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

by Gordon Jarvie

  ‘It’s very strange you can’t tell a story,’ said his host. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard plenty.’

  ‘I can’t remember one,’ said the Uistman.

  His host himself was telling stories all night, to pass the night, until it was time to go to bed. When they went to bed, the Uistman was given the closet inside the front door to sleep in. What was there hanging in the closet but the carcass of a sheep! The Uistman hadn’t been long in bed when he heard the door being opened, and two men came in and took away the sheep.

  The Uistman said to himself that it would be very unfortunate for him to let those fellows take the sheep away, for the people of the house would think that he had taken it himself. He went after the thieves, and he had gone some way after them when one of them noticed him, and said to the other: ‘Look at that fellow coming after us to betray us; let’s go back and catch him and do away with him.’

  They turned back, and the Uistman made off as fast as he could to try to get back to the house. But they got between him and the house. The Uistman kept going, until he heard the sound of a big river; then he made for the river. In his panic he went into the river, and the stream took him away. He was likely to be drowned. But he got a hold of a branch of a tree that was growing on the bank of the river, and clung on to it. He was too frightened to move; he heard the two men going back and forth along the banks of the river, throwing stones wherever the trees cast their shade; and the stones were going past him.

  He remained there until dawn. It was a frosty night, and when he tried to get out of the river, he couldn’t do it. He tried to shout, but he couldn’t shout either. At last he managed to utter one shout, and made a leap; and he woke up, and found himself on the floor beside the bed, holding on to the bedclothes with both hands. His host had been casting spells on him during the night! In the morning when they were at breakfast, his host said:

  ‘Well, I’m sure that wherever you are tonight, you’ll have a story to tell, though you hadn’t one last night.’

  That’s what happened to the man who couldn’t tell a story; everyone should be able to tell a tale or a story to help pass the night!

  THE TAIL

  John Francis Campbell

  There was a shepherd once who went out to the hill to look after his sheep. It was misty and cold, and he had much trouble to find them. At last he had them all but one; and after much searching he found that one too in a peat-hag, half drowned; so he took off his plaid, and bent down and took hold of the sheep’s tail, and he pulled! The sheep was heavy with water, and he could not lift her, so he took off his coat and he pulled! But it was too much for him, so he spit on his hands, and took a good hold of the tail and he PULLED! And the tail broke! And if it had not been for that this tale would have been a great deal longer.

  NOTES ON THE AUTHORS

  Anon.

  As stated in the note on story attributions (at the end of the Introduction), many of the stories listed on the Contents page are ultimately anonymous. But with the exception of only two texts, all show the name of an author under the title. The two listed as being anonymous are two Border ballads, ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ and ‘Tam Lin’. The version of ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ used in this book is taken from Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802) and ‘Tam Lin’ is from The Scots Musical Museum (1797), as communicated by Robert Burns. Both texts, even in those days, were of considerable antiquity. And having several points in common, it is possible that both of these ballads derive from the same source.

  Many versions of these stories were collected in the nineteenth century. Although the ballad details are unique to Scotland, the motif of capturing a person by the use of supernatural powers is found throughout European folklore. The main distinction of Thomas the Rhymer is his gift of prophecy (from the Queen of the Fairies), evident also in the twentieth-century version collected in South Uist by Margaret Fay Shaw. He was also unable to tell a lie. One theory traces the story back to the thirteenth century, and to the life of Thomas of Ercildoune (c. ?1220–?1297, also called Thomas Learmount and ‘True Thomas’). The village of Ercildoune is today called Earlston, a small market town in Berwickshire. The historical personage called Thomas of Ercildoune is said to have had the gift of prophecy, and to have predicted the death of King Alexander III (in 1286) and the battle of Bannockburn (in 1314). A romance of ‘True Thomas’ and his ‘ladye gaye’ dates to the fifteenth century.

  John Buchan (1875–1940)

  A son of the manse, John Buchan was a Borderer by extraction and inclination: most of his childhood summer holidays were spent there. He attended Hutcheson’s Grammar School in Glasgow, followed by Glasgow and Oxford Universities. It was at Oxford that he first became acquainted with the public school set, whose ethos is depicted in so much of his fiction. Thereafter he pursued a public career as barrister, publisher, journalist, civil servant (as an intelligence officer he was a Director of Information during and after the First World War), Conservative Member of Parliament for the Scottish universities (1927–35), and Governor-General of Canada (1935–40).

  As a writer, Buchan was influenced by the craft and style of Robert Louis Stevenson. His adventure novels, especially The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), Greenmantle (1916) and Mr Standfast (1919), are in the mould of Stevenson’s Kidnapped, and achieved similar wide popular acclaim. Buchan called them his ‘shockers’, regarding them as the product of the private imaginative or fantasy world into which he liked to escape. But he also – and simultaneously – wrote history, the major project being Nelson’s History of the War (1915–19), in twenty-four volumes. There were also books of poetry (Poems Scots and English, 1917), biography (of Montrose, Cromwell and Sir Walter Scott), and several books of short stories. His fairy tale ‘The Magic Walking-stick’ appeared in an anthology for younger readers, edited by Lady Asquith, entitled Sails of Gold (1927).

  Robert Burns (1759–96)

  The poet’s father was William Burnes (1721–84), a tenant farmer and gardener at Alloway, just south of the town of Ayr, in Ayrshire. William had been reasonably well educated in general knowledge and scripture, and he tried to ensure that his children also had this advantage. So, although we still tend to remember his son Robert Burns as ‘the ploughman poet’, Robert grew up to be a keen reader, cultivated and literate not just in English-language book culture but also in the vernacular culture of the Scots language. He probably owed his interest in the latter to Betty Davidson, a widowed relative who lived with the Burns family and was fond of entertaining the children with ‘the largest collection in the county of tales and songs concerning devils, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, deadlights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, inchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery…’ (The Letters of Robert Burns, 2nd edn, edited by J. De Lancey Ferguson and G. Ross Roy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985, p. 135).

  Thus it is not surprising that the adult poet wanted to give something back, and took a more than amateur interest in the collection of oral texts, especially songs and popular poetry, making large contributions to the early volumes of James Johnson’s six-volume Scots Musical Museum (1787–1803), George Thomson’s six-volume Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs (1793–1841), and volume 2 of Charles Grose’s illustrated Antiquities of Scotland (1791). ‘Tam o’ Shanter: A Tale’ appeared in this last volume, alongside an account and picture of the half-ruined Alloway Kirk, where the poet’s father lies buried in the churchyard. The poem had first appeared in print a few months earlier, in the Edinburgh Magazine.

  Burns is known the world over as Scotland’s greatest poet; and ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, his only narrative poem, is widely regarded as one of Scotland’s greatest folk tales. The story is based on a local Ayrshire tale. In it, Farmer Tam is riding home after a night’s heavy drinking in Ayr, and accidentally disturbs a witches’ ceilidh in Alloway Kirk, just outside the town and near the cottage where Burns had grown up. A coven of witches then chase him for his life, as he fle
es their wrath on his good mare Meg towards the brig o’ Doon. Tam knew (as everyone did in those days) that he had to put a running stream between himself and the witches in order to escape their clutches safely. Alloway Kirk had only ceased to be used for public worship in 1756 – less than forty years before the poem was written – but it was soon in a ruinous state and offered an ideally spooky background for a supernatural tale.

  John Francis Campbell, of Islay (1822–85)

  J. F. Campbell was born and raised on the Hebridean island of Islay and, as the eldest son of the laird, he would normally have succeeded his father in the lairdship. But the family had incurred such large debts in the course of undertaking substantial land improvements across the island that they had to sell it. However, even though Islay had passed out of his family’s possession, John Francis was always to be known as Campbell of Islay. Educated at Eton and Edinburgh University, Campbell became a lawyer and secretary to his cousin George, 8th Duke of Argyll, as well as to the Lighthouse Commission and the Coal Commission in Scotland. He had all of the natural scientific curiosity of a Victorian polymath, and was a keen inventor, geologist and naturalist; one of his inventions was an instrument for measuring the power of the sun’s rays.

  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, of Canna (1906–96)

  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.

  Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)

  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’.

  Elizabeth W. Grierson (1869–1943)

  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.

  James Hogg (1770–1835)

  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.