This story was published by AJB in SS 9:153–74 as ‘A Scottish Gaelic version of “Snow-White” ’, with the Gaelic text and notes referring to the only comparable Scottish versions, published by Kenneth MacLeod in The Celtic Magazine 13 (1888):212–18, and Irish parallels. In fact it is a conflation of elements from ‘Snow-White’ (AT 709) with a framework fron ‘The Maiden without Hands’ (AT 706). It is not strictly a Perthshire story either: Lady Evelyn noted of Mrs MacMillan, one of the few people from which she recorded Märchen, that she was ‘a Badenoch woman, her father was a MacDonald, Badenoch, & her mother a Fraser from Lochaber’, and all her stories came from her mother or her mother’s mother, ‘so these are Lochaber tales’. The heroine’s name Lasair Gheug, ‘Flame of Branches’ or ‘Limbs’, may be a version of Lasair (Fhìon-)Dhearg, ‘(Wine)-Red Flame’, a favourite name for heroines in Irish tales. The false accusations and eventual revelation by getting round the ‘baptismal oaths’ (briathran baistidh) – apparently meaning a vow not to tell a Christian soul – belong to AT 706. The eachrais (eachlach) urlair, ‘floor groom’, apparently a sweeper, is a female character who replaces the hen-wife as the stepmother’s evil genius in many Gaelic tales, and her seemingly small demands are typical. The hands usually cut off as a punishment (and miraculously restored) in this type are softened to finger-joints (which can be three to correspond to the three offences), but their bleeding serves to introduce the ‘Snow-White’ elements, apart from the queen’s demand for her step-daughter’s heart and liver, normally motivated by jealousy of her beauty. The prince in cat form, replacing the dwarfs or robbers, is in Irish versions of AT 709 and other Gaelic tales, and is as usual disenchanted by sleeping with the heroine. The most typically Gaelic feature, also shared by the Scottish versions and those Irish texts which do not clearly derive from Grimm, is the replacement of the (obviously modern) mirror on the wall with a speaking trout in a well. The salmon in a spring as a metaphor for truth or poetic inspiration is a basic image of early Irish mythology, and its smaller relative the trout was often kept in drinking-wells in Scotland and Ireland up to recent times to purify the water. It seems quite possible that the Gaelic version represents the earliest form of this tale-type. The prince’s second wife who removes the poison grains (reading sìolain neimh’ for Lady Evelyn’s sìolain ’n eigh, ‘grains of ice’) is also regularly found in Gaelic versions, though the neat solution of marrying her off to the heroine’s father, once more widowed, is not universal.
Riding the wild boar in and out of the church is a motif found in versions of AT 875 (see No. 32) and the story of Diarmaid and Gràinne (PTWH No. LX), where the heroine has to be neither on foot nor on horseback and neither indoors nor out, though the latter condition is confused here. The end of the story, in keeping with the formal and repetitive language of the rest, is an elaborate version of a typical ‘end-run’, a formula apparently designed to show that the story must be true, because its teller was at the wedding, which then destroys the illusion when all the gifts to prove it are lost, and brings the audience back to the real world.
12 Sùil-a-Dia and Sùil-a-Sporain SA 1969/120 Al. Recorded from Donald Alasdair Johnson, Ardmore, Iochdar, South Uist, transcribed and translated by Angus John MacDonald. T7:222–9 (with Gaelic text). Donald Alasdair Johnson (1890–1978) was first discovered in 1969 by Angus John MacDonald, then an Honours student of Celtic at Aberdeen University, doing part-time collecting work for the School of Scottish Studies in the Uists, simply knocking on doors to ask if anyone there knew old songs or stories (see T2:36–7, SS 14:133). Mr Johnson had kept telling the stories he learned from his father to himself as he worked, for lack of an audience when ceilidhing and appreciation of the longer stories faded out, and at the age of seventy-nine had still a remarkable repertoire of them and a stylish manner of telling, adding formulaic descriptions to the scenes he pictured as if of his whitewashed kitchen wall in front of him (SS 22:14 ff). He had served in the Merchant Navy, worked in Glasgow as a docker and fought in Flanders in the First World War, before coming back to Uist to work as crofter, postman, stonemason and joiner; he also composed and sang Gaelic songs, had played the pipes and still played the melodeon, but his stories were his great gift and a volume of them is in preparation. They were a family inheritance: one derived from a sixteenth-century Irish literary satire, An Ceatharnach Caol Riabhach (published from Donald Alasdair in SS 14:133–54), was taken down from his father’s father in Eriskay by Alexander Carmichael in 1865, and DAM has published a comparison in Gaelic of the two versions in Gaelic and Scotland (ed. W. Gillies, Edinburgh 1989): 185–221.
This story, which Donald Alasdair was also filmed telling, is an international moral type, AT 613, ‘The Two Travellers (Truth and Falsehood)’. The gathering of cats, rather than demons or a variety of animals, is a peculiarly Gaelic feature, and the name of their leader, apart from the echo of ‘Old Calgravatus’ (see Introduction), is only known in South Uist stories. The names of Sùil-a-Dia, literally ‘Eye-to-God’ can be understood as ‘Trust-in-God’, and Sùil-a-Sporain as ‘Trust-in-Purse’: the latter is called ‘Mac Mharais’ at the end, perhaps implying that he is condemned to execution (marbhadh).
13 (Ceann Suic) SA 1972/175 A5. Recorded from Mrs Christine M. Fleming (née MacLeod), Berneray, Harris, transcribed and translated by Ian Paterson. 79:30–33 (with Gaelic text). Mrs Fleming’s source Ceit Tharmoid (Kate daughter of Norman) was Mrs Catherine MacDonald, née Paterson (1857–1941), Berneray. Mrs Fleming, ‘Curstaidh Mèri Ruairidh Chaluim’, was working as a nurse in the Southern General Hospital in Glasgow when Ian Paterson (himself a Berneray man) first recorded her in 1967.
AT 500, ‘The Name of the Helper’, the Grimms’ Rumpelstilzchen, or the Suffolk Tom Tit Tot, is a popular type world-wide, usually about an impossible task with textiles, though more often it is only spinning: the inclusion of weaving here is appropriate to a story from the home of Harris tweed. The Lowland ‘Whuppity Stoorie’ (PRS:72–5) is exceptional in being about a female fairy who cures a sick sow. Usually the person who overhears the name is either the heroine herself or another mortal: the introduction of good and evil groups of fairies here, not to mention their killing and eating each other at the end – fairies are quite often killed in Gaelic tradition – is an unusual twist.
14 The Captain of the Black Ship SA 1968/42A. Recorded from Angus John MacPhail, Locheport, North Uist, and transcribed by Angus John MacDonald. STT No. 11. Angus John MacPhail (Aonghas Iain Dhòmhnaill ’ic Phàil) was a crofter and stonemason who inherited his storytelling ability from his father. His family came to Locheport from the Sollas area on the other side of the island when they were evicted in a notorious mid-nineteenth century clearance.
The tale type is AT 506A, ‘The Princess Rescued from Slavery’, one of several international types where the hero’s helper or donor is a ‘Grateful Dead Man’. This one was well known in Scots-speaking areas through the long ballad ‘The Turkey Factor’, It incorporates one or other variant of the Dick Whittington’s cat motif (AT 1651 on its own), replacing the first cat in a mouse-infested country with the first coal (as in PTWH No. XXXII) or as here the first (salt) herring, typical British exports worth their weight in gold, usually in Turkey as the nearest rich non-Christian culture. The way it is reached in this version through a ‘magic mist’ suggests that it really stands for the other world, but the story comes back to earth immediately after with the ingenious way of giving the dead man a Christian burial with things that would be found on a herring boat.
15 The Three Good Advices SA 1955 /150 B5. Recorded from Andrew Stewart, Perthshire traveller, by Hamish Henderson. Transcription by Robert Garioch. STT No. 10. A non-magic ‘novella’ of good fortune, AT 910B, ‘The Servant’s Good Counsels’, which has been popular in Gaelic since a version was incorporated in the ‘Middle Irish Odyssey’, the thirteenth-century Merugud Uilix meic Leirtis (‘Wandering of Ulysses son of Laertes’). In modern versions the wise master who gives the advice becomes a bake
r simply because of the device of the money hidden in a loaf; the third piece of advice about breaking the ‘half-loaf’ (the term normally used at least until the 1950s for a single Scottish ‘plain’ loaf, baked in pairs which were broken up for sale) replaces the counsel to think twice before acting – this stops the hero killing the man he finds in bed with his wife, before he realises it is his own grown-up son. This scene is probably inconceivable to a caird, and this traveller version cuts it out along with the second scene, where the hero is advised not to lodge with the young wife of an old man, who murders her rich husband and accuses the hero’s companion who lodges there. It is replaced by a typical caird ‘Burker tale’, where the hero escapes being murdered for his body in the manner of Burke and Hare, something which all cairds were taught might happen to them (giving them a healthy distrust of strangers), so that even forty years ago a settled traveller like Stanley Robertson grew up with a dread of doctors, hospitals and universities. The red hair of the warning is regularly linked with evil in popular belief. In the first episode too, Burkers replace the usual bandits on the short-cut. Scots words: bud: bided, abode, stayed; parritch: porridge; reed (see CSD under ree): an animal pen, pig-sty, stone-walled yard etc.; the morn: tomorrow.
Hero Tales
16 The Story of the Cook SA 1955/131 B4. Recorded from ‘Alexander Stewart, travelling tinsmith’, by Calum Maclean at Muir of Ord, Easter Ross, in July 1955. STT No. 18. Calum Maclean gives a detailed and entertaining account of his visit to this caird, a very stylish narrator of Gaelic tales in a devil-may-care caird manner, and his mother Grace in their camp near Muir of Ord, in the second half of Chapter VI of The Highlands. He is one of three fine storytellers from this traveller clan, all named Alexander or Alasdair, in this book, but we have not yet succeeded in establishing his relationship to the others, and apart from Calum’s account he remains a mystery.
The story is a combination of AT 303, ‘The Twins’ and AT 300, ‘The Dragon-Slayer’, which in Scottish Gaelic versions often, as here, has a series of many-headed giants in place of the dragon or sea-monster. ‘The Twins’ in Gaelic as throughout Europe usually frames the other tale, but most cairds tell it without the inset, so this is an unusual version. It includes traces of the aristocratic Gaelic literary tradition, such as the detection of the queen’s own son by his innately modest behaviour (in many versions they are not the king’s sons, but born from the eating of magic fish). Some elements are very old folk motifs: the animals born on the same night (from their mothers eating the same fish, though this storyteller only remembers about them when they are called for late in the story); the gate that shows whether the hero is alive or dead; and the small mutilations required to wake him, reminiscent of tribal initiation marks, which eventually also help to identify him. Others are typically Scottish or Gaelic clichés – the description of the giant, so exaggerated it can hardly be pictured, with twenty-six dead old women tied to his shoelaces, apparently as a lunch-pack (we have translated for sound as much as sense, as with the list of magic healing objects at the end); the hen-wife as trouble-maker; and later the appearance of the witch, asking to be let into her own house, in the form of a hen, though she is addressed as ‘Old Woman’ and apparently grows into one. There is a bit of British history – ‘River George’ is probably a corruption of ‘Royal George’, a man-of-war from Nelson’s navy. Finally, there are the touches of humour in description and dialogue, especially the cowardly Cook and the landlady’s excessive respect for him, which are all Alasdair Stewart’s own. Caman: a shinty stick.
17 Conall Gulbann SA 1959/41 B4–42 B1. Recorded from Angus MacLellan, Frobost, South Uist, by Calum Maclean. The indented passages and the alternative ending are added from another recording of the story from Angus MacLellan, SA 1963/14 A1, made by DAM. STT No. 15. Angus MacLellan, ‘Aonghus Beag mac Aonghuis ’ic Eachainn’, was the only Scottish Gaelic storyteller recognised in his lifetime by the award of an MBE, thanks to the efforts of Dr John Lorne Campbell, who recorded, edited and translated his Stories from South Uist (SSU, 1961) and his autobiography The Furrow Behind Me, published when Angus was already over ninety.
This is perhaps the most popular of all Gaelic literary hero-tales in oral tradition. The original romance was almost certainly written in the early sixteenth century, when ‘the Turk’ was actually invading Christian Europe, for the ruler of the Irish region of Tyrconnel (most of modem Co. Donegal), possibly the famous Manus O’Donnell, whose realm was named from his fifth-century ancestor Conall Gulban. For a full discussion of the variants of the story and its motifs, see GFMR:72–9, or Béaloideas 31:1–50. Scottish versions use a motif from far earlier Gaelic literature, the begetting of a half-supernatural son in an otherworld dwelling or brugh (though in Uist recently this word could mean something more like ‘hovel’), simply to ensure that the hero has a fairy grandfather who can help him in time of need. The result is that Conall loses much of his heroic quality when, like Jack in ‘Silly Jack and the Lord’s Daughter’ (tale No. 7 above), he wins a battle with a sword that fights by itself. In fact the description of this sword and the battle was such a long run that it used to be recited alone as a set piece: so much of its archaic language, meant to impress, has become incomprehensible in oral transmission that we have concentrated on conveying the alliteration and rhythm of the Gaelic rather than attempting to translate every word. A Gaelic text of this story from Angus MacLellan was published by J.L. Campbell in TGSI 44: 11-24.
The ‘waking motif’ is a folk borrowing from the previous tale-type, but the sword in the bed is a mediaeval chivalrous motif it shares with the original romance. The alternative ends show that Angus MacLellan learned the story from at least two sources. One was Donald MacDonald, the father of Duncan who told the next story: Duncan’s version (SD:45–58) has a long series of abductors each of whom had once had Conall’s bride but lost her to the next in the series. It ends with a race which Conall wins, and Macan Mór is not killed, as in the original romance and the main text here. However, Angus had also heard the story from Alasdair MacIntyre, another famous South Uist storyteller, and he may be the source of the ending where (as in many folk versions) Macan Mór, originally just a very large hero, is killed like a typical folktale giant.
The Tanhuisg were originally amhuis, ‘mercenaries’, satirised by the author of the written tale by being depicted as ogres. The Tuathanach O’Drao was originally Duanach (‘Poetie’) the Druid; Conall Ceithir Cleannach (‘Four-Headed’) seems to be a version of the early Irish hero Conall Cearnach (‘Victorious’). A buckie (Campbell of Islay’s Scots rendering) is a small sea-shell, a winkle.
18 The Man in the Cassock SA 1953/34 A4–35 A1. Recorded from Duncan MacDonald, Peninerine, South Uist, by Calum Maclean. STT No. 16. Duncan MacDonald, ‘Dunnchadh Clachair’, had perhaps the largest and most varied repertoire of stories and songs recorded from a single Scottish Gael, though not much of it can be played on tape: most of it was taken down by Calum Maclean when working for the Irish Folklore Commission, by Duncan’s son the poet Donald John MacDonald for the University of Edinburgh’s School of Scottish Studies, and others like K. C. Craig, either straight on to paper or using recordings which were erased after transcription. A feature in T25:1–32 includes appreciations from William Matheson and Peggy McClements and reminiscences from Duncan himself as well as a sample of his repertoire.
The five long hero-tales which Craig published as Sgialachdan Dhunnchaidh (SD, after 1944) seem to have had a particular meaning for Duncan, and a study of five versions of this one taken down from him and one from his brother Neil (see SS 22:27–44) makes it fairly certain that both brothers learned the story virtually word for word by heart from their father, whereas they told other stories in a more usual way, choosing different words each time to describe the same events. Duncan was almost certainly descended in a direct male line from the MacRury seannachies, hereditary historians and storytellers to the MacDonalds of Sleat, and a comparison of the introductory episode
of this tale with its solitary incomplete seventeenth-century manuscript written by Hugh MacLean in Kintyre in 1690 (National Library of Scotland MS 72.1.36, published with translation in Éigse 12:301–26) shows such close verbal correspondences that it seems quite possible that the story was learned by heart from a manuscript before 1700 and passed down substantially unchanged for two and a half centuries. Duncan himself knew it as ‘The Man in the Cassock’ (literally ‘of the Habit’, in the sense of a clerical uniform, but the literal translation could be misleading) but he was told by an old man that his father had also called it ‘The History of the Hermit’ (Eachdraidh an Dìthreich) a more conventional form of the title in the 1690 MS.
The mysterious, yet rather comical, hermit must really be a supernatural character, perhaps the Irish pagan deity Manannán who often plays such roles in mediaeval tales: the way that no time has passed at the end of this version, or that in others Murchadh goes to bed in the hermit’s mansion and wakes up next morning on a bare hillside with the stag and hound beside him, shows that this was a visit to the otherworld. However, the burlesque in-tale, almost entirely lost in the only MS, but the longer part of the story in a dozen oral versions, depicts him as a powerful secular warrior, apart from his curious weapons, with no stronger magic powers than his opponents in some episodes and unable to escape his in-laws’ plot to prevent him taking home his bride. His epithet Feamanach, sometimes claimed to mean a sort of giant, actually seems to be a corruption of an obscure word fimineach, translated by an eighteenth-century Irish dictionary as ‘hypocrite’, no doubt because he is not all he seems. The word gruagach (literally ‘hairy’) is also confusing. In Irish romances like the original of this it means a warrior with some magical powers, a sort of elf-knight, while in Scottish Gaelic poetry it means a maiden, so in this version the Gruagach of the Stag and the Hound is female and her pursuer and her brother are male gruagachs (the name of her estate, Tiobart, means ‘Well’, because usually it is reached by diving down one, not travelling over the sea with ‘water helmets’). Murchadh is a straightforward historical hero, son of the great Brian Bóramha (‘Boru’), king of all Ireland, and killed like him in the Battle of Clontarf in 1014: there is an early reference to his otherworld adventures, which survive in this and at least one similar tale (cf. GFMR: 136–43). We have tried in the translation to give an idea of the rather tongue-in-cheek formality of this story’s language, a superb piece of blarney, meant to be spoken not read but otherwise rather reminiscent of the mixture of archaisms and slang Standish H. O’Grady used to translate early Irish tales in his Silva Gadelica. Geasa are spells which must be obeyed. The hermit’s epithet ‘Feamanach Fabhsach’ seems to mean ‘false hypocrite’, because he is not all he seems. The ‘Cailleach Eana-to-Ghlas’ is just an old woman in grey clothing.
Scottish Traditional Tales Page 43
