The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Traditional Literatures

225 Pages·2013·0.789 MB·English

by  Sarah Dunnigan, Suzanne Gilbert

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ISBN 978-0-7486-4539-8

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Cover image: Starry Night in the Meadows n
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The Edinburgh Companion to
Scottish Traditional Literatures
Edinburgh Companions to Scottish Literature
Series Editors: Ian Brown and Thomas Owen Clancy
Titles in the series include:
The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Burns The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Drama
Edited by Gerard Carruthers Edited by Ian Brown
978 0 7486 3648 8 (hardback) 978 0 7486 4108 6 (hardback)
978 0 7486 3649 5 (paperback) 978 0 7486 4107 9 (paperback)
The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth- The Edinburgh Companion to Sir Walter Scott
Century Scottish Literature Edited by Fiona Robertson
Edited by Ian Brown and Alan Riach 978 0 7486 4130 7 (hardback)
978 0 7486 3693 8 (hardback) 978 0 7486 4129 1 (paperback)
978 0 7486 3694 5 (paperback)
The Edinburgh Companion to Hugh
The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary MacDiarmid
Scottish Poetry Edited by Scott Lyall and Margery Palmer
Edited by Matt McGuire and Colin McCulloch
Nicholson 978 0 7486 4190 1 (hardback)
978 0 7486 3625 9 (hardback) 978 0 7486 4189 5 (paperback)
978 0 7486 3626 6 (paperback)
The Edinburgh Companion to James Hogg
The Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark Edited by Ian Duncan and Douglas Mack
Edited by Michael Gardiner and Willy 978 0 7486 4124 6 (hardback)
Maley 978 0 7486 4123 9 (paperback)
978 0 7486 3768 3 (hardback)
978 0 7486 3769 0 (paperback) The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish
Women’s Writing
The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Edited by Glenda Norquay
Stevenson 978 0 7486 4432 2 (hardback)
Edited by Penny Fielding 978 0 7486 4431 5 (paperback)
978 0 7486 3554 2 (hardback)
978 0 7486 3555 9 (paperback) The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish
Traditional Literatures
The Edinburgh Companion to Irvine Welsh Edited by Sarah Dunnigan and Suzanne
Edited by Berthold Schoene Gilbert
978 0 7486 3917 5 (hardback) 978 0 7486 4540 4 (hardback)
978 0 7486 3918 2 (paperback) 978 0 7486 4539 8 (paperback)
The Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman The Edinburgh Companion to Liz Lochhead
Edited by Scott Hames Edited by Anne Varty
978 0 7486 3963 2 (hardback) 978 0 7486 5472 7 (hardback)
978 0 7486 3964 9 (paperback) 978 0 7486 5471 0 (paperback)
The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish
Romanticism
Edited by Murray Pittock
978 0 7486 3845 1 (hardback)
978 0 7486 3846 8 (paperback)
Visit the Edinburgh Companions to Scottish Literature website at
www.euppublishing.com/series/ecsl
The Edinburgh Companion to
Scottish Traditional Literatures
Edited by Sarah Dunnigan and Suzanne Gilbert
© editorial matter and organisation Sarah M. Dunnigan and Suzanne Gilbert, 2013
© the chapters their several authors, 2013
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF
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Contents
Series Editors’ Preface vii
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction
Sarah Dunnigan and Suzanne Gilbert 1
1 The Roots of Living Tradition
Margaret Bennett 7
2 Genre
Emily Lyle, Valentina Bold, Ian Russell 14
3 Folk Belief and Scottish Traditional Literatures
Lizanne Henderson 26
4 Transmission
James Porter 35
5 ‘Tradition’ and Literature in the Medieval Period
John McNamara 42
6 Vernacular Gaelic Tradition
Robert Dunbar 51
7 The Early Modern Period
Sarah Dunnigan 63
8 The Heroic Ballads of Gaelic Scotland
Anja Gunderloch 74
9 Eighteenth-Century Antiquarianism
Valentina Bold 85
10 Lowland Song Culture in the Eighteenth Century
Katherine Campbell and Kirsteen McCue 94
11 Tradition and Scottish Romanticism
Suzanne Gilbert 105
12 Nineteenth-Century Highland and Island Folklore
Jason Marc Harris 114
vi contents
13 Tradition and Innovation in Twentieth-Century Scottish
Gaelic Literature
Michael Newton 123
14 The Politics of the Modern Scottish Folk Revival
Corey Gibson 134
15 Continuing the Living Tradition
Margaret Bennett 144
Endnotes 153
Further Reading 199
Notes on Contributors 206
Index 209
Series Editor’s Preface
In the preface to the first tranche of volumes in this series, the series editors
argued that, while recognising that some literary canons can conceive of
a single ‘Great Tradition’, there is no such simple way of conceiving of
Scottish literature’s variousness. This year’s tranche, the fifth, illustrates that
variousness in two ways.
The subject of this year’s author volume, Liz Lochhead, currently Scotland’s
Makar, illustrates the variousness of her talents as poet, playwright and, in a
broader sense, figure of cultural significance. As she moves between poetry
and playwriting, her work brings lessons from each genre to the other, high-
lighting the generic slipperiness and interpenetration that is such a feature
of Scottish literature. Her work also illuminates relationships between
Scotland’s languages and dialects, particularly between the Scots and English
languages – but also the varieties of dialect and register in Scots usage – as she
brings her sharp eye and insightful wit to bear. In her art, Lochhead exempli-
fies even wider artform interaction as her painting, poetry and playwriting
each shape aspects of her creative output.
The second volume this year is one of the series’ topic volumes. In its
own way, it also illustrates the variousness of the elements in the canon of
Scottish literature, sliding between the oral and literary traditions – and
their interaction – and voyaging among a wide variety of genres, includ-
ing story, song, ballad and poetry. This is part of the reason it is entitled
a Companion not to ‘Scottish Traditional Literature’, but to ‘Scottish
Traditional Literatures’. It considers the impact of traditional literatures in
Scotland’s several languages both on one another and on what is often more
commonly, if in a more limited (and limiting) sense, defined as the Scottish
literary tradition. In fact, this volume, like the rest of the series, challenges
just what is meant by such a term. The volume pays particular attention to
the role of tradition-bearers and those who collected traditional material and
made it available to us. In doing so, it raises important and pressing questions
about the nature of collecting and the conception of authenticity of tradition.
Ian Brown Thomas Owen Clancy
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the General Editors and all at Edinburgh University
Press for their guidance and support in bringing the volume to fruition, and
especially Ian Brown for his endless advice and patience. We are very grateful
to all our contributors; to Linden Bicket for compiling the Further Reading;
to Michael McVeigh for allowing us to use his painting; to Rob Dunbar
for his kind readiness to advise and help; and to Margaret Bennett for her
generosity and wisdom.
viii
Introduction
Sarah Dunnigan and Suzanne Gilbert
Writing of fairy tales, the late Angela Carter, a dazzling fabulist herself,
remarked on their ‘user-friendliness’. So too, we might add, does this char-
acterise the rich seam of ballad, song and folktale traditions seeded deep in
the varieties of Scottish cultural heritage. Like Carter’s cherished Märchen,
Scots ballads are ‘powered by’ a ‘narrative drive’ which asks ‘ “What happened
then”?’,1 accommodating and reeling us into their distinctive emotional and
verbal worlds. Rather ironically, then, this volume devoted to what we have
called ‘Scottish traditional literatures’ needs to begin with a variety of quali-
fications and definitions in order to encompass the subject’s multifariousness.
We are dealing with a multiplicity of modes and forms – folk narrative; folk
poetry and song; folk drama; folk language or folksay; and these in turn can
encompass ballads, folktales, and songs; jests, riddles, jokes and other types of
oral material; wonder tales, heroic stories, fables, Jack tales; lullaby, lament,
chant and work-song. After all, that the much-loved fairy abduction narra-
tive, ‘Tam Lin’, should exist as an allusion in an obscure sixteenth-century
Scots allegory (‘the tayl of the yong tamlene’), as a ballad communicated by
Robert Burns to James Johnson, compiler of the Scots Musical Museum and as
a song recorded by the 1960s English folk rock band, Fairport Convention (to
choose only three of its incarnations) suggests the kind of historical and cross-
cultural hybridity of this field in which categories and terms need to be used
with care. If this Scots ballad heritage of beautiful, powerful and ribald songs
belongs to what is commonly called ‘oral tradition’, how can it then be sub-
sumed into a category that invokes ‘literature’ (i.e. what is written; printed)? If
oral tradition means transmission by word of mouth, how can we understand
an oral culture that would seem to have no record, documentation, or sources?
And before we even begin to qualify or refine the categories of ‘orality’ or
‘the folk’, what is meant by the term ‘tradition’ itself? The ‘bardic tradition’
in Gaelic culture, for example, is spoken of, but refers to formal, professional,
court or religious poetry written in an artificial, learned language, rather than
the narrative poetry of Gaelic ballad tradition (see Chapter 8). ‘Tradition’
has been frequently a debateable and politicised term – in the context of