Scottish Traditional Tales

by A. J. Bruford

  3b The Cats and the Christening SA 1977/14. Recorded from Tom Tulloch, Gutcher, Yell, Shetland by Peter Cooke. T30:359–60, part of an extended feature on this devoted bearer of all aspects of the traditions of North Yell. The emphasis on the possibilities for improvisation in such children’s stories, and on the moral, is typical of Tom’s careful recreation of the tales he heard from his mother and her sister. Here for once the trickster does not get away with it. In the Grimms’ version of AT 15, ‘The Cat and the Mouse in Partnership’, the cat simply eats her partner when she is found out. (There are no unusual dialect words: ‘paul(ly)’ is simply the North Yell pronunciation of ‘pal(ly)’.)

  4 The Boy and the Brüni SA 1975 /179 A4. Recorded from Tom Tulloch, Gutcher, Yell, Shetland by AJB. An earlier and rather less detailed recording is in T11:96–7, STT No. 20. The core of the story corresponds to that of AT 327, ‘The Children and the Ogre’ (best known as ‘Hänsel and Gretel’), but it is a very individual Yell form. A summary of it noted in the last century is in Laurence G. Johnson, Laurence Williamson of Mid Yell, Lerwick 1971:119–20. Tom felt that the story must have been known in other parts of Shetland, associated with other landmarks than the Erne’s Knowe (Eagle’s Knoll – the K is pronounced), but we have heard of no other versions. Tom not only noted this opportunity for improvisation but suggested a moral, a warning against playing with your food, though as the final result is wealth for the boy’s whole family it hardly seems a clear warning! The giant’s rhyme preserves the Scottish equivalent of ‘I smell the blood of an Englishman’ as Peter Buchan and Robert Chambers noted it early in the last century (PRS:92): compare the form in No. 7 below.

  The dialect of North Yell pronounces ‘ken’ as ‘keen’ and has disconcerting double prepositions like ‘in atil’ and ‘oot ot o’. The following list may help with words which are less obvious variants of English. Aless: unless, except; atil: until, to; ’at: that; brüni: a bannock, large round oatcake; byre: cowshed; caudereen: cauldron; croople: crouch, squat; fand: found; güd: went; ipae, ipo: on; keen: ken, know; kye: cows, cattle; oagit: crawled; peerie: little; row (rhymes with ‘cow’): roll; shoakit: choked; skrauflin: scrabbling, clambering; stoop o the mill: upright of the frame supporting the corn-grinding quern; til: to; t’owt: thought; t’rot: throat; tyoch: tough; wän: one; yondroo: there.

  5 (The Wee Bird) SA 1956/112/1. Recorded from Jimmy McPhee, a fourteen-year-old traveller boy, by Hamish Henderson in an encampment at the berryfields of Blairgowrie, Perthshire. Original transcription by Robert Garioch. T4: 124–5; STT No. 31. AT 720, ‘My Mother Slew Me; My Father Ate Me’, the Grimms’ ‘The Juniper Tree’. This boy’s version preserves some of the starkness of the older Scots story as told by Chambers (‘The Milk-White Doo’, PRS: 49–50): the murderer is the child’s own mother, not stepmother, and the father recognises what he is eating. But as in all cairds’ versions the girl is killed for breaking a jug, fractionally more understandable than in Chambers hare she was to put in the pie but ‘tasted it a’ away’, and (as in some versions designed for children) the victim comes back to life, and here explains that her mother was possessed by the Devil. Most other cairds’ versions (e.g. KBA 152–4) make her a stepmother, call the two stepsisters ‘Applie and Orangie’, and include the rhyme, central to most versions, which the bird sings to various shopkeepers and is rewarded by the presents it drops to the father and sister and the axe or millstone for the stepmother. The Christimas setting, because the presents come down the chimney, is now usual; in Chambers the dove just ‘threw sma’ stanes down the lum’ to get the others outside. Peeping here probably means cheeping, rather than looking. Here is the rhyme as recorded with a rather fragmentary remembering of the story by Hamish Henderson from Andrew Stewart and Donald Higgins, Blairgowrie (SA 1955/191 A8; T4:126).

  Ma mammie kilt me,

  Ma deddie ett me,

  Ma sister Jeannie pickit ma banes

  An put me atweene twa marable stanes

  An A grow’d intae a bonnie wee doo, doo.

  6 Liver and Lights From a typescript of ‘A Scottish Nurse’s Stories’ given to the School of Scottish Studies through Hamish Henderson in 1968 by Miss K. M. T. Bannerman, an Edinburgh lady then in her seventies. T8:239. The stories had been read to Miss Bannerman when she was fourteen or fifteen from the manuscript from which she later typed them, by her Aunt Jemima, Mrs Campbell Lorimer, née Bannerman, daughter of a New College Professor, who had written them down from memory: she was told the stories by her Aunt Ceil, Mrs Cecilia Cunningham, née Douglas, who had heard them in Fife, when visiting friends of the family at Rossie, from their old nurse, whose name was Jeannie Durie. This chain seems to carry the substance of the stories and a few remembered words of Scots dialogue back to about the middle of the last century.

  This story is a variant of AT 366, ‘The Man from the Gallows’. Baughman (TMI: 9–10) lists two English-language variants: someone finds a bone (etc.) and quite innocently uses it in soup, or as in Mark Twain’s How to Tell a Story, a corpse buried complete with a golden artificial limb is dug up and robbed of it. This Scottish variant seems closer to the summary in AT, where a man feeds the entrails of a corpse to his wife, though here it is not on the gallows and the motivation is the wife’s greening – a craving, often of a pregnant woman. In a still more sinister variant in Shetland Folk Book 8, the craving is specifically to taste the liver of a dead man. Like a fragmentary recording made from Mrs Annabella Clouston in Orkney in her hundredth year, it includes the wife’s repeated line ‘Lang lies Lowrie at the mill the night’: he is not a professional miller as in the Fife story, but has to grind his own corn in one of the little local watermills of the islands, often used at night, to leave the day for work outdoors.

  The questions at the end and the terrible shriek also link our story with Chambers’ ‘Aye She Wished for Company’ (PRS:64–6; cf. AT 336), where a skeleton comes in bit by bit to a woman and a series of quiet questions and answers about its different parts ends with a sudden shriek of ‘FOR YOU!’ designed to terrify ‘the juvenile audience’. Other Scots words: e’en: eyes; how: hollow; howk: dig; thraw: twist; traivel: walk; wyte: blame – ‘Its’ last words may be a misunderstanding of something like ‘Ye aucht [are due] the wyte o’t’.

  Fortune Tales

  7 Silly Jack and the Lord’s Daughter SA 1954/90 A5. Recorded from Jeannie Robertson, Aberdeen, telling it to her young nephew Isaac, by Hamish Henderson. Transcription by Robert Garioch. STT No. 14. Jeannie Robertson (Mrs Regina Christina Higgins, to give her her official married name) is remembered more for her singing than her stories, but she was the first caird Hamish Henderson recorded telling stories (see T6:169–71), though her repertoire of traditional tales (as against lively anecdotal reminiscence) was not large. The hallmark of her style is involvement with her characters and the stress given to the bond between parents and children: less all-forgiving than her sister-in-law, Stanley Robertson’s mother (cf. T40:175), she lets the elder brothers be killed as due punishment for their greed and disregarding the mother’s blessing, but praises Jack for his kind heart.

  This very simple pattern of story can be assigned to the tale-type AT 577, ‘The King’s Tasks’, and it all springs from the ‘bannock and blessing’ opening, found in both Scots and Gaelic (e.g. PRS: 90–92; PTWH No. XVI). In the latter example the sons ask their mother to ‘cook them a bannock (bonnach) and roast them a cock (coileach)’: the Gaelic word reflects the sound rather than the meaning of Scots ‘collop’, a slice of meat, and this part of the formula at least seems to have come from Scots to Gaelic. The significant choice, however, found also in Ireland and elsewhere, is between the big bannock (or bigger half) with the mother’s curse or malison and the small one with her blessing. The wee mannie is one of Propp’s ‘donors’ (see Introduction p. 27), who sets a simple test for generosity or greed, and the magic object he gives the successful candidate takes charge of the rest of the story. It not only fights the giant, dragon and snake by itself, a
s you might expect of a sword, but provides Jack with food and a horse.

  Notice that John is perceived as a different name from Jack. The giant’s words, unlike those in ‘The Boy and the Brüni’ (tale No. 4 above), are clearly influenced by ‘I smell the blood of an Englishman’, which must have reached Scotland in chapbook versions of ‘Jack the Giant-killer’ or the like. ‘Feel the smell’, however, is pure Scots. Other Scots words: cray seems to be Jeannie’s regular word for a grey (or white?) horse; puddocks’ spewins: frogs’ vomit; wal (rhymes with ‘pal’): a well.

  8 The Tale of the Brown CalfSM 1961/10. Recorded from Annie Johnston, Glen, Barra by Fred Macaulay. STT No. 13. For Annie, Calum Johnston’s schoolteacher sister, see also T13:162 ff. In this case she is collector rather than storyteller: the recording, whether the story is read or learned by heart, follows almost verbatim a Gaelic text she published in Béaloideas 6:293–7, taken down in 1930 from her neighbour Elizabeth MacKinnon (Ealasaid Eachainn ’Illeasbuig), who was born in Vatersay before 1860 and spent much of her childhood in Sandray. Both her parents were storytellers, and Annie had already published a story from her in Béaloideas 4.

  AT 510B, ‘The Dress of Gold, of Silver, and of Stars’, is much more usual than 510A, ‘Cinderella’ proper (with the stepmother and ugly sisters) in the older tradition of Britain and Ireland. See Neil Philip, The Cinderella Story, Penguin Folklore Library, Harmondsworth 1989, for a recent study and selection of versions of both and some kindred stories from all over the world. Here the helpful brown calf (the Gaelic word is actually masculine), replacing the artificial ‘fairy godmother’ who first appears in the seventeenth-century French version of Perrault, explains what is usually left to be deduced, that it incarnates the heroine’s dead mother. The hen-wife (cailleach nan cearc), whose daughter replaces the ugly sister at the end, is a stock character in both Gaelic and Scots who plays the same role in Chambers’ Fife version (PRS:66–8): she is usually a villain, linked with the stepmother, but there is also a helpful hen-wife at the beginning of Chambers’ story. The bird’s rhyme, with chirping high vowels and a typical Gaelic repeat of the first couplet after the second, has been translated partly following Chambers’

  ‘Nippit fit and clippit fit

  Ahint the king’s son rides;

  But bonny fit and pretty fit

  Ahint the cauldron hides’.

  ‘Scullery’ translates Gaelic cidsin dubh, ‘black kitchen’, where the dirtiest work was done. Campbell’s Islay version (PTWH No. XIV) has a quite different rhyme, but shares with Chambers the typical Scottish Protestant feature that the prince sees the heroine in church, not at a dance.

  9 The Three Feathers SA 1956/128 B2. Recorded from Andrew Stewart, Perthshire traveller then living in Glasgow, by Hamish Henderson in 1956. Transcription by Robert Garioch. T14:225–234. Andrew, who soon after emigrated to Canada, was the youngest of the large family sometimes rather misleadingly all called ‘the Stewarts of Blair’, because of the prominence of his brother Alec and his wife Belle and their daughters, who lived in Blairgowrie, in the folk music revival (see Maurice Fleming’s article in T21:165–9 and the introduction to Sheila Douglas’ The King o the Black Art (KBA, 1987) for appreciations of the whole family). At least three of the brothers, Alec, John and Andrew, and their much older sister Mrs Bella Higgins, have all been recorded telling stories learned mainly from their parents. Andrew had perhaps the most uninhibited, racy, impromptu style of the four: it is clear in some stories that he has forgotten what came next, but he is never at a loss for words.

  Though this tale-type (AT 402, ‘The Mouse (Cat, Frog, etc.) as Bride’) is widely known throughout Europe, the opening with the feathers and other major details correspond so closely to the Grimm version that it seems almost certain that one of the popular published translations is the original source. But caird storytelling has added masses of vivid detail: this version, like ones told by Andrew’s brothers and his cousin Willie McPhee, is several times as long as the Grimm text and far more enjoyable to hear and even to read. The only Scots words that might need explanation are guttery: muddy and meat: food of any sort. Brae steeds seems to be just an odd pronunciation of ‘brave’ or ‘braw’.

  10 The Green Man of Knowledge SA 1954/101 B26. Recorded from Geordie Stewart, Aberdeenshire traveller, by Hamish Henderson in Jeannie Robertson’s house in Aberdeen. Geordie, then a young man of twenty-four, had learned the story from his grandfather, and it is possible that like some other longer wonder-tales it was considered as the speciality, almost the property of this particular Stewart family. Certainly he seems to have learned no other comparable story. After nearly thirty years during which they lost contact, Hamish Henderson found Geordie Stewart again in Banff and after a discussion of the story recorded a complete text with some interesting differences (SA 1983/157–8). It naturally lacks some of the spontaneity of the original recording, which combines a young man’s rather tongue-in-cheek attitude to the conventions of the ‘Land of Enchantment’ and the simpleton hero (whom he depicts largely as a devil-may-care Buchan farm servant, cheeky rather than backward) with a pride in recalling the whole of his family’s ancient story. The colloquial narration, interspersed with well-characterised dialogue in broad Doric for Jack and what to Geordie were English forms (‘shall’ for ‘will’, ‘well’ for ‘wal’, ‘ladder’ for ‘lether’ and so on) for the Green Man and his daughter, rattles on at such a pace that I have made dozens of small revisions of the original transcription by Hamish Henderson and Tom Scott first for the original version of this book (STT No. 12), then for the collection where it was the title story (GMK: 11–27), and again every time I have played parts of it to a class, and I am still not sure exactly what Geordie said in many places.

  The text was first published in SS2:47–85 with a typically wide-ranging essay by Hamish Henderson on its tale-type, AT 313, ‘The Girl as Helper in the Hero’s Flight’, and its possible parallels with the Middle English ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ as well as Sanskrit and Welsh Romany versions. The type is notable for a variety of quite different beginnings to get the hero into the power of the villain (here the Green Man) and different tasks he is then set, even within Scotland: the Gaelic variants published and summarised by J. F. Campbell (PTWH No. II) are enough to prove this. The only other published versions I know from Lowland Scots sources are Peter Buchan’s ‘Green Sleeves’ (AST 40–47); ‘Nicht, Nought, Nothing’, written down by Miss Margaret Craig, near Elgin, for Andrew Lang and first published by him in Revue Celtique 3:374–6; and Willie McPhee’s very individual variant, ‘The Nine-Stall Stable’ (KBA: 132–7) which begins more like ‘Silly Jack and the Lord’s Daughter’ and had a different ending each time in the book and two versions I have heard him tell since. Geordie Stewart’s version is longer than any of these, particularly with the journey and guidance by donors at the beginning, and has three distinctive features: Jack wins at cards – having practised against the dog who in most versions of the story is not mentioned until he ‘kisses’ the hero near the end – and yet still goes on to find the Green Man’s castle (more usually a task set to the loser of the game), apparently from sheer cussedness; his third, rather quickly passed over task is to clear ants out of a wood (at an earlier stage perhaps the ants helped Jack to find pearls from a broken necklace, as in Willie McPhee’s story, or sorted different types of grain for him, but this seems to be how Geordie heard the story and still told it in 1983); and the ‘Magic Flight’ episode ends with the Green Man and his elder daughters being burned by the ‘spark of fire’.

  North-east Scots words, forms (see also above) and phrases: aa: all; aafae: awful(ly); aathing: everything; abeen: above; chap (at door): knock; claes: clothes; dee: do; die: deem: girl (dame); den: valley; fa: who; fae: from; far: where; fin: when; feel: fool; fit: what; gae, gaun: go, goin; geeny: guinea; gey: very; gie: give; ging: go; mair: more; meer: mare; ’oor: hour; peer loon: poor boy; pinkie: little finger; quyne: girl; thackit cot: thatched cottage
; weisht I: wish I had; yin tee: that (yon) too.

  11 Lasair Gheug, the King of Ireland’s Daughter Lady Evelyn Stewart-Murray’s MSS, No. 197. Recorded from Mrs MacMillan, Bridge Cottage, Strathtay on 3rd June 1891 by Lady Evelyn, a daughter of the seventh Duke of Atholl, whose collection of Gaelic folklore was stopped by her parents within a year as an unsuitable occupation for a lady. Lady Evelyn was immediately exiled to the Continent at the age of twenty-three to prevent her fraternising further with peasants (though Queen Victoria had praised the Atholl family’s interest in Gaelic!) and never returned, but her brother Lord James, later the ninth Duke of Atholl, brought home her manuscripts and began to edit them with a view to publication, and after his death they were presented to the University of Edinburgh’s School of Scottish Studies by the present Duke in 1958. The 240 stories and songs in the collection cover most of West Perthshire, where Gaelic was still many people’s first language in 1891, and are an invaluable record of the traditions and dialect of the area. We hope for a complete publication of the collection, now being translated and edited by Mrs Sylvia Robertson, before long.