Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales from Burns to Buchan (Penguin Classics) (27 page)

A fluent Gaelic speaker, Campbell devoted much time to collecting Gaelic folklore throughout the Highlands and Western Isles, and it is for this work that he is mainly remembered. His
Popular Tales of the West Highlands Orally Collected, with a Translation
(4 vols, 1860–62) was a magisterial landmark publication, a ready quarry for later folklorists. He also published the
Leabhar na Feinne
(1872), a celebrated collection of Ossianic ballads in Gaelic.

John Lorne Campbell was born in Argyll, and trained at Oxford University as a rural economist, but he is best remembered as a scholar of Gaelic folklore. He went to Barra in 1933, and it was while working there in partnership with Compton Mackenzie that he met his future wife, Margaret Fay Shaw (see
p. 226
). He worked on Barra on a practical campaign to protect the livelihood of local inshore fishermen in the Outer Hebrides (he was secretary of the Barra Sea League) and, again in partnership with Compton Mackenzie, wrote
The Book of Barra
(1936). Margaret and John married in 1935, and lived on Barra until 1938 when Campbell bought the island of Canna and took on the lairdship. Conservation issues, environmental and community challenges were then to occupy much of his time. With Margaret, he built up a significant Gaelic library at Canna House over the years. John first visited the Gaels of Nova Scotia in 1932, and with Margaret he was to revisit the Canadian maritime provinces in 1937.

His main books on folklore include
Stories from South Uist
(1961, with Angus MacLellan), which contains ‘Why Everyone Should Be Able to Tell a Story’;
Canna: The Story of a Hebridean Island
(1984); the three-volume
Hebridean Folksongs
(1969, 1977, 1981, with Francis Collinson); and
Songs Remembered in Exile
(1990), being a repertoire of traditional Gaelic songs from Nova Scotia.

Many people express surprise at this writer’s Scottish antecedents, but he was born in Edinburgh and studied medicine at Edinburgh University. One of his medical teachers in Edinburgh was Dr Joseph Bell (1837–1911), a rather coldly scientific professor, but whose deductive skills later provided Conan Doyle with one of the models for Sherlock Holmes, his popular and bestselling detective. Another was Sir Patrick Heron Watson, whose warmth and humanity is echoed in ‘my dear Watson’. A different bestselling creation was Professor Challenger, the scientist hero of
The Lost World
(1912) and
The Poison Belt
(1913). But long before these creations, several of Conan Doyle’s early stories are set in and around the city of his birth, and made their first appearance in
Chambers’s Journal
, then an important Edinburgh literary periodical.

Conan Doyle entered the Edinburgh Medical School in 1876. He was something of an adventurer in his youth, and in 1880 he served as a ship’s doctor in the Arctic in order to raise sufficient funds to complete his medical studies in 1881: a practical and useful Victorian ‘gap year’. Later, his writing skills took him as a war correspondent to South Africa to cover the Boer War, about which he was to publish the two books for which he was knighted:
The Great Boer War
(1900) and
The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conclusion
(1902). Conan Doyle’s easy, flowing narrative style resembles that of his near-contemporary Edinburgh fellow writer, Robert Louis Stevenson.

Like so many good supernatural tales, ‘Through the Veil’ is well grounded in the realistic detail of an archaeological dig at the Roman remains at Newstead, near Melrose, in the Scottish Borders. The story’s three characters, Mr and Mrs Brown and Farmer Cunningham, are all ordinary country folk naturalistically depicted. But this is also a story of second sight and – unusually – of a vision of the past shared by a husband and his wife. In this context, it is perhaps relevant to note that Conan Doyle had lost a son at a young age in the First World War, and that in later life (like others similarly bereaved) he became engrossed by spiritualism in his efforts to communicate ‘through the veil’ with the young son who had ‘passed over to the other side’.

There is very little in the public domain about the life of Elizabeth Wilson Grierson. Miss Grierson was ‘privately educated’ and apparently spent some time in Germany. She published about thirty books between 1906 and 1935, with some reprints as late as 1950. She was born, grew up and lived at Whitchesters, a farm near Hawick, in the Scottish Borders. One of her best-known books was an illustrated collection called
The Scottish Fairy Book
, printed in 1910 and reprinted in 1935. She cites Campbell’s
Popular Tales of the West Highlands
, Leyden’s poems, Hogg’s poems, Scott’s
Border Minstrelsy
, Chambers’s
The Popular Rhymes of Scotland
and
The Folklore Journal
as her sources for this publication. Her other books include
Children’s Tales from the Scottish Ballads
(1906),
The Northumbrian Saints
(1913),
Early Light-Bearers of Scotland, The Book of Edinburgh for Young People
(1914),
The Book of Celtic Stories
(1927), and
Tales of Scottish Keeps and Castles
(1928). So one may hazard the notion that she was a writer who tried to provide young people with ‘improving’ literature in the fields of Scottish history, literature and the early church. Like many other female writers of the period, including her fellow workers in the field of Irish folklore (such as Eleanor Hull, Letitia McClintock and Maud Joynt), Miss Grierson appears to have been content to leave few traces.

The Popular Rhymes of Scotland
(1820) by Robert Chambers is Miss Grierson’s source for various folk tales, including ‘The Milk-white Doo’. Her version of this story is fuller than the Chambers version, but perhaps easier to follow, losing little of the horror in Chambers. It is an old folk tale that (like ‘Katherine Crackernuts’) focuses on a wicked stepmother. The stepmother kills one of her stepchildren and – as if infanticide isn’t enough – then cooks the infant and feeds his flesh to his father. Such a dastardly and unnatural act calls the supernatural powers into play. The agent of justice is a ‘milk-white dove’, magically constituted from the bones of the dead infant. Walt Disney may have more recently established the tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as the archetypal text about a wicked stepmother, but the theme is quite ancient in oral folk literature and has an international resonance.

Interestingly perhaps, the villain of the piece in Chambers is the infant’s mother; Grierson changes this detail into a stepmother. (Did that make her crime slightly less unnatural?) Chambers points out that the story was ‘familiar in every Scottish nursery fifty years ago’
(i.e. around 1780) and that it was also prevalent in Germany, where the Plattdeutsch version of the bird’s song is almost identical to the Scots.

Chambers also has a story, called ‘The Pado’ (or frog), which Grierson uses as the source for her ‘The Well o’ the World’s End’. Both stories involve a supernatural talking frog, or puddock, which eventually turns into a handsome prince. In folklore, a frog is viewed as slightly ‘unchancy’ or ‘fey’, and looks almost human – albeit in a stomach-churning way. The moral? Be kind to animals, even if the sight of them repels you. This story too has a very similar German version, and Sir Walter Scott is said by Chambers to have traced a version to the Kalmuck Tartars.

Born and raised in Ettrickdale, then as today a remote and rural part of Selkirkshire, in the Scottish Borders, James Hogg grew up in considerable poverty to become a shepherd, like his father. But through his mother, Margaret Laidlaw, he was also raised in a rich storehouse of oral tradition which she and then he carried on. He took pride in claiming to share the birthday of Robert Burns (25 January), and indeed saw himself as one of the latter’s successors as a poet. And if Burns was known to his peers as ‘the heaven-sent ploughman’, Hogg was happy with the equally apposite cognomen of ‘the Ettrick shepherd’: for that is what he was.

Hogg was largely self-taught, and he was in his mid-thirties before he acquired much celebrity.
Scottish Pastorals
, his first collection of poems, was published in 1801. He was encouraged in his writing by Sir Walter Scott, with whom he shared an interest in oral literature and the Border ballads. In 1810 he moved to Edinburgh to try his hand as a professional writer, and enjoyed considerable success after publication of
The Queen’s Wake
(1813), which contained two of Hogg’s best-known supernatural poems, ‘Kilmeny’ and ‘The Witch of Fife’. For a while his poetry was as popular as Scott’s and Byron’s, and his four-volume
Poetical Works
(1822) probably marked the apex of his success as a poet.

Hogg also wrote prose, which was also heavily influenced by the Border ballads and legends. His short stories appeared in
Blackwood’s Magazine
and his brand of magic realism was popular, leaving his readers to choose between belief and scepticism. Sadly, his reputation in his own lifetime suffered as a result of two problems. First, much
of his prose was published in bowdlerized ‘genteel’ editions, losing something of its impact as a result; and secondly, the upwardly mobile and socially genteel middle classes of Edinburgh took against this ‘upstart’ peasant, in a snobbish reaction they had not adopted with Robert Burns twenty years earlier. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century, when reliable texts of Hogg’s work started to reappear and undergo rediscovery, that his reputation rose significantly, thanks to books like
The Brownie of Bodsbeck and
Other Tales
(1818),
The Three Perils of Man
(1822) and his masterpiece
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
(1824). As Douglas S. Mack points out in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(2004), it is now easier to see that ‘Hogg… created a space in which the allegedly “marginal” and “primitive” culture of the old Scottish peasantry could speak with eloquence and power’.

Violet Jacob was from the landed gentry: she was a member of the Kennedy-Erskine family from the House of Dun, near Montrose (now in the care of the National Trust for Scotland). Her fluent mastery of the Scots tongue was gained in the company of her estate workers. In 1895 she married Arthur Otway Jacob, an army officer from an Anglo-Irish family. They spent some of their early married years in India, and Jacob’s poetry from that period of exile expresses her longing for Scotland. Her only son was killed in 1916 at the battle of the Somme, aged twenty.

Jacob worked in a variety of genres. She wrote fiction and poetry for children in
The Golden Heart and Other Fairy Stories
(1904) and
Stories Told by the Miller
(1909).
Flemington
(1911) was a historical romance for adults, set in the period of the Jacobite rebellion, ‘the best since
The Master of Ballantrae
’, in the opinion of John Buchan, who later published some of her poetry in his
The Northern Muse
(1924). Hugh MacDiarmid also published some of her poetry in all three issues of his periodical
Northern Numbers
(1920, 1921, 1922).

The poems of Violet Jacob are very strong on atmosphere, and the two poems included in this book are no exception. They date from 1919-21, by which time Jacob was living back at the House of Dun. The
Times Literary Supplement
describes her poetry of the period as ‘excursions into the eerie’, and there is an element of the supernatural – of a world beyond the human – in both ‘The Kelpie’ and ‘The
Rowan’. One reader (James O’Hagan) recalled ‘sleepless childhood nights after reading the atmospheric Violet Jacob poem that finishes with the devastating “For the warlock’s livin’ yet – But the rowan’s deid!” ’ Similarly with ‘The Kelpie’: the beast of the title isn’t even there, but the mere
idea
of it in its spooky habitat is almost overwhelming to the poem’s young narrator.

Some people regard the Loch Ness Monster as a giant form of kelpie. However that may be, the
Dictionary of Celtic Mythology
(Oxford University Press, 1998) defines a kelpie as

Jacobs was born and raised in Sydney, Australia, travelling to Britain in 1873 to study at St John’s College, Cambridge. He later spent a postgraduate year in Germany and then made a home with his wife Georgina Horne in north London, where he became prominent as a prolific writer, intellectual and polymath. He had three children, and it may have been their advent in his life that directed his scrupulous scholarly attention into the field of folklore and fairy tales. He became editor of
Folklore Magazine
and compiled and wrote popular editions of Aesop, as well as English and Indian fairy tales; while his illustrated and user-friendly annotated
Celtic Fairy Tales
(1892) and
More Celtic Fairy Tales
(1894) have been almost continuously in print since their first appearance. His skills as an editor of folklore, judiciously topping and tailing stories, and simplifying without altering their sense, were considerable.

The two stories included in this book are from
Celtic Fairy Tales
. Jacobs tells us that the Macdonald of Saddell Castle (who features in ‘The Sprightly Tailor’) was a very great man indeed. Once, when dining with the Lord-Lieutenant of Argyll, an apology was made to him for
placing him so far away from the head of the table. ‘Where the Macdonald sits,’ was the proud response, ‘there is the head of the table.’