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The Alan Bruford Lecture Island Odyssey: Scotland and the Old Europe Scottish International Storytelling Festival Tuesday 25 October 2011

‘An indelible imprint on the memory’: celebrating the recorders and the recorded.

The world of storytellers and singers can be a world of wonder, excitement, joy and awe. In this respect, and in honouring the occasion of the International Storytelling Festival, it would be appropriate to reverse the word order to bring the recorded before the recorders. Those who take an active part in the transmission of culture – the tradition-bearers - are few while many may listen and learn. The words of the late Rev William Matheson in Tocher in 1977 – ‘an indelible imprint on the memory’ – recall this special world which we are celebrating while drawing on his own memory of Duncan MacDonald, Peninerine, South Uist, one of the most remarkable tradition-bearers and storytellers of the twentieth century. The phrase is taken from his summing-up of ‘Duncan the Mason’, Donnchadh Clachair: ‘All in all, a man more than most to leave an indelible imprint on the memory. It has often been said before, but seldom more aptly than of him: we shall not see his like again’.

William Matheson’s words also seemed so apt for encapsulating the occasion of the Alan Bruford Lecture, the International Storytelling Festival and the achievements of the School of Scottish Studies. Founded sixty years ago this year, the School is a treasure-house of memory and research, and the launch of the Tobar an Dualchais/ Kist o’ Riches website on 9 December 2010 convincingly marked a coming-of-digital age. In 1951, the School was a keenly desired outcome for a small number of Scottish scholars who had lobbied and cajoled for a number of years. The process in itself may be the stuff of stories whose motifs could be recognised and categorised. The first Archivist reflected on this in 1957: ‘… a history of the foundation of the School of Scottish Studies would find its source-material in a strange medley of memoranda, private letters from one professor to another, half-remembered scraps of common-room talk, and a certain amount of retrospective divination’.

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We are introduced to the world of storytellers and singers in one form or another as soon as we hear our first fairy-tale or nursery rhyme. Such tales and rhymes are still at the back of my memory and I would like to think that an experience of mine is worth recalling because it belongs in this world of fairy tale and legend which the Scottish International Storytelling Festival celebrates. I was part-brought up in East-Coast Scotland, in Angus, and two of my aunties resident there, my father’s elder sisters, were excellent raconteuses. The eldest, born in 1907, seemed to specialise in historical events, their localities and historical personalities, especially in Strathmore, and stories with a ‘romantic’ gloss and tales of derring-do of seventeenth-century Royalists and eighteenth-century Jacobites such as her own ancestor, David Hunter of Burnside, who was ‘out’ in the ’45 (and of whom she was extremely proud). The younger aunt, born in 1912, retailed a darker side, with tales of the supernatural. I remember vividly her easily told encounter (apparently about 1939) with ‘Jock Barefoot’, the murdered servant lad on the road by Finavon, her account of the Drummer of Airlie, traditionally heard before the death of the head of the Ogilvie of Airlie family, and her ingenuous re-telling (at first-hand from a friend of hers) of the vision of the battle of Nechtansmere by Dunnichen. Most vividly, because I was about nine years old at the time, I remember her telling me on a visit to Auchmithie (a day’s journey for us in those days) about a piper who had agreed for a bet and in search of treasure to explore a deep cave under the sea cliffs to the south of the village. This was a place where the sea could be heard booming under your feet and, as on that very day, the chilling grey mists rolled in from the North Sea. The piper had gone into the cave accompanied by his dog, and had played his pipes to signal progress. Eventually, the pipes could no longer be heard and the piper disappeared never to emerge again, but his dog appeared, frantic and entirely without its coat of hair, and dropped down dead. After that, on days or nights of storm when the seas exploded and boomed in the sea caves and mists and fogs hid the landscape, the sound of the pipes could be heard under the hearthstone of Dickmountlaw nearly two miles inland.

I had just begun to learn the chanter at the time and, with the eagerness of the beginner, identified myself with the world of pipers and pipe music. This was a chilling tale and I wanted to know when it had happened and who was the piper, what exactly had happened to him, and what shocking accident had caused the dog to lose its hair. And if the pipes could be heard, why could not steps be taken to rescue the piper, although my child’s mind could grasp the inference that the piper was almost certainly no longer alive. To me, this was a real and terrifying event which must have happened, say, the proverbial hundred years ago, when there were no ‘Emergency Services’ and fates were sealed by the invisible hand of destiny. The story imprinted itself indelibly on my mind and replayed frequently with a succession of grim images made real in the gothic landscape which I knew of cliffs, the grey North Sea and isolated fishing communities of low, ground-hugging houses somehow separated from the landward farming communities. Starting at university a decade later and with unlimited access to books, to my surprise and with a sense of betrayal that this was ‘my story’ from Auchmithie, I read the same story as occurring in Skye. Then I found that it had happened in 3

Mull, in each case with this same sense of immediacy and familiarity with remembered events.

Dr Alan Bruford joined the School of Scottish Studies as archivist and lecturer in 1965. He explored stories of pipers disappearing in caves and identified the legend of the piper in the cave as well-known motif, as international tale-type and as migratory legend. He pointed out that more than thirty versions of this story have been recorded in Scotland. He speculated on a possible significance of these cave sites in historic or prehistoric terms and the plausible notion that the story was propagated by smugglers to hide their activities from gossips and gaugers. More significantly, he analysed the transmission of the story, through oral sources of successions of storytellers or handed down from an identifiable printed original, and whether such a story could be fitted into patterns of migration from, speculatively, the Far East, the Steppes of Russia, the Great Hungarian Plain and the North Sea rim. This research was published in Scottish Studies in 1980 under a memorable piece of alliteration: ‘Legends long since localised or tales still travelling’. Theories of migration and dissemination continue to be the matter of debate. Archaeology and material culture offer intriguing analogues for the carrying of stories across continents and oceans. The recent discovery in Finlaggan of a pilgrim badge from Rome suggests that there might have been an Islay pilgrim with tales to tell, and pottery sherds from eroded river-banks in Kazakhstan have been recently interpreted in terms of migration routes and ethnic identity.

Other facets of storytelling were investigated by Alan, in his doctoral thesis and another seminal article for example in Scottish Studies, ‘Recitation or recreation? Examples from South Uist storytelling’, in which Scotland’s arguably special position as regards the quality and diversity of her story-telling was examined. By taking South Uist, where the School’s fieldworkers such as Calum MacLean had been especially busy, so many facets of story-telling could be put under the microscope. This was the constituency where the long hero-tales could still be found which John Francis Campbell of Islay and his helpers had collected in 1859 and 1860, and, importantly, where the status of the tales could still be measured from tellers and listeners. It was evident that the long hero-tales and adventure stories or international wonder-tales were very popular and considered to represent, quintessentially, the native story-telling tradition. These long tales were regarded in the ceilidh-house tradition as the summit of the art and near-sacred. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, it was still possible to record these and Donald Archie MacDonald and Alan Bruford have written so eloquently about the genre and the storytellers. Storytellers and poets were skilled practitioners of the verbal arts, and research has revealed ways in which they might have learned, remembered and performed their material, because ‘performance’ it was. We now have graphic examples of extended storytelling in styles with little or no variation in wording in the re-telling. Duncan MacDonald of Peninerine ‘performed’ an international wonder-tale, Fear na h-eabaide or ‘The man of the garb (or) habit’, at the 1953 International Folklore Conference in Stornoway. He was recorded by John Lorne Campbell in Lochboisdale in February 1950. A text was 4 prepared by Professor Angus Matheson (1912- 1962) and Derick Thomson, printed up and distributed to delegates who were able to follow the story word for word. Also known as ‘The Tale of the Hermit’ or Sgeulachd an Dìthreabhaich, this was in essence a medieval romance that is known from a manuscript version and is one of a surviving corpus of Gaelic manuscripts which include versions of tales belonging to the medieval learned or classical tradition. The self-evident richness of the oral tradition has been linked to this ‘learned’ and high status tradition which notionally preceded it and was dying out in the eighteenth century. It is conventionally linked to the bardic families such as MacMhuirich. Written material emanating from a medieval classical learning has been analysed for its influence on oral narrative where the language and motifs of medieval manuscripts are reproduced and the tales told by people, whether Uist crofters or travelling people, who had not read them or indeed could not have read them. This complex issue was analysed by Alan Bruford in his thesis presented in 1966, Gaelic Folk-Tales and Mediaeval Romances, later available in its published form as Béaloideas Volume 34 (1969). This trail was also followed by Donald Archie MacDonald in his article in the important 1989 volume of essays, Gaelic and Scotland: Alba agus a’ Ghaidhlig, celebrating the foundation of the Chair of Celtic in Edinburgh University. His paper, ‘Tri ginealaichean de sgeulachd’ (‘three generations of a story’), compared in detail the sixteenth-century Irish romantic tale, An Ceatharnach Caol Riabhach (‘the lean, grizzled kern’), with a version recorded in 1969 from Donald Alasdair Johnson, South Uist, a version taken down from his grandfather in 1865 and an earlier manuscript copy of which about fifty versions survive.

In the sense of ‘legends localised’, issues of memory and performance stand out in relation to the long tales, such as the prodigious ability of some story-tellers to memorise and retain their material and the use of set and seemingly formulaic language. Donald Archie MacDonald described how many story-tellers would be respected for their use of difficult and elevated language that would convey the skill and authority of the seanchaidh to their listeners. He quoted Seumas Delargy on this: ‘We should bear in mind that obscurity of language held an attraction for the pedantically minded though unlettered listener. One old story-teller friend of mine, speaking of old men whom he had known in his youth, was full of admiration for their “hard Irish”, remarking that “they had such fine hard Irish you would not understand a word from them”.’ Any reading of the romances or hero-tales reveals the use of decorative passages or ‘runs’ of words, involving archaic words and alliteration, or triads of three essential elements, for example, in the entertainment of a guest, thus producing a stock sentence and a long sentence which can be made to serve in many stories and meets the expectation of the listeners. Typically, the hero reaching towards the realisation of his quest is given hospitality by the king and queen: ‘Food was set in the place of eating, drink in the place of drinking, music in the place of hearing.’, or punctuation signalled by a stock sentence: thogadh ceòl is leagadh bròn, ‘music was lifted and sorrow caused to fall’. This was a subject opened up memorably by Seumas Delargy in his essay, ‘The Gaelic Story-Teller’ in 1945 in the Proceedings of the British Academy. This account reached to an essence that has impressed students of the art before and since. 5

Storytelling in the Hebrides attracted the School of Scottish Studies as it had attracted Campbell of Islay. This was but one facet of Alan Bruford’s wide field of research and scholarship from which so many have benefited and continue to benefit. Alan also launched Tocher in 1971 with its rich pickings of tales, music and song selected from the archives of the School, an enterprise which has come virtually to define ‘folklore’ in Scotland. I have never forgotten my first meeting with him. I had recently arrived at the National Museum of Antiquities in Queen Street and was astonished to discover a complete disavowal of Ossian, or perhaps of the significance of Ossian, among my more senior colleagues in the Museums and Galleries. As a student, I had learnt from primary sources that Ossian was one of the first of the international best-sellers that had thrilled several generations around Europe from 1760. The too toxic view simply that Osssian was fake prevailed in the 1970s to the extent that the gallery curators doubted the value of acquiring for the nation a frieze from a Princes Street tearoom by the artist Robert Burns. In order to swing the argument in favour of the frieze and the significance of Ossian, I wrote a short article in order to iron out the complexities of the story of Oisean the bard and son of Fionn, the central figure of James Macpherson’s national epic. I was advised to speak to Alan Bruford at the School of Scottish Studies. He taught me much, not only of the significance of Ossian but of generosity. He gave me a copy of his thesis.

The tales of Fionn MacCumhail and the Fianna within the Ossianic canon are stories of a pre- Christian world. The Fianna or the Feinne were the warrior band supposedly set in the pre- Christian third century BC of Ireland and Scotland. The stories were carried as part of the cultural traditions of a scholar-magician class of the poets or filidh and written down by a Christian priestly class. Thus there was a spiritual continuity, but the tradition suggests a sort of neo-spiritual continuity and a requirement to consider the familiar and institutionalised dichotomy between Christianity and paganism. The conventional understanding of such a dichotomy holds that the one has replaced the other. Another view holds that Christianity never fully succeeded in undermining Christian beliefs. This dichotomy colours our long-term view of history but fails perhaps to consider that there has always been an intellectual reconciliation between Christian and non-Christian ideas.

The Auchmithie piper in the cave was not only a story for young children – by modern standards perhaps it was not a story for children at all - rather it was for late-night and adult gatherings. Like all stories, this was to enthral and to impart knowledge and act as a form of instruction. The story that I had heard was certainly localised within the community and can loosely be described as ‘folklore’, the vast field of material of which most of Europe was made aware in the nineteenth century. In 1812, the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm began publishing their volumes of oral folk narratives and interpretations of German mythology. Others followed such as Hans Andersen and the familiar repertoire emerged, now multiply- published, of Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk or the Arabian Nights, together with the signpost language of ‘Once upon a time …’ and ‘they all lived happily ever after’. The transmission of stories and songs in Scotland began to be explored and analysed in the 6 nineteenth century, with the work of Campbell of Islay, Rev John Gregorson Campbell of Tiree, Robert Chambers, Edinburgh, and publishers who took on their work such as Alexander Gardner of Paisley and the Chambers family’s own publishing house.

This subject known as Volkskunde, which came to be known later in English as ‘folklore’, rode on the wave of what is described as ‘European Romanticism’, itself deriving much of its moving spirit from Ossian. From my point of view, significantly, Volkskunde as a field of study is wide-ranging and includes custom and belief, language and dialect, music and material culture. In terms of music, for example, folk music inspired classical composers but this was nothing new in the nineteenth century. The recording of folk music as national endeavour was the goal of Bartok and Kodaly in Hungary and a ‘discovery’ by Marjory Kennedy Fraser in the Hebrides, types of enterprise that shifted folk music into hugely influential art music. We tend to think of the School of Scottish Studies in terms of the recording of folklore and folksong but the study of material culture was in the founding remit of the School and tribute should be paid to the School for what has been achieved and for the support and encouragement they have given to others. As originally established by the University of Edinburgh in January 1951, it was seen as an interdisciplinary centre for co-ordinating research on Scottish subjects and for extending it into neglected areas of study. I myself have been a beneficiary of this in many ways. I have just completed a short essay on ‘Divination by Sieve and Shears’ with the aid of the School Archive but, perhaps more profoundly, it has been the School who have regularly offered a platform where material culture might be analysed and contextualised.

Folklore has tended to concentrate on ‘storyology’, to borrow the Campbell of Islay term, and this bias is evident in the late-nineteenth century. The Folk Lore Society was founded in 1878 and the journal Folklore began in 1879 and occasionally dealt with material culture topics. In Scotland, the long-running journal, the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, offered a substantial outlet for material culture research. It seems as though ‘folklore’ was almost invented in the early nineteenth century but it had been the subject of scholarly interest and description since the seventeenth century with the work of William Stukeley and John Aubrey and predecessors such as Camden. It figures as ‘popular antiquities’ in the work of the Society of Antiquaries from 1707 and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland from 1780. Folklore is detectable in early sources such as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Bede, and of course in the Bible and the works of classical authors. In the twentieth century, ‘folklore’ had become a substantial field of learning and scholarship and of course stands for the subject matter itself

Folklore may be contrasted or compared today with ‘folklife’, also a discipline or group of disciplines subsumed under the label ‘ethnology’, forming a context for the study of tangible ‘cultural heritage’. It is significant that material culture has its own journal, Folk Life, produced annually by the Society for Folk Life Studies since 1963. It was preceded by the journal Gwerin edited by Iorwerth Peate and the first number of Gwerin in 1956 covered a significant spread of topics between the Welsh Folk-life Survey, ploughs and ploughing, tools 7 and techniques, crafts and trades, vernacular architecture, the ‘Horseman’s Word’, Glamorgan customs, and ‘the Communion Season and Presbyterianism in a Hebridean Community’ (a paper by the distinguished ethnologist, Trefor Owen, later to be Director of the Welsh Folk Museum). In the first volume of Gwerin also was a paper ‘Hebridean Traditions’ by Calum MacLean, a masterly setting of topographical, physical and social context and a history relevant to this. A succinct summary from the Norse to the nineteenth century concludes on the dark period, recognised even at the time in the words of the Napier Commission in 1883, quoted by Calum MacLean: ‘a state of misery, of wrong-doing, and of patient long-suffering without parallel in the history of the country’.

Material culture still merits consideration in ‘storyology’ and this begs the question as to why and how it should be recognised, defined and explained. The ‘why’ relates to context of location and the perspectives of tellers and audience. A story is given meaning and veracity in descriptive detail. A critical comment made by Professor Maire Herbert in relation to a Middle Irish narrative tale can be applied to most of the corpus of Scottish and international storytelling: ‘To read any early medieval narrative is, in a sense, to reverse the expectation which the reader brings to modern literature. The public of the early narrative did not seek to discover the unique world-view of a particular author, but rather, sought recognition of familiar codes and conventions shared from one work to another. Assessment of a medieval text entails …. the reconstruction of the ‘horizon of expectation’ of those for whom the text was originally composed. This involves identification of the signals by which the text disclosed itself to its public. Moreover, it entails concern with both text and context, with the location of the work within the historical and cultural worlds which shaped its creation.’ The ‘how’ question can be addressed by example; taking the ‘Records of Argyll’, a volume prepared under the editorship of Lord Archibald Campbell in 1885, this includes mostly historical traditions and clan stories and legends, and is rich in circumstantial detail such as on food and diet, clothing and textiles, transport and communications, building details such as bracken and heather thatch and wattle walls and doors, straw, heather and rush ropes, and terminology relating to material culture generally bypassed by even modern editors. There is also a scatter of detail which is archaic but recognised as such and understood by an audience, such as accounts of cooking meat in hides, charms and amulets, and pre-Reformation beliefs.

This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the School of Scottish Studies. It marks an extraordinary ‘odyssey’ and the process of discovery and recovery. It feels rather like coming to rest on the mountain-top after the long climb from where we can look back, take stock of where we are and look forward to where we are going. In this context, I would prefer to look back in order to highlight one personal element behind the School of Scottish Studies.

Dr John Lorne Campbell, scholar, folklorist and farmer, was born on 1 October 1906 and died in his ninetieth year on 25 April 1996. He was a scholar, a patriot, and a generous friend to many both at home and furth of Scotland. He was the eldest son of Col. Duncan Campbell of Inverneill, 8 the laird or proprietor of the estates of Inverneill and Taynish on Loch Fyne, and this rural patrician background was an important part of his upbringing. He went on to St John's College, Oxford, to read Rural Economy and Agriculture under Professor Sir James Scott Watson and Celtic under Professor John Fraser of Jesus College, graduating in 1929 and receiving his MA in 1933.

John Lorne Campbell dedicated his career to the recording, transmission and publication of the Gaelic song, literary and linguistic record of Scotland. He was the author or editor of more than two dozen books of seminal importance for Gaelic history and literature, and of a very long list of scholarly articles in the learned journals of his disciplines. John Lorne Campbell can be seen to occupy a significant and, I would suggest, seminal position, not only in the pioneering work of the mechanical recording of Gaelic and the laying up of a considerable archive of approximately 1,500 songs (mainly chorus songs or orain luaidh) and 350 folktales, but also in his concentration on the Gaelic languages of the communities of the Outer Hebrides. Campbell’s vigorously maintained emphasis on vernacular Gaelic drew on a belief in the importance and superiority of ‘dialect’ over ‘book Gaelic’ which he maintained had come to dominate the teaching and study of Scottish Gaelic.

John Lorne Campbell began work while at Oxford on a Gaelic anthology which became his first publication, Highland Songs of the Forty-Five, published in 1933. Under Professor Fraser’s guidance, he learnt the principles and discipline of editing which subsequently served him in such good stead and naturally made him impatient of carelessness and low standards in such fields of scholarship.

The editorial apparatus of this work put up an important scholarly marker and presented a thesis to which John Lorne adhered through his long career. When Highland Songs of the Forty-Five was deservedly republished by the Scottish Gaelic Texts Society in 1984, besides amendments and additions, he was able to restate with conviction after half a century that: ‘... the Rising of 1745 was the natural reaction of the Jacobite clans and their sympathisers in the Highlands against what had been since the coming of William of Orange in 1690 a calculated official genocidal campaign against the religion of many and the language of all Highlanders.’

After Oxford, John Lorne Campbell’s career took a fresh and, for him, momentous turn. When his Highland Songs of the Forty-Five was in proof, he offered to make his information available to Compton Mackenzie who was working on his biographical history of Prince Charlie. This was taken up and Compton Mackenzie, then living ‘in exile’ in Barra, invited Campbell to visit him and to make a study of crofting conditions and colloquial Gaelic. His arrival in the Outer Hebrides on 4 August 1933 was a defining moment in his career and marked the beginning of the long and extraordinary life's work of recovery and transmission of the Gaelic song, literary and linguistic record. 9

Sharing in the literary coterie which Compton Mackenzie had established at Northbay in Barra, John Lorne himself took lodgings with the exceptional John Macpherson, county councillor and postmaster, known to all as the ‘Coddy’. With him and other Barra notables such as Neil Sinclair, the Sgoilear Ruadh, and Annie and Calum Johnston, he began to explore this unusual world of the Hebrides, then still, as in his own words, ‘like the old Highlands of the early 19th century’. Here John Lorne became the pioneer of the modern collection and preservation of Gaelic song and story, and, working as I have said beyond the conventional institutional framework of the universities arguably has given his work a freshness of approach in the study of Gaelic literature and history as well as of language.

Together with Compton Mackenzie in Barra, John Lorne took an interest in the political and economic life of the Outer Hebrides and began to battle against official and governmental attitudes and neglect. An intellectual manifestation of this was their publication in 1936 of The Book of Barra, designed to overturn a too-prevalent sentimental image of the Hebrides ‘profitably fostered by certain writers’. They founded the Sea League in the summer of 1933 which took its title from the nineteenth century Land League and its philosophy and dynamic from the fishery policies of Norway, Iceland and the Faroes. The story was told in the pages of the Sea Leaguer between 1936 and 1939 and this bilingual news-sheet, it has been said, ‘deserves its place among the literature of Highland protest.’

When later he edited and published John Macpherson's Tales of Barra in 1960, he explained and rationalised his approach to modern Celtic Studies as ‘getting inside the tradition’ and the need of the student (like himself) to learn, not the stilted language of the litterateurs and the grammarians, but a dialect of Gaelic since ‘... the dialects of the Outer Hebrides are more vigorous than the modern literary language, and contain many words and expressions that are not in the printed dictionaries’. Urged on by John Macpherson, ‘The Coddy’, and Annie Johnston, he started his recording work in manuscript and shorthand, gathering enough material for example to assemble the book published in 1936 of the Gaelic songs of Shony Campbell of South Uist. Over a period of about thirty years of intense dedication, he amassed his important sound recording archive of songs and folktales. Approximately one-tenth of the collection has been published, for example the 135 waulking songs in three volumes of Hebridean Folksongs edited as a collaborative effort with Francis Collinson from 1966 until 1981 and published by Oxford University Press in three volumes, in 1969, 1977 and 1981. This also included the MacCormick Collection of waulking songs from South Uist and amounted finally to about 51,000 lines of verse. Wishing to draw attention to the wealth of traditional material which was still part of the fabric of life in the Hebrides, he always wanted to make available the results of his recording work. It was a careful and deliberate decision latterly to concentrate on the preparation of material for publication rather than to attempt more recording until he was unable to continue this work effectively. The imperative to publish and the importance of the spoken word supplied the editorial principle for a remarkable and influential book of Gaelic stories from South Uist and Barra, transcribed and privately printed in 1939. Apparently there was little demand for this sort 10 of material but a print-run of 250 was quickly sold out. His introduction to the Sia Sgeulachdan or ‘Six Stories’ includes the comment:

‘In writing down these stories, whether from the speaker’s own dictation or from Ediphone records, I have deliberately reproduced the dialects of the speakers. This is in accordance with the method used by contemporary Irish collectors of oral Gaelic literature, for example by most of the contributors to Béaloideas (the Journal of the Irish Folklore Society). In my opinion, any attempt to force oral Gaelic literature into the artificial mould of the standardised literary spelling and grammatical forms is a mistake, as it not only actually produces a false impression of the real language of the stories, but also obscures many interesting grammatical points.’

He was the pioneer for Gaelic Scotland of technical methods and methodology. His recording work advanced in step with contemporary developments, beginning in January 1937 with a clockwork Ediphone Recorder using wax cylinders, he progressed in the autumn of 1937 to a Presto Disc Recorder, both obtained in New York as state of the art equipment. In 1948 Campbell bought a Webster Wire Recorder, again in the USA. He often recalled the difficulties and suspicion which he met with in trying to get his new equipment through the bureaucracy of Customs who detained the Webster for six months. Latterly when magnetic tape recorders became the norm, John Lorne used a Grundig Tape Recorder from 1956 and began the work in South Uist of recording Angus MacLellan and his sister, Mrs Neil Campbell, whom he had first met in 1948 and were then in their nineties. From 1962 tape recordings were made in the field on a Phillips Portable Recorder. Working alone in the field, he gained some recognition of the importance of his task with a two-year grant of £250 from the Leverhulme Foundation in 1949. This later, post-War phase of John Lorne Campbell’s fieldwork was extremely fruitful and reflects the breadth of his interests. Stories from South Uist, published in 1961 and recently republished, supplies an English translation of tales told by Angus MacLellan, and the most remarkable variety of story types from a single reciter. He also recorded from Angus a version of Conall Gulbann, ‘one of the greatest, if not the greatest of the romantic tales’, and a version of the Tàin Bò Cuailnge. The 1961 collection included a section titled ‘The Storyteller’s Own Story’ and this aspect of narrative was developed by Campbell into a full-length autobiography published in English as The Furrow Behind Me (1962) and in Gaelic in 1967 and 1974.

The linking of Scotland and Nova Scotia was another facet of John Lorne's innovative approach to Gaelic Studies. Having begun productive recording work in Barra and South Uist in 1936-37, he then visited eastern Canada and Cape Breton in particular to discover the Gaelic oral tradition among the descendants of eighteenth and nineteenth century emigrants very much alive even after a separation of over 100 years. He was tracing particularly the emigrants of the period c.1770-1830 from the west-coast area of Lochaber, Moidart and Arisaig, South Uist and Barra and the Small Isles. Single-minded, but never narrow, he also recorded the history and traditions of the Micmac Indians, the aboriginal inhabitants of the Maritime Provinces, while he was in Nova Scotia. The significance of Cape Breton for Gaelic tradition was, in his own words, as ‘a 11

Highland community where there are no lairds’ and its richness is reflected in his own recently republished Songs Remembered in Exile (Aberdeen University Press 1990 and Birlinn Press 1999).

From the mid-1930s when he had learnt good island Gaelic and his recording was well under way, John Lorne became a vigorous advocate of the need for public and academic recognition of the oral culture of the Scottish Gaidhealtachd. He was one of the main instigators of FIOS, the Folklore Institute of Scotland (and its President from 1947), whose main object was to lobby for official recognition of the importance and value of the Gaelic oral tradition in Scotland and the urgent need for support in organising the recording of it by modern methods. In support of these principles, FIOS published a set of ten 12inch discs at 78rpm through Linguaphone in 1950. These were prepared by John Lorne Campbell from his own fieldwork recordings, 200 sets were made and an accompanying booklet in a print-run of 500 written to supply biographies of the singers and translations of the song-texts, thus providing a very significant statement in support of his case. He himself developed the case for systematic collection of Gaelic folksong on a properly organised basis preferably by the endowment of a body in Scotland similar to the Irish Folklore Commission. The efforts of the Folklore Institute of Scotland together with other interested parties led to the creation of the School of Scottish Studies in the University of Edinburgh in 1951. In contributing to the founding of this new archive, he endowed it with copies of more than 300 of his own wire recordings of traditional song.

With 16 books and a great many articles, one or two of John Lorne’s research topics stand out for their continuing contribution to Gaelic Studies. Stories taken down from dictation and recorded on the Ediphone in South Uist and Barra between 1933 and 1938 were published privately in Sia Sgialachdan in 1939. This book drew the attention of the Irish Folklore Commission to the Hebrides and a vigorous oral tradition surviving there, and they sent over Calum MacLean to carry out recording work on their behalf, an initiative which undoubtedly helped to prompt the subsequent establishment of the School of Scottish Studies. The outbreak of war in 1939 had made it difficult or impossible for them to take action, but immediately on conclusion of the Second World War in 1945, the Irish Folklore Commission sent Calum MacLean to Uist and Barra. By contrast, John Lorne Campbell described the attitude in Scotland as blatantly uninterested and reprehensibly negligent. When he had been trying to arouse an interest among university academics in the Gaelic of the Islands while preparing Sia Sgialachdan for the press, he raised the matter with Professor James Carmichael Watson. The latter had just moved from Glasgow to the Celtic Chair at Edinburgh and commented to Campbell that he had students from Harris in his Classes. Campbell described how he had said to him: ‘Why don’t you get an Ediphone Recorder for them so that when they go home for the summer vacation they could record songs and stories?’ To this the answer was: ‘ I would do that if I could Mr Campbell, but if I went before my seniors and asked for this kind of thing, I’d be laughed at.’

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John Lorne Campbell’s reappraisal of the work of Marjory Kennedy Fraser, author of the Songs of the Hebrides (1909-1921) which had ‘popularised’ Gaelic folksong, continues to have ramifications for the understanding of traditional folksong. Kennedy Fraser, the doyenne of early-twentieth century music halls, aroused an intense interest in the oral tradition of the Gaelic world by her renderings of songs supposedly gathered in the field from singers in the Hebrides. But these were ‘art-songs’ and Campbell set out in articles and in the collaborative editing of his Hebridean Folksongs to, in his own words, ‘set the record straight’. Specifically, in the appendix to Hebridean Folksongs (volume 3, pages 324-336), he and Francis Collinson establish the originals or original versions of many of the art-songs in Songs of the Hebrides. Ironically they were able to record from people who had sung for Kennedy Fraser or from their daughters, and it was said that in the Islands traditional singers resented her treatment of their material. In Barra Campbell recorded the opinion that ‘she spoilt our songs’. When the centenary of Kennedy Fraser’s birth was being commemorated in 1957, Campbell called in print for a re-focussing of attention from the Singer to the Songs. He reminded his readers that public attitudes and the reception of the Songs of the Hebrides were strongly coloured by what had come to be labelled ‘Celtic Twilight’. Summarising her collection, he commented firmly: ‘It appealed to the preconceived ideas and emotions of a public ignorant of the true nature of Gaelic folksong and oral literature. As Dr Robin Flower has pointed out, the true nature of Gaelic tales and poetry – and nearly all Gaelic poetry is made to be sung – is concrete, epigrammatical and brightly coloured. But the great mass of the English- speaking public prefers to have it vague, misty and sentimental. That is what Mrs Kennedy Fraser gave it, and she had an immense and immediate success.’

The other enormous contribution, in his own view ‘unfinished’, to Scottish Gaelic studies has been the tracing of the literary remains and lost Gaelic folklore collection of Rev Fr Allan McDonald (1859-1905), parish priest of Daliburgh, South Uist, and Eriskay. He had begun collecting dialect, vocabulary and local information in 1887 and continued in Eriskay after 1893, when he was transferred there after an illness. He had been dead only twenty-eight years when John Lorne Campbell went to Barra but he was still held in the highest esteem in the southern islands. It became a mission, possibly with spiritual dimensions, to recover the collection and reinstate Fr Allan’s reputation which was more or less lost to the world outside Uist and Eriskay and some of this corpus has been made available most notably in Fr Allan’s Gaelic Words and Expressions of South Uist and Eriskay first published significantly by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in 1958. Beside this, John Lorne Campbell published a collection of Fr Allan’s own Bardachd in 1965 in a significant act of pietas.

After Fr Allan’s death, his general folklore collection in nine or ten notebooks had been acquired by the Glasgow publisher, W B Blaikie, for publishing in the newly founded Celtic Review. Apart from a few items and a group of Fingalian stories printed in the Celtic Review between 1905 and 1909, the collection had disappeared. Campbell’s subsequent discovery of part of the collection in university archives and its analysis, revealed that the collection, in his own words, ‘had been 13 gutted’. This led to the detailed revelation of the plagiarism of Miss Ada Goodrich Freer, a researcher at the time into the phenomenon of Second Sight, who, he felt, had deceived Fr Allan and manifestly failed in her own publications to acknowledge her considerable debt to the Priest.

No account of John Lorne Campbell could omit his marriage of sixty years to Margaret Fay Shaw of Glen Shaw, Pennsylvania, whom he met in South Uist in 1934 where she was collecting traditional Gaelic songs. Her training in the 1920s as a professional musician, added a special ingredient of music to his words, through her musical talents and his scholarly and lexical skills, creating a treasure house of their lives and work in Canna.

To conclude, I have been unable in the space available to detail adequately all John Lorne Campbell’s contributions to Celtic Studies in the twentieth century. I am conscious particularly of omitting mention of his research into the work of the Welsh polymath, Edward Lhuyd, who visited Scotland as part of a scientific tour of the ‘Celtic’ countries between 1697 and 1701. A major work of collaboration with Professor Derick Thomson emerged from this research, Edward Lhuyd in the Scottish Highlands, and then a further volume on seventeenth-century folklore from Lhuyd’s papers, titled A Collection of Highland Rites and Customs. I have described, I hope in a fair and balanced manner, the work of John Lorne Campbell and I believe that I should claim, with others, that he is one of the foremost Gaelic scholars and fieldworkers of the twentieth century. What I have tried to show is that he has been one of the instigators of a modern approach to language and idiom, finding new value in dialect and colloquial Scottish Gaelic, he broke the mould of Scottish history, giving a new awareness and value to the Highland and Gaelic factor, and he achieved one of the most significant assemblages of work for Scottish folklore gathered by a single collector.