1 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’. 2 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.