Bateman / Loughran / Macdonald The Glendale Bards

A Selection of Songs and Poems by Niall Macleoid (1843-1913), 'The Bard of Skye', His Brother Iain Dubh (1847-1901) and Father Domhnall nan Oran (c.1787-1873)
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-907909-22-1
Verlag: John Donald
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

This book marks the centenary of Neil MacLeod's death in 1913 with the republication of some of his work. It also publishes for the first time all of the identifiable work of his brother, Iain Dubh (1847 - 1901), and of their father, Domhnall nan Oran (c.1787 - 1873). Their contrasting styles mark a fascinating period of transition in literary tastes between the 18th and early 20th centuries at a time of profound social upheaval. Neil Macleod left Glendale in Skye to become a tea-merchant in Edinburgh. His songs were prized by his fellow Gaels for their sweetness of sentiment and melody, which placed a balm on the recent wounds of emigration and clearance. They are still very widely known, and Neil's collection Clarsach an Doire was reprinted four times. Professor Derick Thomson rightly described him as 'the example par excellence of the popular poet in Gaelic'. However, many prefer the earthy quality of the work of his less famous brother, Iain Dubh. This book contains 58 poems in all (32 by Neil, 14 by Iain and 22 by Domhnall), with translations, background notes and the melodies where known. Biographies are given of the three poets, while the introduction reflects on the difference in style between them and places each in his literary context. An essay in Gaelic by Professor Norman MacDonald reflects on the social significance of the family in the general Gaelic diaspora.

Meg Bateman was born in Edinburgh in 1959. She lectures at Sabhal Mor Ostaig in Skye, part of the University of the Highlands and Islands, where she teaches literature and philosophy through the medium of Gaelic. She learned Gaelic in South Uist and the University of Aberdeen where she taught for many years. Her poetry is included in numerous anthologies such as the 'Penguin Book of Scottish Verse' and the 'Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945'. She has translated and co-edited anthologies of Gaelic medieval, 17th century and religious verse. Her two collections, 'Aotromachd / Lightness' and 'Soirbheas / Fair Wind', both published by Polygon, were shortlisted for the Scottish Book of the Year award in 1997 and 2007.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bateman, Meg

Loughran, Anne

Macdonald, Norman

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

Neil MacLeod was born in Glendale in Skye about 1843 and at the age of twenty-two he moved to Edinburgh where he remained till his death in 1913. A rare opportunity for examining the influence of life in the Lowlands on his work is afforded by his father and brother also being poets, who remained culturally attached to Skye. Anne Loughran first suggested making this comparison between Dòmhnall, who was born in the 18th century, and his sons, Niall, the Edinburgh tea-merchant, and Iain, the sailor, who some have rated more highly than his famous brother.i The point was reiterated recently by Màrtainn Dòmhnallach in a newspaper article discussing the erection of a headstone for Niall in the centenary of his death in Morningside Cemetery in Edinburgh.ii Changes in poetic taste are clear in the work of the three poets in the same family, spread over two generations and three centuries, with their different lifestyles, urban, rural and maritime. The requirement to produce songs for the Gaelic diaspora in Lowland cities made for a different sort of song from those produced to entertain or edify a Highland community.iii

No other Gaelic poet has suffered such a dramatic change in reputation as Neil MacLeod. Nowadays many consider him facile and superficial.iv Derick Thomson and Dòmhnall Meek have compared him unfavourably with Màiri Mhòr, criticising him for a softness of focus and lack of political engagement with the Clearances and Land wars. While Màiri Mhòr shared a platform with politicians such as Sir Fraser MacIntosh, Niall spoke in generalities from a distance. While Màiri Mhòr’s poetry is passionate and gutsy, Niall is criticised for the simulation of emotion with little heightening of language.v Yet in 1892 Dr MacDiarmid wrote, ‘Niall is probably the best known and most popular poet living’,vi and John N. MacLeod, addressing the Gaelic Society of Inverness in 1917, described Niall’s collection, Clàrsach an Doire, as co-chruinneachadh cho binn blasda tomadach ’s a chaidh riamh an clò (as sweet, pungent and weighty a collection as had ever been printed).vii At the time of his death in 1913, Donald MacKinnon, professor of Celtic at Edinburgh University, referred to Niall as one of the three foremost Gaelic writers of his time:

Since Duncan McIntyre died, no Gaelic poet took such firm hold of the imagination of the Highlanders as Neil MacLeod was able to do… There is a happy selection of subject. The treatment is simple, unaffected. You have on every page evidence of the equable temper and gentle disposition of the author – gay humour or melting pathos; happy diction; pure idiom; exquisite rhyme… and the melody of versification.viii

Derick Thomson writes, ‘Niall Macleòìd would seem to be the example par excellence of the popular poet in Gaelic, and he more than any other became part of the pop culture of his time’.ix It may be easier to try to account for Niall’s popularity in his own time than to give a conclusive assessment of the worth of his poetry.

The social conditions which Niall encountered in the Lowlands were very different from those of the ceilidh house in the townships of the Highlands. For the first time Gaelic speakers from all over the Highlands were meeting socially at dances in the cities of the Lowlands. While traditional songs had alluded to specific communities and places, a new sort of song was required for the Lowland gatherings that would evoke a common background and identity through some sort of generic neighbourhood and landscape. The new urbanisation of the Gaels made new demands on their poets: pieces were required for the annual gatherings of Gaelic societies, and after 1893 for singing at the Mod, for encouraging the Gaelic language, and for historical pieces, arising from a new self-consciousness about being a Gael.x

While the characters and places of Niall’s father’s and brother’s songs were known to the people of Glendale, in Niall’s songs, characters and place become every community and every place. This accounts in large measure for the vagueness of Niall’s verse, so different from the traditional exactitude of Gaelic verse.xi His songs were required to entertain, to be easily memorable and immediately understandable, without the length, complexity of argument or of vocabulary, or the specificity of emotion seen in the work of his father and brother and other traditional poets. It has been suggested that the different subjects of his love songs – Sìne Chaluim Bhàin, Màiri Bhaile Chrò and Màiri Ailein – were one and the same girl.xii

Niall’s father, Dòmhnall nan Òran, was born in 1787, his life therefore overlapping with Uilleam Ros’s and Dùghall Bochanan’s, while Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair and Donnchadh Bàn were only a couple of generations older. He escaped the press-gang by working as a road-tax collector which took him all over Skye. Like Robert Burns and Alexander Carmichael, his work allowed him to collect poetry and stories. Some of these he published with his own poetry in Orain Nuadh Ghaelach in 1811, with the financial help of four MacLeod tacksmen.xiii He emigrated to America, perhaps as a result of the death of his sweetheart at the age of twenty-one and his boredom with fishing as a livelihood, but returned fifteen years later. In 1839 when he was fifty-two he married Anna MacSween of Glendale and they had a family of ten. He published another book at the end of his life in 1871, but we are to understand from mention of mss in the possession of his widow that a lot more of his work has been lost.

Dòmhnall is a traditional poet: he acts as a clan poet in praising the chief and in evoking a bird, in the traditional manner, to recount the past glories of the clan.xiv He uses satire as a means of social control, sometimes to mock but sometimes to marshal righteousness to correct wrong-doing (see nos. 52-57). He is highly literary and moves easily between genres, whether comic village verse, praise, satire, love, nature or religious verse. Sometimes he composes to entertain, but equally he composes to caution and exhort (see nos. 58-59). Most of his poetry is passionate and personal with a range of metre, diction and vocabulary.

Niall was the oldest surviving child of Dòmhnall’s and Anna’s children. He moved to Edinburgh in the 1860s to join the tea firm of his cousin Roderick MacLeod, for whom he worked as a travelling salesman. In 1889 he married Katie Bane Stewart, a schoolteacher and daughter of a schoolteacher of Kensaleyre, Skye,xv and they settled and raised a family at 51 Montpelier Park in Bruntsfield, Edinburgh.

MacKinnon spoke of Niall’s ‘equable temper and gentle disposition’, and it seems he was different from his father and his brother, both in outlook and personality. However, an early poem of Neil’s, no. 10 ‘Còmhradh eadar Òganach agus Oisean’, composed when he was twenty-eight and left unpublished in his lifetime, demonstrates a forcefulness and anger rarely seen in his later work:

Tha na Gàidheil air claonadh om maise

Is air aomadh gu laigse ann am mòran:

Thug iad riaghladh an dùthcha ’s am fearainn

Do shluagh do nach buineadh a’ chòir sin…

The Gaels have declined in their fineness

and have yielded to weakness in many matters:

the rule of their land and country

they have handed to a people with no right there…

Iain Dubh was Niall’s younger brother by three years, and unlike his father and brother, he never published his poems. The contradistinctions between the two brothers may have been exaggerated in local folklore. He was married twice and spent much time away from home as a seaman. In Glendale it was said that he was dubh air a h-uile dòigh (black in every way), in hair, skin colour and even in deed. This last comment probably relates to his skills as a conjuror and powers of hypnosis which would be demonised by the church, but all evidence is that he was a kindly man whose poetry John MacInnes describes as ‘strong, realistic, compassionate’.xvi We know of only fifteen poems by Iain, but it is widely held that Niall saved some for posterity by publishing them under his own name in Clàrsach an Doire. Ailean Dòmhnallach (former headmaster of Staffin primary school) can be seen making the case for ‘A’ Bhean Agam Fhìn’ being Iain’s on You-tube,xvii and certainly its irreverent humour is unlike Niall’s. The people of Glendale generally understood this poem to have been Iain’s, and were critical that Niall had published perhaps three poems of Iain’s without acknowledgement. The present editor suggests on stylistic grounds that the other two may be no. 18. ‘Turas Dhòmhnaill do Ghlaschu’ and no. 23. ‘Cuairt do Chuithraing’.xviii Both exemplify vivid idiosyncratic imagery and celebrate the world of drink so typical of Iain. Their length, though not the metre, is more like Iain, while Niall’s work tends to be shorter. The beguilement of a man by a pretty girl is a theme Iain returns to on several occasions, in ‘A’ Bhean Agam Fhìn’, ‘Nuair a Rinn mi Do Phòsadh’ and ‘Gillean Ghleanndail’ and it is also the moral of ‘Turas Dhòmhnaill do Ghlaschu’.

We cannot know how many of Iain’s songs have been lost. Though Iain does not have the same range of diction in what survives as his father, he likewise composes from his own experience, describing his life at sea and on land, the landscape of Glendale and situations that arose in his neighbourhood in Duirinish and in the cities. He does not show the same moral seriousness as his...