fact that this is for the natural dissonance of the harmony of the music to do this aside, these half-step pitches do not exist in Gaelic music. Moreover, harmony in Gaelic music is a relatively new phenomenon. Therefore, there are no leading tones in Gaelic music, and this stiffening of the voice which prevents vibrato cannot occur since neither the half-steps themselves, nor the dissonance of harmony exists in traditional Gaelic music.

9.4. Lack of Rhythm in Fenian Lays

The main difference between communicative song and work song or dance seems to be in the emphasis placed upon a strong rhythm. If the listener wants to dance or do repetitive motions, a strong repetitive rhythm is best; if the listener wants to understand a story, a lack thereof is best. Fenian lays are by their nature narrative and therefore should not be performed to a strong rhythm.

That being said, to what rhythm should they be sung?

As mentioned above, it is said that singing is nothing more than speaking on pitch. The difference between speaking and singing is that the singer has to

118 contend with speaking (speaking on pitch = singing) on defined pitches that are different from pitches that would be used when speaking normally. The singer must also contend with shifting the length of syllables from speaking to singing in metered music. In such a musical measure, the length of a syllable as one would normally speak it changes; as an example, in Figure 7: "Hallelujah" from

Handel's Messiah, above, one would never say Ha as long as the dotted quarter note demands. Therefore, the sung length of the syllable Ha is elongated from its spoken length. In other instances, the syllable may be written in the music to be shorter than as one would normally speak. This change in syllable length not only is a challenge to the singer, but also distorts the sound of the syllable in the ear of the listener. Such a length change thus interferes with the communication between the performer and the audience. Since this was not desirable in Fenian lays, strict metre was not used: "There [was] not so much a sharp divide but a continuum between speech and song in Gaelic [...]" (Newton 91). Maclnnes further supports this by stating that "[t]he 'prosody' of traditional Gaelic singing, except in the domain of work-song, clearly aims at maintaining a conversational rhythm: as older singers used to insist, a song should be 'told'" ("Recording"

129). This does not mean that the poetry was to be spoken since "[t]he poetry was largely oral based; much of it was meant to be sung" (Newton 90).

Additionally, a Fenian lay performed in a chant-like manner would take much less time than if set to a set musical metre. This would make sense since most

Fenian lays are very long. Concerning the lay on the death of Dermid (from the

119 lay "Bas Dhiarmaid") sung to a musical metre, MacFarlane states that, "This ballad, sung at a medium rate, would take about one hour in delivery" (52).

Additionally, Breathnach states, "Micheal 0 hlghne's [...] chant-like quality

[rendering of the lay] and free rhythm style, reminiscent of Latin plainchant, may be observed in the music" (26).

9.5. Transcribing Recordings of Gaelic Music

It is important that when transcribing the lays of Fionn mac Cumhaill that it be done so as to most accurately reflect its nature. When most people do this, they often walk to a piano and pound out the notes as closely to the pitch being sung and annotate the pitches as heard. While that may be a valid starting point, it is flawed. The final rendition must not have any accidentals in the key signature nor in the music itself. If there is going to be an accidental in order for the notes to fit on the staff, it must be one sharp. Gaels did not use flats at all as can be seen in the introduction to Edward Bunting's The Ancient Music of Ireland: an edition comprising the three collections fom the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792. The original purpose of adding accidentals was to raise (or lower) the tune by half an octave so that different voice-types could sing the tune. In mainland Europe, Bb was used; this transposed the modes by half an octave; for example C-Ionian became F-Ionian; the other modes shifted as well. This very functional, but fictional note (it was not in the Pythagorean scale) was so very useful that it was considered musica vera, not musica ficta. In Insular Britain, F# was used for this

120 purpose. This shifted the tune up half an octave as well; for example C-Ionian became G-Ionian.

Additionally, one should not alter an accidental in the key signature so that the European art music convention of only having two modes is followed.

Often transcribers will have a tune start on G and return to G, but have an F# in the key signature. Closer inspection will reveal that an F# does not appear in the piece. By doing this, they make the piece to appear to be in G-major when in fact the piece more closely resembles the Mixolydian mode. Furthermore, in this example, there is a note (or two) missing. Therefore, the tune is not in an ecclesiastical mode at all since the modes require seven notes per octave.

When annotating a time signature for dance music, Gaelic music is almost completely composed in some form of triple metre. If the music sounds as if perhaps it is in 2/4 time, it can undoubtedly be better expressed in 6/8 time. If the music sounds as if it is in 3/4 time, 9/8 time might be a better fit. If it sounds as though it was written in 4/4 time, 12/8 is undoubtedly a better choice.

121 122 10.Conclusion

This work was designed to assist scholars and performers to understand narrative singing, especially the lays of Fionn mac Cumhaill. Additionally, by investigating the performance practices of Fenian lays in the broader context of

European musical history, a deeper understanding of musical rhythmic practices might be gleaned. This was attempted through a survey of the lays of Fionn mac

Cumhaill, characters of such lays, thematic elements, the origin of such lays, and performance practices of the lays of Fionn mac Cumhaill.

In order to sing Fenian lays properly, one must create proper transcriptions.

The rhythmic pattern of this should now be coupled in the reader's mind with the spoken rhythmic pattern of Gaelic, which has a three-beat foot. It should also be apparent that transcribing Fenian lays, or any heroic lay, is very difficult since there is no repetitive, discrete multiple of beats within a musical measure.

Therefore, a transcriber is cautioned against placing weak syllables on strongly stressed musical beats which conform to the hierarchy of beats; that is,

"flattening-out."

Where there is a repetitive pattern in music, the stress of the language should match the hierarchy of beats. Languages that are stress-timed must have strong syllables falling on stressed beats within the musical measure with the unstressed syllables falling between. Languages that are syllable-timed need only be placed within a musical measure so that the number of syllables from

123 one poetic line to the next be matched by the length of the musical phrase. In syllable-timed languages where the foot, or neum, consists of long and short syllables, the length of the musical notes should match this rhythmic pattern and not be of the same length.

In analyzing the syllabic structure of Fenian lays, one should note that the form is rather loose; that is, the there are few poetic ornaments. The structure merely consists of a seven-syllable line of four lines per verse; there is also assonant rhyme. This lack of ornament allows the narrative nature of the lays to come forward. The lays are not poetically complex; therefore, the performer should maximize the flexibility and density of the communication to the listening audience through relaxed, narrative speech patterns.

The audience for these lays would also be familiar with the instruments that might be used for accompaniment; the audience would also be comfortable with the performance practices of the baird who would sing these lays. These performance practices were very much shared by other medieval singing castes.

What is of great importance concerning these lays of Fionn mac Cumhaill is that, although altered over time, vestiges of performance practices of medieval lay singing existed in the Highlands and islands of Scotland until only a few decades ago. Not only do the lays themselves exist in written form and musical notation, there exist actual recordings that preserve, at least partially, elements of a medieval music performance practice. Through the lens of these extant songs, modern performance practices may be viewed anew. If modern performance

124 practices can be altered with a deeper understanding of narrative singing practices, then the lays of Fionn mac Cumhaill will not die, but have new life.

125 126 Appendix A (Laoidh Fhraoich) This is taken from Tocher #35 (1981, pp. 292-5) from a field recording by William Matheson; attached is a recording made during the International Congress of Celtic Studies at Edinburgh, 1967

Laigh easlainte [sic] throm, throm A sore, sore sickness fell Air nighean Maighre nan cdrn fial: Upon the daughter of Maighre of the bounteous goblets: Sin 'nuair chuir i fios air Fraoch, That was when she sent for Fraoch, 'S dh'fhiosraich a1 laoch gu de 'miann. And the warrior asked what was her wish.

Thuirt i ris nach biodh i slan She said that she would never be well Mur faigheadh i Ian a bas maoth Unless she got the full of her soft hands De chaoruinn a' lochain fhuair, Of rowan berries from the cold pool, 'S gun a dhol gam buain ach Fraoch. And none must attempt to pluck them but Fraoch.

Dh'fhalbh Fraoch, 's cha bu ghille tiom; Fraoch set out — he was no frightened boy; Shnamh e gu grinn air a' loch; He swam the loch with ease: Fhuair e 'bheist 'na siorram suain He found the monster fast asleep 'S a ceann a suas ris an dos. With its head resting up against the branch.

Fraoch mac Fhiuthaich nan arm geur, Fraoch son of Fidach of the keen weapons, Thanaig e o'n bheist gun fhios He got away from the monster undetected Le ultach dc na caoruinn dhearg With an armful of the red berries Dhan bhall a robh Maibh 'na taigh. To where Maeve was waiting at home.

"Ach ge math na rinneadh leat," "Though you have done very well," Thubhairt Maibh, 's bu gheal a cruth, Said Maeve, so white and shapely, "Chan fhoghainn siod, a laoich luain, "That will not do, oh valiant hero: Ach slat a bhuain as a bun." A branch must be torn out by the roots.

Dh'fhalbh Fraoch, 's cha b'e 'n turus aigh: "Fraoch set off— it was no hopeful quest — Shnamh e air a' linne bhuig. He swam the watery pool. Bu deacair fhios da mar bha It was hard for him to know what lay ahead, 'M b'e siod am bas da 'na chuid. Whether death was to be his portion.

Rug e air an dos air bharr He seized the branch by the top 'S tharruinn e 'n crann as a' fhreumh: And tore the tree out by the roots: 'N am dha 'chas a thoirt go tir, As he set foot on the bank Rug i air a rlst, a' bheist. The monster caught up with him.

Rug i air, 's e air an traigh, It caught him on the beach, Is ghlac i a lamh 'na craos: It gripped his arm in its huge mouth: Rug e orra-se air ghiall - He seized it by the jaw — 'S truagh gun sgian a bhith aig Fraoch! Alas, that Fraoch had no knife!

A' nighean bu cheannabhuidh fait, The girl of the golden hair, Shad i thuige sgian dhan 6r. She threw him a knife of gold. Liodraich a' bheist a chneas ban: The monster tore his white shirt: Liodraich i a lamh gu ledn. It tore his arm into a gaping wound.

127 128 Appendix B (MacFarlane's Lav Tunes)

The following lays are taken from Malcolm MacFarlane's "Studies in Gaelic Music" From the Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness Vol. XXVII, 1915. They are included here since MacFarlane's transcriptions were in sol-fa notation; here, they have been placed in staff notation. Titles are as they appear in MacFarlane's work

Dan Liuir (MacFarlane 52)

MJMEM— Mtmmm&mLmMmmmmmmMmmmmmJBKmm wm La chaidh Fiona do thigh Liuir le aon fh chead deug ^m |" Ill'limij pgBWB*|- ["^ lining fear gu - fior 'Sbu - ohean --nani tri naon ar- fear-

J i i feachd an taon (tear bu fair dhmn.

129 Bas Dhiarmaid (MacFarlane 52) n\Si #H 4- 4 Eisd ibh beagma's aill leibh - laoidh Faill ithill - ho robh - a ho ro

W m. W d =3- hi 's na hug oirionn o, Air a' chuid - eachd chaoimh so ghluis Faill

ft p *=i r "3 I 111, 1 p- f f i IF1 « » . *

ithill - iuthill - thill a - gus ho ro Hi ri ri u hill - in o - horo - ro Hill - in

*F ninm

i hug o - ro hi - ri u 'S na hith-ill - ean eil - e chall or - ocho.

130 Dearg mac Dheirg (MacFarlane 53)

^£ * * J J ^JE An Dearg mac - Dheirg - gur mis' a1 - bhean; m —*— ^ Air an fhear nib - d'fhi - dir lochd; Nim bheil saoi nach • d'fhu - air a leir - eadh Is tru - agh a ta mi fhein an nochd Is

Cs ' n i r 5^E tru - agh a ta fhein an nochd

131 Laoidh an Amadain Mhor (MacFarlane 53)

""''MT""""'''"''""'"""" ' '". '"HPPfff^FT^1 •'•

Cto las sgeul luai • neach gii Mung

=3- J- « #

Haoi ho ro 'sna hoir - mm oh - o Air oin - id 'd • an

J 'J Mi J' ' J J I P * J geill na sloigh 'SIB haoi ho ro 'sua hi ri hu o

""IM*—inmimnmifinnTii —•iiiwim I I I j I t " 11 "* w # Haoi ri hu "sna hmr - eana oh

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