Scottish Traditional Tales

by A. J. Bruford

  The other basic genre of traditional tales which the Grimms defined was the subject of their later book Deutsche Sagen, which translates fairly easily as ‘German Legends’. Legends to the folklorist are not as closely tied to historical characters or national events as they are in the common usage of the word, and include a lot of stories of supernatural contacts which happened to someone or other in a particular place, or just in the neighbourhood. Sagen are, or were when they flourished, believed to be true according to the Grimms’ definition, and may be remembered not just because they are enjoyable stories or have a moral message, like Märchen, but also because they belong to the neighbourhood or even to the family – so a legend that doesn’t make all that much sense may still be preserved as part of its teller’s heritage.

  So-called ‘modern (urban, contemporary) legends’ are largely to do with wonderful, or horrible, happenings in present-day surroundings, like the woman who tried to dry her miniature poodle in the microwave oven and blew it up. Some of the effect again depends on at least a tincture of truth – they tend to be told as something that actually happened to a friend of a friend, or was in the paper, like the one about the local couple who went to a specialist restaurant in Hong Kong and asked the waiter to look after their dog. That one has been traced back as far as one of Thackeray’s novels,18 and quite a few ‘modern’ legends have very old roots: many of them can be collected almost anywhere in the world. Many types of Sagen too, though the word is sometimes translated as ‘local legends’, can be found all over Europe if not the whole world; in other cases what can be recognised as the same legend is associated with different places in the same country. They could perhaps be called localised legends, but the national catalogue of them most often used for comparison between different countries is the Norwegian one published in 1958 and compiled by Reidar Christiansen, who called it The Migratory Legends, and that is as good a term as any. Nearly all the legends in this book are migratory types.

  There are other stories in tradition which cannot be classed as either fictions or legends: some are borrowed from books or the oral literary traditions of earlier times, some are the myths of a religion, though in modern societies most myths have ‘worn down’ to supernatural legends. Some have very precise forms with little point to the plot of the story: what matters is that they are repeated accurately word for word – chain tales like ‘The Old Woman and Her Pig’, ‘Henny Penny’ or just ‘The House that Jack Built’, endless tales, shaggy-dog stories and so forth. And then there are stories based on the teller’s personal experience or life story, or something heard from the person who experienced it and maybe beginning to sound a bit like a migratory legend, but still a bit more shapeless: at that stage folklorists tend to use the term ‘memorate’, coined between the Wars by the Swedish folklorist Carl von Sydow.

  At the other end of the scale are stories that come from literature. Apart from the recent borrowings by Lowland cairds already mentioned, the top rank of the Gaelic storyteller’s repertoire is occupied by long hero-tales derived from the secular literature of the mediaeval aristocracy of Ireland and the Highlands and Western Isles. The most admired are those belonging to the Fenian Cycle of tales about Fionn mac Cumhaill (traditionally anglicised as ‘Finn Mac Cool’) and his followers the Fenians (An Fhéinn in Scottish Gaelic), after whom all hero-tales are called fianaíocht in Irish. A parallel cycle of late mediaeval ballads was the basis of James Macpherson’s eighteenth-century Ossian, a set of gloomy prose epics claimed to be translated from Gaelic poetry written by Fionn’s son Oisean in Scotland in the third century AD. The Fenians are a legendary war-band based, according to the latest theories, on the teenage noblemen of pagan Ireland who trained for war in the woods and hills on the borders of each petty kingdom. Accordingly they are represented both as outlaws living by hunting like Robin Hood’s men, and as the standing army of Cormac, king of Ireland, who defend his country against invaders, though some of their hardest struggles are with supernatural adversaries. The Fenian tales and other tales of battle and magic with heroes from pagan or Dark Age Ireland or imaginary lands overseas – rarely from Scotland – were evidently written for reading aloud in the halls of chieftains, but in parts of the south of Ireland were still being copied and read aloud in farm kitchens well into the nineteenth century. In Scotland one or two manuscripts of such tales survived and could be read in South Uist after 1800, but the stories must in general have passed into oral tradition a century or two earlier.19

  The result was not only that many of these hero-tales themselves have been told in Scotland and Ireland in this century, but that they have influenced the telling of other tales of adventure and magic in Gaelic. For one thing, there are far more names in Gaelic Märchen than in Scots or most European ones. There is a whole stock of names for the countries they are set in, ranging from France (as in No. 16 below) or Greece to Lochlann (approximately Norway) and totally fictional kingdoms like Sorcha – variously identified by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquaries as Portugal, Sweden, China or Ardnamurchan, but more probably derived from a Latin name for the province of Syria assimilated to a Gaelic word for ‘bright’. The heroes and villains are often kings’ sons from such domains (see Nos. 17 and 18 below, told by storytellers from South Uist, but in which many names come from a general stock rather than the manuscript sources of these particular tale-types). In tales of battle or transformation the heroes and heroines are more likely to be of royal or noble blood than woodcutters’ children. The most frequent hero in Scottish Gaelic tales is not Jack the widow’s son but the son of the king of Ireland. This reveals both where the tales came from and their aristocratic bias, acceptable to crofters who could mostly claim, if not kinship, at least a hereditary attachment to the line of one chief or another. In Gaelic the brief descriptions of most European Märchen may be replaced by strings of alliterative adjectives, or whole stereotyped accounts of recurrent happenings such as fights, journeys or hunts, known in English as ‘runs’, derived from similar set-pieces in manuscript stories. The written runs are designed both to sound good and to impress with their learning: with oral transmission the archaic alliterative words may degenerate into nonsense, but often a verse-like rhyme and rhythm develops in compensation, which may make them sound even more impressive.

  Before looking at folktale collection in Scotland and folk narrative scholarship, we should define some other terms that will be used in the Notes. Tale-types are plot summaries created by scholars, but it is surprising how close many oral versions are to the theoretical basic type: the type catalogues most often used in the Notes are the Aarne-Thompson Types of the Folktale (referred to as AT, with a type-number) for Märchen; the Irish national version of this by Seán Ó Súilleabháin and Reidar Christiansen, Types of the Irish Folktale (TIF); Ernest Baughman’s Types and Motif Index of the Folktales of England and North America (TMI) – this includes some Scots tales, but there is still no published index for all Scotland; and Christiansen’s Migratory Legends (ML). (Full details of all these publications are given in the select Bibliography.) We will call a single storyteller’s way of telling a particular type a version (if it has been recorded more than once, the different recordings may be described as tellings) and a group of versions sharing features not listed in the catalogue a variant.20 One sort of variant or sub-type is an ecotype (a term borrowed from botany by von Sydow), which is restricted to one language, country or district. We would normally describe a story or type as being made up of episodes and motifs. ‘Episodes’ are substantial parts of a story which might be told on their own; ‘motifs’ in our usage are short self-contained elements of the narrative. The term ‘motif’ has been used by others to cover any detail of a story, such as a description (‘Fairies dressed in green’) or a name (‘Heroine called Snow White’), and Stith Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature MI unfortunately uses it in this sense, which is one reason why we have hardly bothered to refer to it (the other is its use of quite different
numbers for ‘dwarfs fear the cross’, ‘fairies fear cross’, ‘ghosts . . .’, ‘troll . . .’, ‘witch . . .’etc., which all express one idea). ‘Motif’ to us is a structural element of narrative, and it does not matter whether it is the crowing of a grouse-cock that lays the Devil, as in tale No. 60a below, or that of a crofter’s cock that stops his house being burned by a fireball, as in No. 62b: the motif is the same, and the points that differ would be referred to as details.

  THE STRUCTURE OF THIS COLLECTION

  This collection is not an anthology from earlier books, like most collections of Scottish folktales published between 1910 and 1980, but a representative selection from the archives of the School of Scottish Studies, mainly from tape-recordings made since the School started work in 1951, but also using manuscripts written for us or given to us, which include one or two outstanding survivals from the last century. We have chosen to limit the selection to versions of recurrent types, many of which have been collected in other countries and nearly all told in several parts of Scotland: in some cases we have given two or three variants of one tale-type, or closely related parallels, to emphasise the fact that there is no ‘correct’ version of any traditional tale, and many of them have different forms in Scots and Gaelic. In just two sections of the book, ‘Origin and Didactic Legends and Robbers’, ‘Archers and Clan Feuds’, the stories are too closely tied to places to be recurrent types, but even they include recurrent motifs. Several classes of similar historical legends have been passed over for lack of space: they include stories about clearances and evictions, the Press-Gang, disasters such as shipwrecks, murders and massacres, and more acceptable crimes such as poaching, smuggling and illicit distilling. These too may include migratory motifs, but there simply was not space for them in this book, nor have we attempted to include ‘modern legends’. We hope a later volume may redress the balance. Non-recurrent types omitted include several kinds of comic tales and local anecdotes, and serious stories about second sight and the Evil Eye, which are based on widely-held beliefs but told as true experience. We have also had to leave out many of the longer tales told by travelling people, which may use the conventions of international Märchen and even episodes that are known from particular tale-types, but cannot be assigned to any existing Aarne-Thompson type or compared with anything recorded from another Scottish storyteller. Many of these, however, have recently been published, notably those of Duncan Williamson and Stanley Robertson, who can tell hundreds of these very individual tales. Since we do not want to take away anything from the living which Duncan and Stanley are managing to make between live storytelling and their publications, we have included only one story of the many they have recorded for the School’s archives, and recommend their own books (and the Tocher features where they first appeared) for the rest.21 Similarly we would have liked to give more stories from that superb traveller storyteller in the traditional mode, the late Betsy Whyte, but since a book to include versions of most of her tales is planned soon, we have only used two here.

  The first half of the book contains fictional folktales, beginning with Children’s Tales, stories often told to children (though not all of them may seem very suitable for that!) and going on to Fortune Tales, wonder-tales in which the hero or heroine either sets out to seek his or her fortune or makes it in spite of earlier misfortune. There follow Hero Tales, mostly with Gaelic literary roots, in which the hero really is brave and strong, not just lucky, and Trickster Tales – originally a term used by anthropologists for a category of tales from North America, but perfectly applicable to stories nearer home – in which the central character is not necessarily a hero to be admired at all, but is clever enough to outwit others. The pleasure in European trickster tales comes largely from the type of people who are duped: rich men, misers, bad neighbours, grasping employers, clergymen and anybody who might usually be envied by the poor have the tables turned on them. The outrageous crimes the characters may get away with perhaps also have a cathartic effect on those who tell and hear the stories: if you were ever tempted to wish a troublesome old relative dead, imagining a scenario where people kill their mother and try to sell her body (as in tale No. 22 below) may exorcise your wish without violence. Other Cleverness, Stupidity and Nonsense contains similar stories of cleverness and stupidity, but with less malice in them, and tall tales, whose main point is to see whether any listener might actually believe such lies. The following section, Fate, Morals and Religion, is transitional, including stories told as true and local, like legends, and one or two which are set in the timeless world of Märchen; they have either a Christian message or at least a clear moral, or simply demonstrate that what is ordained by Fate cannot be avoided.

  The Origin and Didactic Legends which follow often seem to us as incredible as tall tales, but may have been believed at one time: certainly one of the functions of the myths of many tribal peoples is to account for the origins of creatures and landmarks. The didactic stories, with a moral for children, seem little more convincing, and the single place-name legend at the end of this section is like a great part of the learned lore of early Ireland. The tales in the next two sections, Legends of Ghosts and Evil Spirits, and Legends of Fairies and Sea-Folk, may sometimes appear to make little sense, but are nonetheless frightening for it: many of these supernatural legends may reflect long-lost, perhaps pagan beliefs about life, death, nature and the unknown, and today their lack of logic can perhaps simply be seen as an expression of the chaos scientists still acknowledge as an inevitable part of our incomprehensibly vast and complex universe. The legends in these sections cover many beliefs – widely held ones, because these are mostly migratory legends – including the cures and precautions that were used in the attempt to avert disaster, disease and want. If spirits out there did not get the blame for these misfortunes, the old woman next door might, and such beliefs, much worse for the health of the community itself, are the basis of the Legends of Witchcraft, which fortunately seldom bother with the punishment of witches as long as they are defeated, and sometimes even treat the subject, with hindsight, as a joke. Finally there are the historical legends of Robbers, Archers and Clan Feuds, some of them migratory types, nearly all from the Gaelic. The clan legends at the end could not be left out because they sum up the rest: they incorporate elements of almost everything that has gone before – fictional folktale, ancient hero-tale, witchcraft, fairy lore, cunning tricks and inevitable fate – in a framework based on actual events of Highland history in the storyteller’s home area, and in some ways could be said to represent the climactic peak of Gaelic storytelling.

  FOLKTALE COLLECTION IN SCOTLAND

  The first evidence we have for traditional tales being told in Scotland is in The Complaynt of Scotland, a nationalist tract published in Paris in 1550, probably by Robert Wedderburn, a cleric from Dundee. In between urging resistance to English oppression, the author inserts a pastoral scene in which a company of Scottish shepherds pass a long summer’s evening, apparently telling every story, singing every song and dancing every dance that he could think of. The stories listed include the Canterbury Tales, (John Barbour’s) Bruce, Greek myths and Arthurian romances, but also such titles as ‘The Red Etin’ (a word for a giant) and ‘The Well at the World’s End’,22 which reappear among the ‘Fireside Nursery Stories’ included in the third and later editions of the Popular Rhymes of Scotland (PRS), published by Robert Chambers nearly three centuries later. Chambers gives Scots texts of the stories (mostly in prose though he includes some wholly in verse) as they might have been ‘told by the fireside, in cottage and in nursery, by the old women, time out of mind the vehicles for such traditions’. These were probably not taken down from dictation but remembered and reconstituted years later, like the three stories which the ballad collector Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe wrote down as he heard them ‘at the knee of Nurse Jenny, at his father’s house of Hoddam in Dumfriesshire, about the year 1784’. Most of the stories seem to have been sent to Chambers in manuscript:
he sometimes names the writer, sometimes just the county, sometimes he says nothing of the source. His version of ‘The Red Etin’ seems to have been rewritten in Scots from a manuscript collection offered for publication by the ballad collector and publisher Peter Buchan from Peterhead, in which all the stories are presented in a stilted English not unlike that of chapbooks such as Buchan printed and sold, though he said the tales were ‘taken down from the recitation of several old people in the North Countrie’23. Buchan’s ‘Red Etin’ begins: