On the Gaelic Idea
William Sharp and Fiona Macleod, Part 3
This is Part 3 of a series. It stands alone as an essay about Scottish literature and its uses and abuses of Gaelic, but reading Part 1 and Part 2 may help. If you want to dive straight in here, then all you need to know is that William Sharp and Fiona Macleod were “Celtic Twilight” writers from Scotland at the end of the 19th century, and that they were the same person.
Frauds are glamorous. It’s easy to be enthralled with the romance and forget the defrauded. Not unrelatedly, when writing about minority languages, it’s easy to be preoccupied with everything the majority culture has done and forget what is actually happening in the minority. The dynamic is there in the term itself: the language becomes defined by its minority status relative to something larger. When the majority of what is written about a minority language is written in a majority language, this dynamic metastasises. Here I am, doing the same again. Here is Crìsdean MacIlleBhàin in his classic essay Against Self-Translation, discussing the insistent habit of publishing Gaelic poetry in facing English translation (usually with English on the eye-catching right):
English is a language into which remarkably little gets translated. Why then is there all this hurry to get whatever is written in Gaelic published in English as soon as possible? In case I need to spell the answer out, what matters is to dispense with the Gaelic text, to render it superfluous. [emphasis mine]
So what was happening in Scottish Gaelic literature, and in the political life of the Gàidhealtachd, when Fiona Macleod was writing her fraud of Celtic life?
As William Sharp was writing his first book in 1881, a community of tenant farmers began a rent strike on the slopes of Beinn Lì. They were protesting the denial of grazing rights by their landlord. In 1882, they burned the summons presented by his officers, and on the 19th of April they fought a battle against 50 police sent to arrest ringleaders. The crofters’ brutal treatment made national news, and was a major prompt for the Napier Commission in which Gaelic speakers gave testimony about their oppression. The Commission led to some legal protections for crofters in Achd na Croitearachd (the Crofting Act) of 1886. The events are commemorated in the Òran Beinn Lì of Màiri Nighean Iain Bhàin:
Thugaibh taing dhan a’ mhuinntir
Tha fo riaghladh na Bànrigh,
Rinn an lagh dhuinn cho diongmhalt’
’S nach caill sinn Beinn Lì.Cuiribh beannachd le aiteas
Gu tuathanaich Bhaltois.
Bha air tùs anns a’ bhatail,
’S nach do mheataich san strì.1
This was far from the only such fight, and far from Màiri’s only song. She was and is known as Màiri Mhòr nan Òran, Great Mary of the Songs, and was the leading bard of the Gaelic land struggle. She performed at events in community halls across the Gàidhealtachd, her songs recording and distributing news of current events alongside tributes to the land and rousing calls to action, often all within the same song. “Cuimhnichibh gur sluagh sibh / Is cumaibh suas ùr còir”2 she sings in Eilean a’ Cheò, after a history of oppression in the island and praise for its landscape.
This struggle and its literature were long. In 1841, several communities in Diùranais rioted in the face of eviction threat. In 1852-3, the people of the Còigach three times turned back sherrif’s officers. In both cases, women placed themselves at the forefront of the forceful resistance, both leading the movement and understanding their strategic role in gaining sympathy (as also recorded in Òran Beinn Lì); both cases, like on Beinn Lì, resistors took the strategy of burning the English language summons so that they could not be served; both cases were widely covered by the national press; in both cases, resistors won a partial victory against eviction. In 1888, in Puing, 400 women and men raided a farm to reclaim it for small-scale crofting, as part of land raids across the island and the Gàidhealtachd. Joni Buchanan writes in The Lewis Land Struggle that:
Lewis, down to the present day, retains a substantial rural population for one reason above all others. It is that, at crucial points in the island’s history, its people were prepared to resist the power of landlordism and insist on their right to remain on the land which they occupied.
Leòdhas also holds some of the few remaining strongholds of Gaelic language community. Although this land war is remembered poorly in English (and in working class history in the UK in general), memorials in Leòdhas named for heroes remember the land struggle, and a similar memorial is now planned for the Còigach. The what3words for the site of the Durness Riot is occupy.afterglow.revives.
This Gaelic political resistance took place at the same time as work to preserve and further Gaelic literature. In 1860-62, Iain Òg Ìle published Popular Tales of the West Highlands, a scrupulously-compiled anthology of oral culture which made the argument for a historical and uniquely Gaelic oral tradition, the reality from which MacPherson’s Ossian had tried to make a fraud. A continuous stream of community bards, drawing on the Gaelic song tradition, wrote poetry recording and celebrating community life within global events well into the 20th century. At the turn of the century, an t-Athair Ailean Dòmhnallach drew on this bardic tradition and his own folklore collection to produce innovative religious and secular poetry. The first Gaelic language novel, Dùn-Àluinn, no an t-Oighre 'na Dhìobarach was published in serial in 1910.
The Scottish Gaelic political and literary scene at the end of the 19th Century was vibrant with resistance and future-making, tradition-gathering and literary innovation, all taking place after the long century of dispossession, eviction, famine, economic warfare and forced colonial emigration known as the Fuadaichean (Clearances). In Ireland, meanwhile, there had been a century of physical force rebellions in the wake of the 1800 Act of Union, leading to a doomed effort to resolve the tensions of Irish nationalism through Home Rule. The Celtic Revival of Yeats and Russell, to whom Sharp wrote his posthumous note, was fully committed to this political movement. I lack the expertise and time to fully explore the literary and political connections between the Scottish and Irish Gàidhealtachdan of the period, but Màiri Mhòr knew them well: Òran Beinn Lì nicknames the rebellion’s leader as Pàrnell, after the Irish Land Leaguer and leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party Charles Stewart Parnell.
Thus when Fiona Macleod was writing the precursor to the (equally unmoored and Anglophone) genre of modern Celtic fantasy, she was writing at a time of cacophonous literary and political resistance, spanning the run of social life from community halls to political parties. It is in this context that we must understand her pronouncements on politics in Celtic language settings:
[I]t is time that a prevalent pseudo-nationalism should be dissuaded. I am proud to be a Highlander, but I would not side with those who would “set the heather on fire.” If I were Irish, I would be proud, but I would not lower my pride by marrying it to a ceaseless ill-will, an irreconcilable hate, for there can be a nobler pride in unvanquished acquiescence than in futile revolt. I would be proud if I were Welsh, but I would not refuse to learn English, or to mix with English as equals. And proud as I might be to be Highland, or Scottish, or Irish, or Welsh, or English, I would be more proud to be British – for there, at last, we have a bond to unite us all, and to give us space for every ideal, whether communal or individual, whether national or spiritual.
(This and other Macleod quotations here are from the essay ‘For the Beauty of an Idea’, republished in the collected works, in the volume entitled The Winged Destiny; Studies in the Spiritual History of the Gael)
There is no mention in Macleod of issues of economic justice or democratic will, of land rights or political disenfranchisement. Her only interest is the spiritual, and for her the chief attraction of Celticism is its imagined “unvanquished acquiescence”. “I am ever but the more convinced that the dream of an outward independence is a perilous illusion – not because it is impracticable, for that alone is a fascination to us, but because it does not, cannot alas, reveal those dominant elements which alone can control dreams”. Gaelic political life must end so that it can become a dream; Gaelic language culture must die so that it can revivify English with its imagined Celtic spirit. “One must not choose the backwater and declare that is is the main stream, or have the little tributary say that though it travels on the great flow it is not part of the river.” Britain, the union and the English language are here imagined as the great streams which are the stronger for their “reconciliation” of different cultures – in Macleod’s own terms, of different races. “The Celt falls, but his spirit rises in the heart and the brain of the Anglo-Celtic peoples, with whom are the destinies of the generations to come.”
Remember that, despite her declaration that she is a Highlander, Fiona Macleod has no claim to Gaelic heritage. She is William Sharp’s dream, his longed-for fantasy of Celtic femininity. She does not speak the language, has no stake in the economy, invents the mythology, and shows no awareness of the political struggle. In contemporary terms, she is a cultural appropriation, but I think this language fails to fully grasp the politics of what is happening. “Cultural appropriation” is not an ethical failing or a creative faux pas but a political strategy. At the strongest moment of political resistance to the economic order in the Gàidhealtachd in over a century, William Sharp creates Fiona Macleod as a fraudulent Gaelic voice calling on Gaels to lay down their arms because their cause is already lost, because defeat is the Celt’s spritual destiny. The appropriation is a political reaction: it is an attempt by the majority culture to claim the minority culture, to render Gaelic and Gaeldom superfluous, to say that the only future available is assimilation as the oppressor’s dream. This isn’t an interpretation: it’s Macleod’s stated political project.
This is far from the last time we will see Gaelic reduced to a dream, an idea in service of a broader national project. Where Fiona Macleod has her beautiful idea, Hugh MacDiarmid has his “Gaelic idea”.
Hugh MacDiarmid is another Gaelic penname for a Scottish author without Gaelic language and with the thinnest claim on Gaelic cultural heritage: Christopher Murray Grieve. He was a founding member of the National Party for Scotland (later the SNP), which he left after five years for being a communist, and then a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, from which he was expelled after five years for being a nationalist. He is now chiefly known as a leading figure in the Scots language revival, largely responsible for repurposing Scots as a language for contemporary poetry and political concerns. It is likely that I would never have become a Scots language writer without his work.3
In ‘The Caledonian Antisyzygy and the Gaelic Idea’, MacDiarmid lays out an early form of his intellectual and political programme for Scotland and the role of Gaelic within it:
The essential point is that all fixed opinions — all ideas that are not entertained just provisionally and experimentally — every attempt to regard any view as permanent — every identification of Scottish genius with any particular religion or political doctrine — every denial of the relativity and transience of all thought, any failure to ‘play with’ ideas — and above all the stupid (since self-stultifying) idea that ideas are not of prime consequence in their qualitative ratio and that it is possible to be over-intellectual — are anti-Scottish — opposed to our national genius which is capable of countless manifestations at absolute variance with each other, yet confined within the ‘limited infinity’ of the adjective ‘Scottish’.
This is MacDiarmid’s “Gaelic Idea” (there is considerable slippage between “Scottish” and “Gaelic” in his essay): that Scottishness comprises internal contradiction, the combination of irreconcilable parts. He seeks “a renewed Scottish plea for diversity as against uniformity in keeping with our essential national genius”. For MacDiarmid, language politics is the prototypical case, the best example of how Englishness has collapsed potential into monoculture:
Just as in British arts and letters we have lost incalculable strength and variety by putting all our eggs in the basket of the main English tradition — excluding the great Gaelic literatures of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, Scots vernacular literature, and literature in the diverse English dialects — extirpating their racy native dialects from the speech of our children in a psychologically outrageous and culturally sterilizing fashion in the interests of snobbish convention — so in politics the position in which England finds itself today, and must increasingly find itself, is just retribution for the selfish imperialism which in these islands particularly and in the organization and policy of the empire generally has insisted by the most unscrupulous means on English ascendancy rather than on that synthesis of the potential contributions of the various elements, the fostering of which would have added so enormously to the vitality, variety, and breadth of a truly British tradition.
However, “from the point of view of the Gaelic idea, knowledge of, or indeed even the existence of, Gaelic is immaterial”, and “[i]t would not matter so far as positing it is concerned whether there had never been any Gaelic language or literature, not to mention clans and tartans, at all”. Worse still, “almost all the Gaelic speakers have been hopelessly false or unequal to their trust”. MacDiarmid prefers a Gaelic learner (like me) with political commitment to his Scottish project than any attention to actually existing political, cultural and economic conditions in the Gàidhealtachd. His preference for such flights of literary fantasy over attention to material conditions leads him to advocate, in a sympathetic consideration of Wyndham Lewis on Hitler, for a “Blutsgefühl in Scotland” which could perhaps stabilise “European civilization, and, behind that, white supremacy”.
It’s ironic, then, that MacDiarmid claims that his project has “no relationship whatever with the Celtic Twilight”. Reading MacDiarmid alongside Macleod (but aren’t the given names here perfect?—Grieve alongside Sharp), the connection is startling in its clarity: both seek the subsumption of Gaelic language and life into a wider national project, one Scottish and one British; both praise their national project as the space for many contradictory cultures. MacDiarmid begins his essay with a consideration of the concept of G. Gregory Smith’s Caledonian Antisyzysy, the double split that MacDiarmid praises as essentially. Smith takes as a significant example of this imagined national characteristic, writers’ “escape, each in his own way, from the oppression of fact; as in one in bookish affection for the mystery-lady of Iona”. In the index this is revealed as a reference to William Sharp.
It’s easy to condemn MacDiarmid — and how can even a self-contradictory call to copy Hitler’s project in Scotland not be condemned? — but he should never be accused of consistency. In 1940, he published the Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry, including English translations of Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair and Donnchadh Bàn Mac an t-Saoir, which he produced from bridge translations by Somhairle MacGill-Eain. The Gaelic was not included; nor were the Scots poems in the volume given English translations. He chose exactly the same poems that Elizabeth Sharp chose, again providing only the English, for her Lyra Celtica 40 years earlier. But MacDiarmid was also a significant champion for Somhairle MacGill-Eain’s own work, and for that of Deòrsa Mac Iain Dheòrsa: he ensured that they would be published, praised them in the presses, and leant his reputation to establishing theirs. On the one hand, it was necessary to MacDiarmid’s political project (which did eventually abandon advocacy for fascism) that contemporary Gaelic literature exist; on the other hand, he did work hard to support Gaelic writers in their own terms. There was a brief period in the mid-Twentieth century where linguistic pluralism, with Scots and Gaelic supporting each other, was the true avant garde. Gaelic literature now would look very different without such giants.
I am rather tired of the Caledonian Antisyzygy as the guiding metaphor for Scottish literature. I wonder if it would have lasted so long were it not for how cool it looks on the page and how smug you feel when you can reliably pronounce it. I’m working at the moment on a paper about the use of trans fantasies by major writers of the Scottish fin de millénaire: it couldn’t be more clear that the trans devils and angels of the Scottish gender novel are a way of rewriting this tired trope for the period of national identity crisis around Devolution. I’m less interested in my own life as a symbol and more interested in how I get by from day to day, negotiating medical care, economic marginalisation, cultural disenfranchisement and street violence. I don’t, for all I hold multiple sexes in my name and my history, spend a great deal of time any more thinking about how exciting it is to be both. Similarly, I wonder if the antisyzygy is more a product of empire than a counter to it, more how majority culture copes with being haunted than anything descriptive of minority culture itself. I see fewer doubles when I stand in the Gaelic perspective; when I stand in my own Orkney, I only see double when I think in English. But then, I will only ever gain languages, and am unlikely to fully lose them: I always will think, and always think often, in English.
In 2023, the Scottish Government introduced the Scottish Languages Bill, giving both Gaelic and Scots official language status. The Bill is remarkable for its total lack of economic and political commitment to the languages. The problems facing Gaelic and Scots are socioeconomic: rural depopulation, reduction of opportunities to work in the language, astronomical rates of second home ownership and holiday lets in the very communities where minority languages are strongest. As the campaign organisation Misneachd wrote, “[Chan] eil e soilleir dè bhios an inbhe seo [sgìrean cànain sònraichte] a’ ciallachadh no dè seòrsa ghoireasan, structaran-taic agus guth coimhearsnachd a bhiodh ann, nam biodh sìon, aig ìre nas ionadail”.4 Misneachd propose a specific political structure and level of funding for Gaelic language heartlands as an amendment to the Bill. It remains to be seen whether anything like that will be adopted. No such proposal is present for Scots. The Bill seems to prefer official status and resources for beginner learners to confronting the socioeconomic realities of rural minority language communities. It seems to me as if the Scottish Government needs Scots and Gaelic to exist in order to affirm a national identity, but not to present any cultural or economic threat to the existing political order: it is as if what the Scottish Government wants is a Gaelic idea. As Màiri Mhòr sang: “Tha mi sgith de luchd na Beurla”.
What I’ve Made
I’ve been up a few mountains recently and written about them on my blog, Munros 4 Trans Liberation.
I was part of a group of six artists commissioned by Culture Counts to “dream of a fairer future for culture”. I’ve written a long letter about the wreck of EDI as a political ideology and am putting it in the post rather than online. If you’d like to read it, you can sign up to get it here.
What I’m Doing
On 27th April I’ll be at Lyra Bristol Poetry Festival, in person and online.
What I’m Reading
Katharena Vermette’s real ones is a big-feeling novel about ethnic fraud in the Indigenous context.
Hanna Silva’s My Child, the Algorithm is about queer parenting and AI: at a time when capital is making a bore of procedural writing, it’s a human approach to the machine.
Torrey Peters’ Stag Dance republishes three bleakly hilarious novellas of contemporary trans life alongside a new contemporary novel that has the best sentences I’ve read all year.
Give thanks to the people who, under the rule of the Queen, gave us a law so steadfast that we won’t lose Ben Lee. Send glad blessings to the farmers of Valtos who were the source of the battle and who did not weaken in the struggle.
Remember you are a people and stand up for your rights
For readers unfamiliar with the terminology: Scots and Scottish Gaelic are two very different languages from two different families. Scots is Germanic, to a greater or lesser degree mutually intelligible with English, spoken (roughly) in the south and east and in the Northern Isles. Gaelic is Celtic, to a greater or lesser degree mutually intelligible with Irish, spoken (roughly) in the north and west and in the Western Isles. The two languages used to overlap a great deal; now it is rare to speak both. It is the main language in which I write: I came to Gaelic as a learner.
It’s not clear what this status [special language areas] will mean, nor what sort of resources, support structures and community voice would exist, if any, at a more local level.