Culture is not museums, books and cell service. It is that system of understandings and practices which supplies ordinary people with tools with which to live in an imperfect, often heartbreaking, world that never stops challenging us. In a society whose traditional culture has collapsed, as most have today under the pressure of “nothing matters but profit” economies, each individual must figure out their own individual way of understanding and living in the world, and that is no easy task.
Many of the people of traditional Irish and Highland communities in the nineteenth, early twentieth, and probably earlier centuries were deeply cultured. They lived gracefully, skillfully, elegantly, sustainably, within the limits of their possibilities. (Possibilities that by modern times were admittedly quite limited.)
I’m not claiming this because “The Backward Look” nostaligia or because “Ireland, Boys, Hurrah!” Most impartial observers at the time noted the fact. (Those who were afraid that the dark oppressed masses would rise up to cut their throats or decrease their profits…Not so much. They saw barbarians.)
“I have wandered amongst the peasantry of many countries,” folk-tale collector J.F. Campbell wrote in 1860, “and…There are few peasants I think so highly of, none that I like so well. Scotch Highlanders have many faults, but they have the bearing of Nature’s own gentlemen--the delicate natural tact that discovers, and the good taste that avoids, all that would hurt or offend a guest. The poorest is ever the readiest to share the best he has with a stranger…I have never found a boor or a churl in a Highland bothy.” (I’m quoting from his introduction to Popular Tales of the West Highlands.”) The same was true of traditional Ireland.
(Anna Nic a' Luain, Na Cruacha Gorma)
Many of these people were also immensely learned in traditional lore and literature, and took everyday pleasure and delight in language. As poet Maire Mac an tSaoi said; “When a Dingle Peninsula man had time to reflect on what he was about to say, what came out was poetry.” She is not talking about fancy discussions of art and philosophy, but everyday conversation about everyday things. A ceili was originally not manufactured entertainment, but a nightly gathering of neighbors to tell stories, sing songs, discuss history and important current matters.
Mary Macdonald of Garryheillie in South Uist in the Highlands (1897-1977) left school at age fourteen and spent her working life as a maid, then as a crofter’s wife. She knew more than two hundred songs, passed down to her by her mother and other women; many of the songs very old and rare...and great That is not all: “Even if she had never sung a song, Kate MacDonald would have been memorable--for her humanity, her dignity, her sparkle, her ready wit and her infectious sense of fun,” folk-tale collector Donald Archie MacDonald wrote. She was only one of hundreds in the Highlands and still Irish-speaking parts of Ireland in the early twentieth centuries.
George Campbell Hay (1915-1984) was brought up in Tarbert, a small town in the far southwestern Highlands. His father, a minister, died when he was four, so his mother returned to her family’s native area, (Tarbert) where George soon discovered the submerged Gaelic language culture of the community.
“Och, when I was about six, I started asking them (his two great aunts) what was the Gaelic for this and what was the Gaelic for that, and so on, and that’s how I learned Gaelic.”
He also learned the language from fisherman Calum Johnson: “And in front of Dougie Leitch’s shed there used to be a log where they sat down and talked, and I don’t remember when I first met Calum, but he used to go round and sit on the log and talk, you know, and I was small and I sat down beside him and talked to him, and I got to know him that way; and his boat was out there, and I said, “Oh, I’ll go fishing” to him , so I went fishing with Calum.”
In 1881, the census noted about 70% of the population of the town as Gaelic-speaking, but by 1921, it was down to 26%, and was only used by older people in situations like “on the log.” Similarly to Douglas Hyde in late nineteenth-century north Roscommon, George Campbell Hay got to know the last representatives of an old world. He absorbed their implicit cultural teaching, and, adding to it a deep self-taught knowledge of Irish and Scottish Gaelic literatures, he went on to become one of the three great twentieth-century Gaelic poets -- writers of world stature. (I will admit that much of the world, and particularly the U.K., has not caught up with the fact yet.) (The other two are Sorley MacLean and Aonghas MacNeacail, both of Skye.)
I’m hoping, after posting The Civilization of Cats, (incoherent and poorly-argued as it is) that I don’t have to go too far explaining why the following poem is not a sentimental exercise in nostalgia: “To My Gran.” The poem takes its place in a large body of Irish, Scots Gaelic and Welsh poetry in praise of a person (or people, in this case). These poems don’t exist because the people who made them were simpering flatterers. Traditional Irish/Gaelic/Welsh culture never went in much for abstractions. Values, ideas and life paradigms were always presented as embodied in person, in story. There are no essays on how to rule a kingdom. Instead, there is the Deirdre story, and others. There are no philosophical treatises on how to live; instead, there are poems like the following, where “The Good” is embodied in a specific person’s doings.
Cuimhneachain do Ealasaid agus Anna Nic Mhaoileain (Memorial for Elizabeth and Anna MacMillan)
Is ann ‘nan laighe an Cill Aindreis
Tha dithisd bhan a dh’altrum mi,
Mnài ‘chuir maise air a’ bheatha-s!
Ged bu sean iad, le’n cuid gnìomh;
Ealasaid maraon as Anna,
Bha iad farsuing, caomh, neochrìon.
Thug iad saoghal mòr ri fialachd.
Is thug aon bhliadhna iad do’n chill.
It is in the graveyard in Tarbert
that two women who raised me lie;
two women who made life beautiful,
with their deeds, though they were old.
Ealasaid and Anna together;
they were hospitable, gentle and gracious.
They lived a long time giving,
And one year took them both to the grave.
Uaisle ghiùlain, cainnt ba chiùne,
Suairceas, sùnnd is crídhe mor,
Có a shaoileadh mnathan aosda
A bhith ‘nan aobhar ionghnaidh leò?
Mar sin bha Ealasaid is Anna,
Le sgairt a fhreadradh do’n aois òig:
Bha sean fharsuingeachd nan Gàidheal
A rìsd ‘nan gnàths a’ tighinn beò.
Nobility of bearing, gentle speech,
affable, cheery and great-hearted;
who would think that would be a cause
of wonder in old women?
That is how Ealasaid and Anna were,
with vigour as though they were young.
They had the old Gaelic breadth of spirit,
come alive again in the here and now.
An sean saoghal còir bha ‘nochdadh
Riamh tromhaibh ann gach ceum.
Feumaidh sinn a’ ràdh, mo thruaighe.
Gu’m “b’aisling uair éiginn e.”
Is maith a bhiodh sin dheth, a dithisd,
Na’fàgadh sibh mar ghibht ‘nur déidh,
S na’m faigheadh daoine an tsaoghail ghoirt seo
Leth nan sochair bh’annaibh fhén.
You called into being the old decent world
In everything you did,
but I must admit to my sorrow,
that this was a thing that was, and now has gone.
We would be better for it, you two,
if you had left a gift behind you,
and the people in this bitter world today
had half the virtues that you two did,
Ealasaid, you never bent your head or mind
To any worthless soulless thing.
Anna, who was generous and good-natured,
never closed her hand to others, or her door.
I see you gently smiling, at the head of the table,
sharing with everyone.
If you are still here in the old place,
you are a kindly and welcoming spirit.
(I translate from O na Ceithir Airdean, 1952, Oliver and Boyd.)
While MacLean was inspired by the incredibly intense and powerful Gaelic songs of the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries, and MacNeacail by the contemporary, Hays was inspired by the older bardic poetry:
“For models of high artistic skill, one inevitably turns to the work of the bardic schools,” he wrote. “Dan Direach metres can be adapted by substituting a system of stress for the syllabic system, and by disregarding the rules about classes of consonants.” (It is necessary to add that he used caoineadh metre a good bit in his last poems.)
The editor of Collected Poems and Songs speaks of concision and restraint, and richness of ornamentation. (p. 504, 2003 paperback edition) and these are qualities that distinguish Hay's poetry. The other quality is a lyric passion and intensity. It is altogether great.
His work has been collected in The Collected Poems and Songs of George Campbell Hay, edited by Michael Byrne, Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
A’ Cheolraidh – Beatha Bun-os-Cionn
Thug mi an oidhche caithriseach (sleepless)
Gu camhanachd is fàire (dawn: sun on horizon)
A’ cumadh air an rannaghail, (keeping: poetry)
S’ an aicill teachd ‘sa ga tàthadh (binding together)
Gun chlos on Cheolràidh fhiadhaich (respite: feverish Muses)
‘s an norran gnàthach cian uam, (sleep)
Mar chomhachag no iasgair, (owl)
No ialtaig nan sgàile. (bat: shadows)
He returned to Tarbert in the 1980s, but Gaelic and the old world were gone. He ended up drinking a lot, and leaving.
If you want to know more, and you like books, Nils Holmer’s The Gaelic of Kintyre (Dublin, 1962), and The Gaelic of Arran (Dublin, 1957), will tell you a lot about phonology, with some texts and grammar. There is also Nils Holmer’s The Irish Dialect Spoken in the Glens of Antrim (Uppsala Universitets Arksskrift, 1940) (about Glenarrif): Sgealtan Rachreann (Stories from Rathlin Island) (1910, Gill) and other collections from Aoidhmhin Mac Greagoir: Seosamh Watson’s edition of Seamus O Duilearga’s Antrim Notebooks, published in Zeitschrift fur Celtische Philologie: and The Rathlin Catechism of the early eighteenth century, which probably was written for Antrim Irish-speakers. There is a recent book that supplies the east Ulster Doegen texts (including Antrim) and situates them in a linguistic context (Ulster Gaelic Voices, Ni Bhaoill, 2010) but I don’t have a copy. O Doibhlin’s online work on the last east Ulster speakers is also very interesting, as is O Dochartaigh's on the Scottish Gaelic/East Ulster dialect area. (I must be thinking of Dialects of Ulster Irish, 1987, Institute of Irish Studies. Another book I have never seen.)
Rathlin was essentially a Scottish Gaelic dialect – in the sixteenth century, everyone there was massacred by the English – but the Glens are a very interesting transitional area, part of a sixteenth century MacDonald lordship that included parts of the Highlands and of Ireland.
The southwest Highlands is a distinctive linguistic area within the Highlands as a whole, and in its vocabulary, it often agrees with (east) Ulster against the rest of the Highlands. For details, Seumas Grannd's The Gaelic of Islay: A Comparative Study, Department of Celtic, Aberdeen, 2000) provides discussion, and almost a hundred maps that show linguistic features and vocabulary for many points in the west Highlands south of Ardnamurchan, also giving comparative information for other areas and Ireland. It is great!
Antrim, Down, and then Derry/Tyrone (more or less), on the one hand, and Kintyre, Arran, and Islay/Jura, on the other, thus form the unit of transition between dialects in Ireland ("Irish"), and the Highlands of Scotland ("Scottish Gaelic"). One language, be it that society and culture have diverged since the 16th century.
I
care about Irish and Scottish Gaelic and Breton and Welsh dialects because they
speak the interaction of people, place and time over many many many centuries.
They speak small-scale societies that show us how to live gracefully even in
hard times.
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