In
1946, Calum I. Maclean (1915–1960) made his first ever trip to the Western
Isles, and more specifically to the isle of Barra near to the southern tip of
this archipelago. Maclean wrote that “I knew not one living soul in Barra: nor
in any of the Outer Hebrides for that matter.”
Nevertheless,
within a few weeks of getting to know the Barra people, Maclean finally met a
storyteller from whom he had heard about from his friend and mentor John Lorne
Campbell. Some eight years previously Campbell had included one of his stories
in his book Sia Sgialachdan [‘Six
Stories’]. Northbay, on the island’s north-eastern shore, marks the place in
which their first meeting took place. The man in question James MacKinnon
(1866–1957), styled Seumas Iain
Ghunnairigh, had been a fisherman all his working days and in his
semi-retirement turned to shoemaking to earn a living.
“For any folklore collector,” Maclean later
wrote, “the crucial time is when contact is first made with the tradition
bearer. To Seumas MacKinnon I was a complete stranger, and much depended on the
outcome of our first meeting. Every folklore collector must be prepared to
efface himself and approach even the most humble tradition bearer with the
deference due to the high and exalted.”
Maclean true to his own words did just that
and when he spoke to Seumas in Gaelic, the old man, then aged eighty received
him warmly. “I noticed that he was very tall,” wrote Maclean. “His face was
weather-beaten and his features were beautifully chiselled. He wore the
blue-peaked cap of fishermen and blue dungarees. The life of eighty years had
been spent as much on sea as on land. At eighty he was still a very handsome
old man. He was the first practised storyteller I had heard in Scotland. His
diction was crisp, concise and clear. Every sentence was short and perfectly
balanced. His style was that of the traditional Gaelic storyteller. His voice
was beautifully clear and pleasing. He stamped his own personality on every
story he told, and his lively sense of humour enhanced his storytelling
considerably. His aim was to delight and entertain, and he certainly did both.”
Considering
that Maclean was later to record other storytellers, it is rather amazing to
think that it had taken him so long to find one in Scotland. But he did have an
excuse as he had, after all, been in Ireland throughout the war period and
given that storytellers of such calibre were more or less confined to the Western
Isles, a place he had only recently visited, it is perhaps not as surprising as
it would first seem.
Although
having never attended school nor being able to read or write and having only a
smattering of English did not stop MacKinnon from having a prodigious memory.
Some sixty years previously MacKinnon had learnt many tales from an
old-bedridden man named Roderick MacDonald, who lived in a black house in
Earsary, and prompted by Maclean a great deal of them came flooding back. As a
young man MacKinnon along with a crowd of boys would visit old Roderick every
winter evening for a ceilidh and as the old man lay in his mattress beside the
hearth in the middle of the floor he would recite these stories to an entranced
and appreciative audience. “Lift me up now, dear and beloved ones,” the old man
would say to the young men. When propped up in a comfortable position, the old
man told tales and continued until it was time for the visitors to depart.
Recollecting such evenings of storytelling, MacKinnon stated that: “There is
nothing like that today. Today there is only Death.” Maclean noted that what he
meant, of course, was that the old order was passing.
From
this reciter MacKinnon learnt his stock and trade of storytelling as Maclean
recollects: “When we had conversed for an hour or so, he began to narrate his
first tale. He had not continued long when I realised that he had mastered the
art to perfection. Every sentence, every phrase was balanced. He was never at a
loss for a word, and never lost the thread of his story. The first story of his
was an international folktale. It was the tale of the three noble acts. A lady,
who had promised her virginity to a farmer, was later wooed and won by a
nobleman. On her bridal night the lady wept when she remembered her promise to
the farmer. Her husband escorted her to the farmer’s house so that she could
fulfil her promise. The farmer nobly declined her offer and told her to return
to her husband. One her way home she fell in with a party of thieves. The
leader of the party, on hearing her story, sent her home in safety. The three
men acted nobly.
Before
relating the story, Maclean and MacKinnon “had sat and spoke for some time.
Eventually I told him I had come to Barra to look for old stories. “Oh!” said
he, “it is a long time since I told a story. People have no use for
storytelling now.”
According
to Maclean, MacKinnon’s repertoire contained a great number of such tales:
Seumas MacKinnon could be most amusing and
entertaining at times. He had a large number of tales of a distinctly
Rabelaisian character. These he told sometimes to a mixed audience. But such
could be done in Barra. The late Thomas MacDonagh wrote that while the people
of Gaelic Ireland were sometimes coarse in speech, they were always impeccably
proper in conduct. The same is true of the people of Barra.
From
MacKinnon forty folktales, some taking almost an hour to tell, were recorded by
Maclean and later transcribed. MacKinnon knew their intrinsic value and could
appreciate the object of reciting the tales and having a written record made of
them. This did not only make Maclean’s task an easier one but a far more
enjoyable one:
It was always an easy matter to induce him to
tell his stories. Today, even in Barra, storytelling has ceased to be the popular
form of entertainment it used to be. Newspapers, radio, and films have
superseded the storyteller. In an earlier generation Seumas MacKinnon and his
kind were more appreciated than they are today. I feel very proud of the help
and friendship of Seumas MacKinnon.
MacKinnon
also told Maclean about his fishing days when, at the beginning of the
twentieth century, the inlets of the west coast of Skye still contained plenty
of herring. Smacks from all over would foregather there and after nightfall
when the nets had been set the custom was for the fishermen to visit each
others’ boats. MacKinnon tells of the time when listening to another Barra
storyteller:
They were all below deck in the storyteller’s
smack. It was early of a winter’s evening that he commenced storytelling. All
night long he continued. The listeners were oblivious at everything except the
story that was being narrated. All of a sudden they heard a series of loud
bangs on the deck above them. They looked up and dawn was beginning to break.
Their smack had dragged its anchors and was drifting perilously near a rocky
shore. The crew of a drifter which had come alongside were throwing lumps of
coal on to the deck of the fishing smack to warn the men below that danger was
imminent.
Maclean
spent some five months recording but only a little of his repertoire for it was
nowhere near to being exhausted. The last time Maclean saw MacKinnon was when
he visited him in March 1956, “resting after a hard day’s work planting
potatoes.” With MacKinnon’s passing the following year, Barra had lost one of
its last remaining traditional storytellers.
References:
Calum I. Maclean, The
Highlands (Inbhir Nis: Club Leabhar, 1975)
────, ‘Hebridean Traditions’, Gwerin:
Journal of Folk Life, vol. 1, no. 1 (1956), pp. 21–33
Image:
James MacKinnon. Courtesy of of the National Folklore Collection / Cnuasach
Bhéaloideas Éireann UCD
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