Scottish Traditional Tales Read online

  Apart from the home fireside there were plenty of other places where long stories might be told in rural Victorian Scotland: at the camp firesides where travelling people met; by the kiln fires of big water-mills, which were often gathering-places on winter evenings; on a journey, where stories could ‘shorten the road’, as the Irish saying has it; or on board a fishing-boat waiting to ‘tide its lines’ (A. T. Cluness called his book of Shetland tales Told Round the Peat Fire, but included a chapter with a description and a fine example of the way in which haaf (great-line) fishermen’s stories had time to digress into ‘episodes, sometimes in themselves containing episodes, and ever returning to the main theme only to diverge again.’10). However, even in Gregor’s youth, stories (mingled with songs and ballads) could not begin until any children at school had ‘prepared their lessons’ by learning passages by heart from books. When it began, ‘the story was for the most of the supernatural’: short and often frightening tales of local fairies, witches and warlocks from the examples he gives, which drove the children to cling to their parents as the fire burned lower ‘with the eyes now fearfully turned to the doors, and now to the chimney, and now to this corner, whence issued the smallest noise, and now to the next, in dread of seeing some of the uncanny brood.’11 Many people in the second half of this century have told us how as children they were frightened to go home in the dark after an evening listening to stories in a neighbour’s house. Other longer traditional tales are not mentioned in Gregor’s account, though he mentions tales of pirates and polar seas, and the wars between England and Scotland (very likely based on chapbooks) and bawdy tales ‘told without the least conception that there was any indecency in them’. Elsewhere he refers to quarterers, ‘a class of respectable beggars’ who were given lodgings in return for the news they carried, and sometimes their skill in music, medicine or repairs; chapmen or pedlars who stayed the night; and travelling tailors, who used to live in their customers’ houses while they made up garments for them from cloth woven by a local weaver out of the householder’s own homespun wool and flax.12 The visiting tailor or cobbler is often mentioned in stories (see Nos. 69a and 87b, and cf. 28) and might well tell stories himself as he sat cross-legged at his sewing: so might quarterers, as well as bringing news; so might chapmen, as well as selling chapbooks and ballad sheets.

  The accounts of Highland storytelling from around the same time which John Francis Campbell ‘of Islay’ published in the introduction to his Popular Tales of the West Highlands paint a similar scene, but the work element is less emphasised and many of the stories told are different: Hector MacLean13 wrote that people in ‘the Islands of Barra . . . appear to be fondest of those tales which describe exceedingly rapid changes of place in very short portions of time’ – heroic or romantic adventure tales, not local legends, and ones which drew from the audience every reaction from loud laughter to ‘almost shedding tears’ . That part of the Gaelic-speaking Highlands would not have had to wait for stories till after the school homework or, as happened at least once a week in most Lowland farm kitchens by the end of the century, the reading of the local newspaper; but MacLean claimed that in Protestant North Uist and Harris ‘these tales are nearly gone, and this I believe to be owing partly to reading, which in a manner supplies a substitute for them, partly to bigoted religious ideas, and partly to narrow utilitarian views’. In fact ‘these tales’ can only be the long hero-tales, for many folktales, and not only local legends, survived in North Uist to be recorded a century or more after Maclean wrote in 1860, and even from Lewis, where the early nineteenth-century evangelists had perhaps the greatest impact: there are in this book late twentieth-century recordings of international tale-types and even a version of a religious exemplum well-known in Catholic Ireland (No. 49 below). But Hector Urquhart from Poolewe14 confirmed that in Wester Ross by 1859 there were no longer the gatherings of young and old there had been on winter nights when he was a boy, to listen to stories from travelling tailors, shoemakers or other visitors known for their ‘store of tales’, or for the company to set each other riddles or discuss the Fenian heroes. ‘The minister came to the village in 1830, and the schoolmaster soon followed, who put a stop in our village to such gatherings; and in their place we were supplied with heavier tasks than listening to the old shoemaker’s fairy tales.’ In 1859 he could find few of the old storytellers or their stories left – but again, the céilidh (in its original sense, a visit to a neighbour’s house which might include singing, storytelling, riddles, card-playing or just conversation) was not totally stamped out anywhere that Gaelic was spoken, and we have been able to include stories from twentieth-century Wester Ross.

  The Gaelic – speaking parts of the Highlands and Islands are one place where only now the new electronic media, the drift away from the crofts and a general decline in sociability between neighbours have apparently finally put a stop to ceilidhing. Though in Barra or South Uist today we know of nobody who knows long hero-tales from oral tradition, there are one or two elsewhere, and there should still be a handful of Gaels who have learned traditional tales of some sort in their traditional context living into the twenty-first century. The only other part of Scotland where anything like ceilidhing remained a regular part of social life in the twentieth century was Shetland, where the habit of calling ‘in aboot da nyht’ for a chat, a game of cards, some fiddle-tunes or songs or stories was well-established in the long winter evenings. Men could use the pretext of ‘guising’ for visits around Hallowe’en and the ‘24 Nights of Yule’ and in practice such visiting took place at any time from the end of October until February. Women still met to work together at wool-cardings or spinnings (bringing their spinning-wheels as Gregor described, and with luck getting them carried home by their boyfriends), right up till the 1930s, and ‘makkins’ where they would knit for the host family, went on at least until the Second World War: these meetings lasted usually from early afternoon till eleven at night, ending with supper and a dance, and must surely have aided the passing on of stories as well as songs.15 But most stories were probably told in much the same circumstances as Gregor describes, and the same sort predominated: local legends, often about named people from the past century or two, as often as not with an element of witchcraft or the supernatural in them.

  In Orkney the occasions for storytelling seem to have diminished earlier, but James Henderson (born 1903) gave us a vivid second-hand description of how it was a hundred years ago:16 ‘I’ve heard my mother sayin aboot the nights’ – the echo of the Shetland term may be more than a coincidence – ‘in some ways it was almost like a ceilidh . . . She remembered the neighbours used to come in: her mother would be sitting spinning and her father sitting makin these straw bands, and men would com in, women would com in – well, they all worked, they would be knitting or doing something. And say, one old fella would tell a story of his days in the Nor-Wast’ – with the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada – ‘another fella his time at the whalin; so-and-so he always sang a certain song, ye see . . . They all had their bits they did,’ and the stories of many sorts which James himself remembered must have been told there alongside the old men’s reminiscences.

  On the Scots-speaking mainland funny stories and anecdotes of local characters, ghost stories and brief accounts of local events – persecuted Covenanters, illicit distilling, murdered packmen, shipwrecks – can still be picked up in many places, but the longer and more magical tales have come to be thought of usually as something you read in books. There was one group of people, however, who kept up regular fireside gatherings to tell stories well into this century. They used to be known as ‘tinkers’, from tin-smithing, a skilled trade which most of their men could practise (until it was rendered redundant by the introduction of plastic containers in the past fifty years), but this name was also used by many non-tinkers as a byword for dirt and dishonesty and all those qualities people like to associate with groups who are recognisably different from themselves. As a result they now prefer to
be called ‘travelling people’ or ‘travellers’ – but the latter form at least is confusing: it is also used by English Romanies, who likewise want to avoid the associations of ‘gypsies’ or ‘gippoes’, and can be applied to commercial travellers (sales representatives) or tramps and other wanderers, and now to the urban drop-outs who call themselves ‘New Age Travellers’ – all groups whom Scottish travellers may either tolerate or view as rivals, but few of whom they would consider as in any way related to themselves. For precision I have therefore often replaced ‘travellers’ by ‘cairds’, a Scots form of their Gaelic name (meaning craftsmen), which for most people is less likely to carry derogatory implications than ‘tinkers’ or ‘tinks’, and is respected at least as a family name.

  Whatever you call them, the cairds did travel and until this century, when the law requiring them to send their children to school for at least a hundred days in the year made many families spend the winters in houses, they camped by the roads they travelled on, the farms they worked on or the rivers they fished for mussels with freshwater pearls. At the camp fires in the evenings, especially where more than one family was camped together, there was too little light to work late except in high summer, or to read if anyone could (around the turn of the century a few children taken as we would now say ‘into care’, because the authorities felt their parents could not provide for them, had been taught to read at ‘industrial schools’ and found their families again after they left). The only possible amusement was to tell stories, sing, ask riddles or simply talk around the fire – and anyone who has camped with Scouts or Guides, on military service or a walking holiday with friends, will probably recognise the situation. If there was little or nothing to eat, at least a story might take the young ones’ minds off it. Mothers told bedtime stories in the dark tents, and during the day, when the men might all be off working in the tattie fields and the women hawking round the houses, an old man, left in charge of the children too old for their mothers to carry and too young to go to work, might tell them long stories from a repertoire amassed over a lifetime. Moreover, in lonelier parts of the country a family of cairds might be lodged in a crofter’s barn and asked into the house for a bite to eat, and to exchange news, stories or songs, or mend a sprained ankle or a leaky pot, just like Gregor’s quarterers.17 In this way many stories that settled speakers of Scots – even of Gaelic in some mainland areas – had lost were kept alive by the cairds, like the unwanted children some of them adopted from country girls in trouble. Their hunger for new stories was such that they acquired many that came originally from books or magazines, read or retold to them by country people or the few cairds who had learned to read, and often improved the stories in the telling; they also invented a good many for themselves on traditional models, though only their older tales have been included in this book.

  FUNCTIONS AND CLASSIFICATIONS OF TRADITIONAL TALES

  This collection is intended to give good examples from unpublished sources of all the main kinds of older stories told in various parts of Scotland in the past fifty years, since tape-recording made it fairly easy to take them down as they were told, without forcing the storytellers to slow down for dictation or stop every few minutes while discs or wax cylinders were changed on the recording machinery. Few of them have been taken down in the sort of traditional context described above, since, as explained, the ways of life that included such storytelling gatherings for settled people were lost or declining early this century. However, it is worth describing in some detail the proper habitat of the creature, so to speak – the conditions for which the stories were developed. Likewise, the Notes which follow the stories include brief sketches of the storytellers, as far as we know them, as well as the histories of the stories themselves, as far as we know them. However, this is designed to be a representative collection for students of the folktale from Scotland and elsewhere as well as enjoyable reading for non-scholars. The Notes, and sometimes the stories themselves, will be easier to understand if you read what follows, which includes some definitions and a very potted history of folk narrative research in Scotland and elsewhere: I will try to keep it brief and not too technical.

  Storytellers themselves, in most European cultures, seldom have any clearly defined terms for the different kinds of old stories they tell: these are created by scholars, usually by narrowing down the definition of words that originally just meant ‘story’. For instance, ‘myth’ comes from the ancient Greek for a word, or anything spoken, hence a story of any kind. Some of what we still call the ‘Greek myths’ are tales of magic much like modern ‘fairy-tales’, some are historical legends about the ancestors of various noble lines, some are fables about the origins of creatures, landmarks or constellations. Gods or other supernatural beings played a part in many of them, but by no means all. It was only when philosophers like Plato started to complain, just like some critics of modern television, that the stories which tragedians were using in their plays provided plenty of dramatic situations but not often good examples of moral behaviour, that the term ‘myth’ began to be restricted to stories about gods, right and wrong, life and death – beliefs which mean a lot to people. ‘Fable’, from a Latin word meaning something spoken, has come to be used particularly for parables with a moral whose central characters are animals or inanimate objects. Yet the adjectives from these words, ‘mythical’ and ‘fabulous’, have nothing to do with morals or fundamental beliefs: they are used for imaginary things in stories you are not expected to believe.

  Modern scholarly study of traditional tales began in Germany in 1811, with the publication of the collection Kinder- und Hausmärchen by the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. Their title means something like ‘Children’s and Household Tales’, though we usually know the collection as ‘Grimm’s Fairy-Tales’. Since the helpful ‘fairies’ in such stories are quite unlike the generally dangerous fairies in many fairy legends, like Nos. 64–78 below for example, most folklorists prefer to avoid using the term ‘fairy-tale’ to refer to all such stories, and it is a bit of a problem to know how otherwise to translate the word Märchen. The heart of this genre of traditional tales is the body of ‘tales of magic’ or ‘international wonder-tales’, many of which are known all over Europe and the countries colonised from Europe, and often in Asia, too, though less often in Africa or Oceania: stories like ‘Cinderella’ or ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, which are often set in a vaguely defined country or like ‘The Green Man of Knowledge’ in the Land of Enchantment, and happened ‘once upon a time, long ago’. However, the German word Märchen is usually also extended to other tales with a similar or wider distribution, covered by the Aarne-Thompson index mentioned above, which do not involve magic as such, though they generally include some element which involves the suspension of disbelief: thus the category encompasses animal fables (where animals talk and behave like people), religious tales (with miracles instead of magic), what are called ‘romantic tales’ or ‘novellas’ (which like early novels usually involve incredible luck or coincidences), and various sorts of comic tales and trickster tales (which generally depend on incredible stupidity or credulity on the part of some characters, or sometimes the audience). Some English-speaking scholars simply render Märchen as ‘folktales’, but this sounds like a term for all traditional tales – we prefer the latter as the general term simply because it avoids the implication that these stories are only told by ‘the folk’, a Victorian concept originally synonymous with ‘the peasantry’. The essence of Märchen as distinguished by the Grimms from their other main category, Sagen, is that they do not need to be believed to be literally true, though they may be symbolically true like parables, and so I suggest that the best English term may be ‘fictional folktales’, or ‘fictions’ for short, though I may use the well-established German term too. Some storytellers are convinced that their fictional folktales must have happened somewhere, at some time, and some tell them as something that happened in their own neighbourhood, but the audience does not have
to believe this: the enjoyable way to listen (or read) is to suspend disbelief and relax in sheer escapism, but you can also listen to such stories as parables illustrating a moral message. Many cultures, including African tribes and Scottish cairds, insist that all these tales have a moral and play an important part in educating children. The Grimms thought that they were ‘worn-down myths’, once full of significant messages.

  Max Lüthi, an authority on central European Märchen, points out that they are best told, remembered and picked up by other storytellers with the plot of the story unencumbered by detail. The action is what matters. Descriptions of people, places or things, unless some detail has to be included to make sense of the plot, are brief, and tend to take the form of the single striking epithet – ‘golden apple’, ‘iron castle’, ‘dress of starlight’. This helps to put the wonder into wonder-tales, but the storyteller does not dwell on the detail, and though the audience may be struck by it the first time it is mentioned, the next time they can take it for granted and concentrate on the new action. Repetition, where the same thing happens, typically three times with a difference in the last – the youngest son kills the giant who has killed his two brothers, but the fight is described in almost the same words used for the two earlier battles, right up to the last minute – is perfectly acceptable: it is almost as easy to remember as a single episode, but makes the story longer. Dialogue can be reported as fully or as briefly as the narrator likes, unless it is a spell, command or explanation that is essential to the plot. Characters and places seldom have proper names at all, and from end to end of the story are referred to simply as ‘the prince’, ‘the old man’, ‘the giant’, ‘the fox’, ‘the palace’, ‘the dark forest’. If the hero of a Lowland Scots fictional folktale has a name, it is likely to be Jack (sometimes pronounced Jeck or Jake, but very rarely Jock), the minimal name which typifies the common man, used throughout the English-speaking world for this character, as Hans may be used in German stories and Jean in French ones. Occasionally a hero, villain or magic object may have a more elaborate name – The Green Man of Knowledge, The Speaking Bird of Paradise, say: if so, the whole story will probably be called by that name. All this applies to Lowland Scots and most European Märchen, but not necessarily to Scottish Gaelic or Irish Gaelic ones: this will be explained below.