Gaelic’s literary links with the landscape
In his new book author John Murray explores how the Gaelic language, rooted in a sense of place, makes poetry of the Highlands
They say that you only ever write one book. After the first, the next is just a variation. A kinder take, would be that a second book grows out of the first. Literature of the Gaelic Landscape did evolve from Reading the Gaelic Landscape. That’s why their covers are similar. The first book tried to understand landscape through the profusion of Gaelic place-names that cover maps of the Highlands. The second looks at how Gaelic authors have used landscape and especially placenames in song, poetry and tale.
Gaelic’s vocabulary for describing the shape of the land, its flowing waters and serrated coast is much more varied than English. Even colours do not translate. Sometimes I needed to draw a diagram to understand the terms. Why is a mountain a Stùc rather than a Stob, Cnoc or Tom? The dictionary is only useful up to a point. As a student of ecology and landscape, I had to go into the field to ground-truth what these words really mean and why they might have been attached to features and places in the landscape.
After visiting Lochan nan Arm – the Wee Loch of the Weapons, perched high and hidden amongst a cluster of glacial mounds, I know that it would make a good hiding place for a party of medieval warriors on the run. Until that is, they were betrayed and cornered. This happened to Robert Bruce and his small band of followers. Such was their haste to escape their foes – the Macdougalls of Lorne, that they tossed their weapons
As a student of ecology and landscape, I had to go into the field to ground-truth what these words really mean
into the lochan to lighten their load in flight. In Dunollie Castle, the clan chief still has Bruce’s plaid brooch, torn from his shoulder in the fracas. So, place-names can register past events, real and imaginary as well as describe rocks, plants, water, weather and animals.
In the middle of the 18th century, Duncan Bàn Macintyre worked as a gamekeeper near Ben Dòrain. He composed a long song about the mountain and her deer. I say composed (Gaelic would say made), since he could neither read nor write. Once he was asked: An e thusa am fear a rinn Beinn Dòbhrain? – Are you the man who made Ben Dòrain? Duncan replied: Chan e, ‘se Dia a rinn i, ‘s mise am fear a mhol i. – No, God made her, I’m the man who praised her.
The song celebrates a lost paradise, when this corner of Eastern Argyll was managed for deer and their pursuit. And if Duncan is to be believed, when its pastures were scented with wild herbs and flowers and when trees and shrubs graced the corries and passes about the mountain. This was a picture of humanity and nature in harmony. And Duncan wanted it to go on forever, even after Culloden, and the gathering storm-clouds of the Highland Clearances. The poem is a baroque and heady hymn of praise. It builds and builds upon itself in successive showers of sonorous adjectives. What action there is, apart from the hunt’s conclusion, charts a wandering or siubhal, through a succession of named places between Ben Achalladair and Allt na h-annaid – the Burn of the Holy Church. Here the deer commune, with wine from the Annat Burn, tasting of honey. Le f ìon Uillt na h-annaid, blas meala r’ a òl air. The thirsty deer have travelled through Fortified Corrie, Fern Corrie, the Pass, Smooth Corrie, Dog Meadow, the Shank of the Hoof, the Ruin of the Fianna, Willow Rock, the Hill of Gathering and the Burn of the Holy Church.
Like the early tales of the heroic Fianna and Donald Mackinlay’s
Song to the Owl, Praise of Ben Dòrain
– Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain, uses place-names, or toponyms as a way of grounding the action in a specific locale and a shared social space. For non-literate people, and particularly for the performer, these names must also have acted as a memory device or mnemonic. By combining toponym with mnemonic, I have made a new word – topo-mnemonic, which may catch on if you can say it!
If Duncan Bàn Macintyre was composing songs about a way of life that was on the brink of erasure, Sorley Maclean’s poetry was written after much of the Highlands and its indigenous Gaelic culture had been ethnically cleansed. Like Macintyre, his work, albeit expressed in a modern idiom, can be rooted in ancient Gaelic legend. Like Macintyre he wants to stop time. Maclean also uses toponyms. In The Cuillin his massive lament for the Clearances, he cites 62 place-names, mostly set amongst that jagged range. In Hallaig, perhaps his most famous work, and again on the same subject, Maclean uses only 15. All of them can be found on the island of Raasay, to the West
of Skye, where he was born. They are instrumental in marking the tightening progress of the poem.
Maclean imagines the recolonisation of the cleared townships of Hallaig and Screapadale in the South and East of the island by young girls who have been transformed into trees. Gaelic grammar allows effortless shapeshifting. Tha i ‘na beithe, ‘na calltainn, ‘na caorann … Literally: she is in her birch, in her hazel, in her rowan. This cannot be fully understood within the confines of English. I have drawn the sequence of place-names in Hallaig. Unlike the deer in Praise
of Ben Dòrain the journey delineated cannot easily be followed on foot. It is not one you would choose to take. It is a journey the poet makes in his mind’s eye. Hallaig’s toponymic narrative can be further abstracted to form a converging spiral, whose vortex centres on Dùn Cana – Raasay’s highest point. I have compared these drawings to Australian song-lines.
From the top of Dùn Cana Maclean kills time – the deer, stone dead, with the Gun of Love – Gunna Ghaoil. Now the silent bands of young girls will move perpetually up through the streams of Hallaig and Fearns as slender trees, until the whole island is under their shade. Maclean has cast a net of names over the empty landscape and reclaimed his ancestral heritage. Like the Cuillin, Hallaig emerges on the either side of sorrow – air taobh eile duilghe.
Literature of the Gaelic Landscape
is not a conventional work of literary criticism. The culture of the Highlands, like the traditions of native societies throughout the world, is closely connected to the land and rooted in the idea of place. A great deal of Gaelic literature uses landscape as a device to support, sustain and catalyse the story. Continuing the approach adopted in
Reading the Gaelic Landscape I have gone into the field to explore and understand what happened, to whom and where, and how that fits the landscape. Drawing and abstracting the pattern of place-name narratives or song-lines makes possible a new and different understanding of Gaelic literature.