The Poetics of Space and Place in Scottish Literature

Monika Szuba,Julian Wolfreys

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030126452
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book addresses the poetics of space and place in Scottish literature. Focusing chiefly on twentieth- and twenty-first century texts, with acknowledgement of historical and philosophical contexts, the essays address representation, narrative form, the work of the poetic, perception and experience. Major genres and forms are discussed, and authors as diverse as George Mackay Brown, Kathleen Jamie, Ken McLeod and Kei Miller are presented through theoretically informed, historically contextualized close readings. Additionally considering the role of dialect and region in the poetry and fiction of modern Scotland, the volume argues for an appreciation of the cultural diversity of Scottish writers while highlighting the overarching presence of a connection between self and world, subject and place within Scottish literature.

Part IContested Beginnings

© The Author(s) 2019

M. Szuba, J. Wolfreys (eds.)The Poetics of Space and Place in Scottish LiteratureGeocriticism and Spatial Literary Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12645-2_2

Begin Abstract

Location and Destination in Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s ‘The Birlinn of Clanranald’

Alan Riach¹

(1)

University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, UK

End Abstract

‘The Birlinn of Clanranald’ is a poem which describes a working ship, a birlinn or galley, its component parts, mast, sail, tiller, rudder, oars and the cabes (or oar-clasps, wooden pommels secured to the gunwale) they rest in, the ropes that connect sail to cleats or belaying pins and so on, and the sixteen crewmen, each with their appointed role and place, and it describes their mutual working together, rowing, and then sailing out to sea, from the Hebrides in the west of Scotland, from South Uist to the Sound of Islay, then over to Carrickfergus in Ireland. The last third of the poem is an astonishing, terrifying, exhilarating description of the men and the ship in a terrible storm that blows up, threatening to destroy them, and which they pass through, only just making it to safe harbour, mooring and shelter. It was written in Gaelic sometime around 1751–1755 and first published posthumously in 1776, in an edition compiled by the poet’s son. The most carefully edited modern Gaelic text is in Selected Poems, edited by Derick S. Thomson (Edinburgh: The Scottish Gaelic Texts Society, 1996).

Its author, Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair , also known as Alexander MacDonald (c.1693/98–c.1770) was a teacher and soldier, a Jacobite officer during the rising of 1745 and Gaelic tutor to Prince Charles Edward Stuart . His father was an Episcopalian Church of Scotland minister, who taught the boy and introduced him to classical literature. He knew about sea voyages, literally, but he also had read about them in the poems of Homer and Virgil . In the poem, there is clear evidence that the author knew and had experienced the sea, but there is also a supremely literary sensibility at work, especially when we come to the storm, where a wealth of poetic resources of hyperbole and imagery are drawn upon. The modernity of this passage is startling, and it could almost be described as psychedelic or surrealist.

Alasdair attended the University of Glasgow and grew quickly familiar with the literature and culture of his era. Not only contemporary and recent poetry in Scots and English, but the European context of all cultural production came into his knowledge. He has been called ‘The Bard of the Gaelic Enlightenment’ but if at times his poetry is indeed ‘bardic’ in a traditional oral sense, he is more accurately described as a highly literate and knowledgeable literary poet, an Enlightenment figure indeed, and a pre-Romantic Scottish nationalist, whose primary language was Gaelic.

In 1729, he became a schoolteacher, an English teacher, working in various parts of Moidart and the west of Scotland. In 1738, he was teaching at Kilchoan, Ardnamurchan. One of his most famous songs of this period was the lyrical, ‘Allt an t-Siucar’/‘Sugar Burn’. In 1741, Alasdair’s A Galick and English Vocabulary, effectively the first Gaelic–English dictionary (of around 200 pages), was published, commissioned by the anti-Catholic, anti-Gaelic, Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), to help spread the English language and extirpate Gaelic. Alasdair had worked on it in the belief that it would help take Gaelic forward, but he soon came to oppose everything to which the SSPCK was committed. Making this book, if anything, confirmed his own commitment to his language and culture. His poems took on increasingly sharp edges.

Called to account for satiric and inappropriate writing, it is said that he abandoned his teaching to help in the Jacobite rising and that he was among the first at Glenfinnan when the flag was raised on 19 August 1745. Many of his poems and songs openly extol the virtues of the Jacobite cause and satirise the Hanoverians and their Scottish supporters, the Campbells. He was a captain in the Clan Ranald regiment, in charge of fifty recruits, and taught Gaelic to the Prince himself. He converted to Catholicism, perhaps at this time, but perhaps much earlier. After Culloden, he and his family were fugitives. His house was ransacked by Hanoverian troops.

He and his family settled on the island of Canna in 1749 and stayed there till 1751, when he travelled to Edinburgh to publish a book of his poems, Ais-Eiridh na Sean Chánoin Albannaich/The Reawakening of the Old Scottish Language, replete with satires on the Hanoverian succession. In the poem, ‘An Airce’/‘The Ark’, he promises that the Campbells will be plagued and scourged for their treason to Scotland, while he himself will build a ship of refuge for those Campbells true to the Jacobite cause, and all moderates who, after swallowing an effective purgative of salt sea water, would be willing to reject allegiance to the British crown. The authorities were outraged.

Aware of the threat of prosecution, he moved to Glen Uig but then moved again to Knoydart, then to Morar and finally to Sandaig, in Arisaig. He often visited South Uist, where his friend Iain MacFhearchair (John MacCodrum) was bard to Sir James MacDonald of Sleat. The MacDonalds and Clan Ranald were his people, and their family connections extended throughout the west of Scotland and to Ireland, to Carrickfergus.

On his deathbed, his last words were addressed to friends watching over him, who were reciting some poems of their own. Alasdair awoke, corrected their metres and versification, showed them how to do it with some verses of his own, then quietly lay back and drifted away. He is buried in Kilmorie cemetery, Arisaig.

The biography of the poet offers us some secure coordinate points and a trajectory through a tumultuous period not only in Scottish but in British history, across the 1707 union of parliaments through the Jacobite risings of the first half of the century, to their aftermath in the second half. Place, in this sense, is secure, even while the spaces we might identify as Gaelic, Scottish and British, are contested. However, when we come to ‘The Birlinn of Clanranald’ as a poem, the questions become more complex. We might conclude from the biographical and historical context that ‘The Birlinn of Clanranald’ was not widely known in its author’s lifetime, and that its historical moment is of some consequence. There is more to it, of course.

The original Gaelic poem is both traditional and radical. The versification is rhythmic, rhymed, with regular patterns. This would make it as familiar and accessible in its own time and language as free verse is to us. Equally, though, a poem in the forms of its era requires a necessary quickening, whether in address or approach or assumption. Rhyming poems in the twenty-first century are not easily read fresh. Often enough, free verse or open-form poems can also feel tired. And there is more. The poem is not a fragmented narrative but coherent, and yet its coherence is blasted by opposing forces. The balance in the poem, in its form as well as in its narrative, is delicate but strong, resistant to, but at the mercy of, forces that oppose and cut across it.

Structurally, there are sixteen parts, and there seem to be clearly eight sub-sections in the last part, the storm. This last part takes up about a third of the whole poem. This is a literary work, carefully put down on paper. It is not a composition made to a musical structure and held in the memory until transcribed, as was the case with the other great Gaelic poem of this era, Duncan Ban MacIntyre’s ‘Praise of Ben Dorain’. Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair intended that ‘The Birlinn of Clanranald’ should be read, as well as heard.

Ambiguities abound. Specific references to the structure and operation of the birlinn, its parts and their purposes, what the crew do, actually, are given in intricate detail. And yet there are contradictions. A birlinn is usually understood as having one sail and one mast. This is what seems to be the case in the poem. Yet in various places, especially at the beginning and end of the Gaelic text, plural terms for these items are used. Today, of course, nobody knows what birlinns were actually like. As far as we know, none survive. In 1493, the Lordship of the Isles was given over to King James IV. It was ordered that every birlinn should be destroyed, as the power of the fleet and the authority of the seafaring clans was a threat. The ships were burned. Reconstructions have been made, and courageously sailed. But questions remain. Perhaps too much importance is given to the word, ‘birlinn’: it seems to have appeared in the title of the poem in the late Victorian era and is used in the poem sparingly, while ‘long’ (‘luinge’) is used three times, ‘bairc/caol-bhairc’ three times and ‘iubhrach’ once. As Michel Byrne has informed me, ‘In spite of the destruction of his Lordship’s navy, island chiefs obviously continued to sail with their retinue (and to be praised as great sailors in panegyric song), so is there much in the poem to make us think MacDonald had anything other than an eighteenth-century ship in mind?’ This remains one of a number of questions about authenticity and reference that take the poem beyond the literal world of historical fact and the rigours of material reconstitution. It lives in more than history. It moves through time as well as over seas.

As such, it is worth quoting an author whose experience of ships, sailing and seamanship authorises his judgements of the experience of sea travel. Adam Nicolson, in Seamanship (London: HarperCollins, 2004), says this of one of the boats on which he voyaged through Atlantic waters, including those around the Hebrides: ‘Of course a boat is not a natural thing. She is the most cultural of things, the way she works dependent on a line of thought that goes back to the Bronze Age: the form of the hull and the weighted keel; the lift and drive given by a sail; […] the ingenuity of blocks and tackles, strops, sheets, halyards and warps, the sheer cleverness of knots. The knowledge that is gathered in a boat is a great human inheritance, especially valuable because it is not material but intangible, a legacy made only of understanding’ (32).

The elemental realities Nicolson describes here cross time and locations with the most fundamental coordinate points that remain essential from the Bronze Age to the twentieth century. They are also human, experienced, remembered and applied in the company of other sailors. They are, on the one hand, indifferent to human feeling and aspiration, and on the other, humanly vulnerable, tough and resilient. This might appear to be an axiomatic dichotomy, yet specific space and place in this light are not irrelevant: currents, climate, seasonal weathers, geographical landfalls, depths and distances are all particular to any voyage and complex beyond any sense of simplicity. Yet the general truths Nicolson is describing are perennial and in literary or cultural terms evoke most strongly tropes of symbolism with which we have become increasingly familiar in the century or so since mass media encroached Western society to the point of visual saturation. Of course, the commercial priority of that saturation is different from that of the sea voyage.

Nicolson continues: ‘You can see the boat, in other words, as our great symbol, the embodiment of what we might be. In her fineness, strength and robustness, in the many intricate, interlocking details of her overall scheme; even in the bowing to nature of her wing-like sails and the auk- or seal-like curves of her body; in all this, she is a great act of civility. The sea is an “it”, the boat is a “she”, and the courage of that confrontation is why people love the boats they know. Boats are us against it, what we can do despite the world. Each sailing hull is a precious thought, buoyant, purposeful, moving on, afloat in the sea that cares nothing for it. From the deck of a boat, out of sight of land, as Auden wrote in “The Sea and the Mirror”, his great poem on art and consciousness, “All we are not stares back at what we are”’ (33).

There is a specific geographical location for ‘The Birlinn of Clanranald’ and it is perfectly possible to chart the route the birlinn takes on her voyage. In terms of place and geography, it would seem, we are secure. The poem tells us that the birlinn emerges from the mouth of Loch Eynort in South Uist, voyages south-south-east to the Sound of Islay then heads south-west, crossing to Carrickfergus in Ireland. But ambiguities remain. No explanation for this voyage is given. Why are these men travelling thus? Why take that route? There are more questions unanswered than resolved by these navigational assurances.

As Murray Pittock says, ‘The Birlinn’s journey, from South Uist to Carrickfergus in Ireland on St. Brigid’s Day, the eve of Candlemas, unites the sea-divided Gael of Clan Donald, the last Scottish family to fight in an Irish rebel army, just as it formed such an important part of the last Scottish army of 1746. The invocation of tradition (the bow) and Spanish weapons can be held to represent the ancient unified world of the Gael, and the calls of Irish Gaelic poetry for Spanish military help’. Pittock emphasises this indication of the significance of the date given in the poem for the voyage: ‘The date of the voyage is surely important: Brigid, the Mary of the Gael, was also associated with a Gaelic pagan inheritance. Her day – traditionally thought a good day for a sea voyage – was linked to the return of fertility and the coming of spring, a token and hope of the renewing year. In this it was clearly linked to the Christian Candlemas’. Pittock concludes: ‘This was a world with which, as a Catholic convert, Alasdair would have been familiar’. So, place and date, the space crossed and the time occupied in the evocation of the voyage at its most literal already have specific reference and meaning that spans particular religious denomination and pagan or non-orthodox belief systems and mythic structures of spiritual reality. At the heart of all, these terms are balanced between what is...