Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) (38 page)

Great medieval narratives such as the
Táin Βó Cuailnge
and the
Mabinogi
command much of our attention in this volume. Their substantial bulk, artistic complexity and depth sustain extensive critical scrutiny. For all that we have discovered about them, most of their secrets remain to be unravelled. And they exist in written documents.

If we think of post-classical Celtic mythology as consisting primarily of Irish and Welsh materials, it is because only in Ireland and Wales was there an early written literary tradition in the indigenous languages. In both Ireland and Wales there is also a huge body of oral literature, much of it collected from illiterate storytellers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In some of the stories characters from earlier written tradition, such as Fionn mac Cumhaill or Deirdre, appear again often strangely transmogrified. In oral tradition Fionn the hero of written narratives can be seen as a giant or as a clumsy buffoon. While mnemonic oral formulae among storytellers may allow for set passages to stay intact over many generations, it is also true that the more often and more widely a story is repeated the more often variations will occur in characterization and plot detail.

A certain fluidity of character and theme is hardly the only distinction of oral tradition. Prompted by the rise of television and mass communications after the middle of the twentieth century, many scholars have re-examined the transforming impact of literacy on the mind of Europe. Their attention has ranged from writing itself to the introduction of the printing press at the beginning of the Renaissance and the rise of mass literacy after the Industrial Revolution. In the view of Walter J. Ong, in
Orality and Literacy
(1982), writing changes the
way
we think as much as it changes
what
we think. His findings are as much diachronic as synchronic and can apply to medieval literacy as well as to modern, even when that literacy is drawn from a long-ago orality.

Collections from the oral traditions of the illiterate among the Celtic fringe came fairly late in the century. The impulse to rescue stories of the peasantry had begun at least a generation earlier on the continent with scholars such as the Brothers Grimm – Jakob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859). With the amassing of stories from dozens of languages came a new understanding of the stories’ nature. Earlier narratives collected from illiterate peasantry were thought to be ‘popular antiquities’: ‘popular’ because they were known among common people, and ‘antiquities’ because they were presumed to have been derived from ancient originals, perhaps in Greece and Rome. In the 1850s English collectors coined the term ‘folktale’ to imply that the phenomenon should be considered on its own, not as some degraded form of a learned original, whether we call it ‘mythology’ or not. Because they are not written down their age and origin are incalculable. Just as speech precedes writing, however, many could well be older than comparable stories recorded by learned elites.

Spectacularly beautiful but mostly unarable land, the Highlands have been so obscured by more than two centuries of romance set among their misty crags that few readers perceive how impoverished they have been and how cut off from the mainstream of European culture. There were almost no roads in the Highlands until the eighteenth century and thus few wheeled vehicles. Individuals did not own land, which was held by powerful clan chiefs, much like medieval lords. In 1745–6, many Highlanders supported a disastrous rebellion to restore the Stuart pretender, Prince Charles Edward or ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, to the thrones of Scotland and England. The misguided effort ended in the last battle fought in Great Britain, at Culloden Moor, in April 1746, a catastrophe for Highland culture. In the subsequent repression of the rebels, traditional dress was forbidden and the Gaelic language vehemently discouraged. In time the clan chiefs, most of whom now resided in distant cities, decided that flocks of sheep would be more profitable on their lands than humans were, and so began the Clearances. These led to the destruction of tenants’ cottages and the driving off of the inhabitants, often at gunpoint. They were put on ships and settled in distant lands, such as Canada and Australia. In their famous walking tour of the Highlands in the 1770s, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell described an exotic, semi-savage population living in debilitating poverty. On entering villages they were greeted by barefoot, begging children, their faces blackened by living in smoky stone cottages without chimneys. Today the Highland population still residing on traditional lands is a tiny fraction of the whole of Scotland, about 270,000 people in a nation of nearly 6 million.

Although Scottish Gaelic literary tradition has been Christian since the establishment of the monastery of Iona in the Inner Hebrides by St Colum Cille (d. 597), it did not produce great ecclesiastically fostered medieval collections of written narratives as Ireland and Wales did. Scottish Gaelic marginal notes appear in the Latin texts of the Gospels in
The Book of Deer
(1131–53) but more substantial writing in the language did not appear until early modern times with
The Book of the Dean of Lismore
(1512–26). Seventeenth-and eighteenth-century bards, patronized by clan chiefs, left substantial written records of their carefully wrought poetry. But the great body of narrative lore was passed down through oral tradition of the illiterate peasantry and not recorded until the nineteenth century. Among the great collections are John Francis Campbell’s
Popular Tales of the West Highlands
, 4 vols. (1861), and Archibald Campbell’s
Waifs and Strays in Celtic Tradition
, 4 vols. (1889–91). In these and other volumes we find familiar Irish characters such as Cúchulainn, Deirdre, Fergus, Angus Óg and especially Fionn mac Cumhaill. When James Macpherson uncovered Fionn and Oisín in Scottish Gaelic ballads sometime before 1760 and fashioned Fingal and Ossian from them, he clearly did not perceive their Irish provenance. Scottish Gaelic texts often replicate narratives found in Irish, sometimes transforming earlier stories but also embroidering new episodes onto old patterns. Further, different themes command priority in Scotland, especially an interest in second sight.

From the Scottish Gaelic
dà shealladh
[two sights], second sight or clairvoyance is a widespread phenomenon in traditional belief. A person with the power is known as a
taibhsear
, best translated as ‘seer’. Among the Irish the Fenian hero Diorruing is credited with such ability. A generic model would have the
taibhsear
behold a phantom funeral cortège passing along a road, escorting the body of a man still in robust health with no thought of death, only to have the person die shortly after this vision. What is seen in second sight need not be dour or gloomy, but in Scotland that is usually the case. A person endowed with
dà shealladh
does not cause unpleasant events to take place or receive any joy in having them come to pass.

A substantial body of oral traditions in Scottish Gaelic about the person and prophecies of the Brahan Seer began to gather in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This lore has been widely known from the Outer Hebrides in the west, across the Isle of Skye and the former shire of Inverness to eastern Ross-shire, especially the peninsula in the Moray Firth known as the Black Isle. At the centre of this lore is the episode of the Earl of Seaforth’s sojourn in Paris in 1663, in which Coinneach, still at home, reveals the absent nobleman’s adultery. No record of the Brahan Seer and his prophecies appears in print until Thomas Pennant’s
A Tour in Scotland
(1769), a century later. Now that the Seer has become a recognized phenomenon, modern scholars have scoured documents for references to him, and what they find is inconvenient to his legend. One ‘Kennoch Owir’ was prosecuted for witchcraft, on 23 January 1577, on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, eighty-six years before the Seaforth revelations.