On the origins of the name Fiona
William Sharp and Fiona Macleod, Part Two
In my last essay we met the fin-de-siècle Scottish authors William Sharp and Fiona Macleod, who were prominent figures in the Celtic Revival in Scottish letters, and who were revealed in 1905 to be the very same person, a person who understood them to be twin expressions of an underlying soul they named “Wilfion”. This time we’re going to look at the origins of the name of Wilfion’s female self, “Fiona”. I believe with some confidence that Fiona Macleod was the very first person to be called Fiona, and is in fact responsible for the name’s contemporary popularity. Tracing the origins of Fiona requires following tangled paths through Scottish literature, investigating the ways that Scotland and the Gàidhealtachd have been imagined.
I should say before I go on that I’m not a trained linguist or lexicographer: I’m just a writer who got transfixed by a pair of weird writers. I have reasonably fluent conversational Gaelic, but am by no means an expert, and am relatively new to the language. Nor am I a historian of James MacPherson and the Ossian controversy. My methods here chiefly involved searching digitised online archives rather than anything truly thorough. All of which is to say, I can’t present my conclusions with certainty. I’m sharing this material because I gathered a good deal I think is interesting, and I hope that better scholars than me will take the work further. There will be mistakes, and I’d be grateful for corrections.
The name Fiona has its origins deeply rooted in Scottish history and boasts a powerful meaning. Derived from the Gaelic word fionn, it translates to white or fair. This name's significance lies in the association with fair or pale skin, highlighting its connection to purity and beauty. Historically, Fiona has been associated with Scotland's rich cultural heritage, often evoking images of majestic landscapes, Celtic traditions, and ancient folklore.
– Ancestry.com
Isn’t the Internet useful for getting straight to the heart of things? In one unsourced paragraph we have a world of ideology: an appeal to Scottish authenticity, colourism of the most blatant kind, and the rooting of both in the glory of a fantasised Highlands. Ancestry.com is entirely right that this is what the name Fiona means to signify, and entirely wrong that it has any kind of authenticity: the name Fiona was in fact manufactured to summon these ideas, though it had no claim to them.
The OUP’s Dictionary of First Names tells us more prosaically that the name Fiona is first used by James MacPherson, in his Ossianic poems. MacPherson is a sort of Patient Zero for odd ideas about Scotland. In his twenties, after trips to the Gàidhealtachd to collect oral tradition, he published first Fragments of Ancient Poetry and then Fingal. These were presented as English translations of epics in Scottish Gaelic that had been passed down orally in their entirety, all originally composed by Ossian (Oisean), the blind poet and son of Fingal (Fionn). Ossian was imagined as a sort of Gaelic Homer, and MacPherson as his faithful translator. The publication was a huge international success, a deep inspiration to Romantics from Byron to Beethoven, believed by Jefferson to be the work of “the greatest Poet that ever existed”, carried by Napoleon on campaigns, and also immediately attacked, particularly within Britain, as a fraud. Samuel Johnson was particularly vituperative, calling the manuscripts “another proof of Scotch conspiracy in national falsehood”, MacPherson a “cheat”, and Gaelic the “rude speech of a barbarous people, who had few thoughts to express, and were content, as they conceived grossly, to be grossly understood”. In other words, Ossian was a battleground for national identity, recruited for Scottishness on the one hand and repudiated for Britishness on the other, symbolising Romantic heroism to some and fraudulent posturing to others. The debate raged for over a century, with Gaelic speakers and scholars most often sidelined.
Fiona does not appear in the Fragments, but she appears once in Fingal, footnoted as “a fair maid”. This is I think the origin of the etymological association with fairness, which is indeed derived from the Gaelic word “fionn”, though in a non-Gaelic form. However, something surprising happens when we go to the supposed Gaelic originals from which MacPherson worked. These were produced during the Ossianic controversy in order to prove the authenticity of his work; their authenticity itself came to be doubted, and later scholars have strongly suggested that they are in fact back translations of the English originals. This then led to an astonishing 1870 document by Archibald Clerk which retranslated the Gaelic manuscripts back into verse English. In this version, the Fiona of the English prose original becomes Evir (Eibhir), a name genuinely found in the oral tradition. In the footnote containing the prose original, the formally unaccented Fiona becomes Fiöna. This may be where this pronunciation originates: one would have to trawl every edition of Fingal to trace its emergence. But in this version there’s now another Fiona: Fìona, given as the Gaelic verse “original” of the English prose’s “Foina-bragal”. This Fìona, however, is explained in the endnotes as bring pronounced accurately to the Gaelic spelling as “FEE-na”, not the “Fee-OH-na” we’re now familiar with and which is indicated by the now-appearing umlaut. So we have an English Fiöna who’s a Gaelic Eibhir, and a Gaelic Fìona who’s an English Foina-bragal, except that this is all derived from an English poetry translation of the Gaelic poetry back-translation of the English prose original that was derived from Gaelic oral culture. Are you lost? I’m lost.
At this point it’s worth having a look at Dr Sharon Krossa’s work on the name Fiona, which I turned to for mine. As Sharon notes, there’s no Gaelic precedence for either using -a as a feminine diminutive or emphasising a second syllable O in this way. “Fee-OH-na” just doesn’t sound very Gaelic, and certainly not when derived from Fionn (pronounced, very roughly, Fyunn). A similar error sometimes occurs in an Anglicised pronunciation of Catrìona, strangely emphasising the O. I wonder, though couldn’t possibly prove, if this odd pronunciation derives by analogy with the island of Iona, itself the product of a Medieval transcription error: it used to be “Ioua”. Is Fiona just errors all the way down? Is any name or any word anything but a history of mistakes?
It’s time to turn to our friend Wilfion. In 1896, Fiona explained her name in a letter:
It may interest you to know that the name which seems to puzzle so many people is (though it does exist as the name Fiona, not only in Ossian but at the present day, though rarely) the Gaelic diminutive of Fionaghal (i.e. Flora). Fiona, however, and not Fionaghal, is my name. For the rest — I was born more than a thousand years ago, in the remote region of Gaeldom known as the Hills of Dream. There I have lived the better part of my life, my father’s name was Romance, and that of my mother was Dream. I have no photograph of their abode, which is just under the quicken-arch immediately west of the sunset-rainbow. You will easily find it. Nor can I send you a photograph of myself. My last fell among the dew-wet heather, and is now doubtless lining the cells of the wild bees.
All this authentic information I gladly send you!
In another letter, however, William makes a different claim. Acknowledging again the rarity of the name, he says “It is an old Celtic name (meaning "a fair maid") still occasionally to be found.” This definition is, as we’ve seen, taken whole from MacPherson. The pronunciation, which he does define elsewhere as fee-OH-na, likely also derives from MacPherson: William edited an 1888 edition which maintains the accent on Fiona. Fionnghal is a genuine name, and its traditional English equivalent is Flora, but the pronunciation of its first part sounds nothing like the modern Fiona. It seems that William and Fiona were unnable to keep their story straight, and less able still to source it accurately. In their last birthday letters to each other, in September 1905, Fiona signs as Fiona, and William addresses her, amidst typically inaccurate Gaelic, as “Fionaghal mo run”. Both acknowledge that her address is still the Hills of Dream.
I can’t disprove their claim that the name is of genuine Gaelic provenance, maintained outwith Ossian, but I can say that they have not proved themselves reliable authorities, that the name doesn’t conform to Gaelic norms, that I’ve found no earlier record of the name in Gaelic texts, and that there are either no or vanishingly few people called Fiona recorded in the Scottish census before Fiona Macleod published Pharais.
Looking at the available digitised records at scotlandspeople.gov.uk, I’ve found 11 possible Fionas before Fiona Macleod published. I looked at their original entries:
A couple of these are certainly Flora. One of them looks to me like James. A couple could be genuine Fionas, but it would need a good handwriting analyst to tell you. What seems to have happened is that the later existence of the name Fiona has shaped the interpretation of the public records during digitisation: by believing that the name exists, the digitiser, whether human or machine, has erroneously created it in the past.
It is possible that Fionas existed independently of Fiona Macleod, but if they did it was certainly a rare name. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, the records show 19 Fionas, then 24 in the next, 115 in the next, and, from 1931-1940, 643. Fiona first entered Scotland’s top ten girls’ names in 1958, and stayed there for over 20 years. In 2022 Fiona was the most popular girl’s name in Lichtenstein; in 2024, she ranked 34th at babynames.com. Back in Scotland, by 2023, the name had fallen to 439th place, with only 7 Fionas: the lowest national Fiona rate since Fiona was invented. In top place? A name derived from an island and given a pronunciation that diverges from the Gaelic original because of how Anglophone speakers render it: Isla.
I have notes on various other instances of this troubled sequence of letters. It is used elsewhere in MacPherson to refer to what we now spell as the Fianna, the warrior bands at the heart of Irish and Scottish oral culture. I found in discussion of Fragments of Irish Annals one reference to the Saxon Alfrid as “Flann Fiona, son of Ossa, king of Saxonland, the famous wise man, the pupil of Adamnan.” In 1865, Emanuel Boutcher bought a boat and named it Fiona, derived from an earlier ship of his Lafonia. In 1868, his daughter was named after the boat: Emily Honora Fiona Boutcher. None of these seem to me plausible origins for the later popular name.
Here’s my provisional conclusion: either MacPherson coined the name as a brief fantastical aside, or one of his editors did by misinterpreting Fìona and introducing a different accent. This single mention never caught on the way other Ossianic names like Malvina and Oscar did, but William Sharp plucked it from obscurity. The popular success of Fiona Macleod led others to adopt the name, just as people started calling their children Merida after Disney Pixar’s Brave. (Merida is now only a little less popular than Fiona in Scotland.) The name took on a life of its own. In 1929, Annie Swan, later Vice President of the Scottish National Party, published the Romance Fiona Macrae, with an archetypically Scottish heroine. In 2001, Shrek’s Princess Fiona was one of the first ever computer-animated humans, a parody Disney Princess who made a bird explode in a singing competition. In an early test screenings, the uncanny hyperrealism of Princess Fiona’s face made children cry: later versions made her more of a cartoon. Of course, like Merida, she had red hair.
Scottish people (and their fanciers) continue to try and make up names that sound Gaelic — but many of our names have their roots in half-remembered language. Hamish is just Seumas in the vocative case. We drop an H in Màiri because the more Hs there are, the more Gaelicky it is. This is, incidentally, the same error that Fiona Macleod made in titling her novel Pharais: she took the title from a poem, not realising that the word, meaning “paradise”, was being used in that context in the genitive case, which lenites and slenderises the noun. A local restaurant, Nàdair, did exactly the same thing last year: they wanted the Gaelic for “nature”, presumably because the more Gaelic something is, the more natural it is, which is very important for a restaurant, and then extracted the word from a quotation without realising it was in the wrong grammatical case. The pursuit of authenticity always produces the inauthentic. The pursuit of an idea of Gaelic excludes Gaelic language and culture as it is actually practised here and now.
But it was ever thus. MacPherson did the same thing, as did all of his readers, Jefferson and Napoleon included, each turning an idea of Gaelic heroic poetry to their own purposes. As for the truth of Ossian, I think it’s best to read Derick Thompson / Ruaraidh MacThòmais:
MacPherson was neither as honest as he claimed nor as inventive as his opponents implied. In Fingal, his most elaborate work, we can identify at least twelve passages, some of them fairly lengthy, in which he used genuine Gaelic ballad sources, sometimes specific versions. [...] He used many names from the ballads, often distorting them violently, and he juggled historical data to suit his own ends.
That is, there was epic poetry being transmitted in Gaelic oral culture, and MacPherson did make use of it: his Ossian was, whether he intended this or not, his own creation, stitching together sources to his own ends. Ossian came from the desire to create a Gaelic epic, and that desire shaped how MacPherson worked with the source material. On the one hand, the controversy kicked up a great storm of noise which obscured the actually existing culture and led to the perpetuation of the Johnsonian view which is still common, that the whole thing was a total fabrication. On the other hand, the controversy did spark a great deal of research into the original poetry, and more of it is now recorded in books than might have been otherwise.
The same might be true of Fiona Macleod. She wrote in favour of a Celtic Revival, and promoted a purelyAnglophone interpretation of Gaelic culture in Scotland. She provoked an interest in all things Scottish Celtic, an interest more likely to fantasise than anything else, but perhaps some readers were led into clearer waters. Then again, as a correspondent to the Oban Times wrote in 1902:
I do not wish to enter the thorny pathways of the Ossian controversy, but I should like to question one remark made by the writer of the article. He says of Ossian “its influence is not to be found in any modern work.” Well, for my own part, I suspect its influence is found in every page written over the signature “Fiona MacLeod.” I should like to know if, in the opinion of Highland scholars, this is an argument for or against the authenticity of these peculiar modern works considering them as products of a genuine “Celtic Revival.” The word “fake” is sometimes heard not very indistinctly muttered about them. I should like to hear what is the genuine opinion of native-born Highlanders.
It would be a mistake, though, simply to strike down Fiona as inauthentic in the interests of the pure authenticity of Gaelic cultures: native-born Highlanders are as capable of making up nonsense as anyone else. No teller of stories in an oral culture transmits a pure source unshaped by the prejudices and interests of their own time. Indeed, the very idea of Gaeldom as an untainted authentic root — of Fiona as connoting the “purity and beauty” of “Celtic traditions and ancient folklore” — is what gets us in such a mess. This is not to say that all cultures are a free-for-all, let alone minoritised cultures that have struggled for centuries against an oppressive Anglosphere, but that all living culture is a dialogue between the ideas of the past and the interests of the future, between authentic lies and inauthentic truths. I’ll turn to this more in the next piece, which will look at the wider meaning of Sharp’s and Macleod’s Celticism, and how it’s been incorporated into Scottish ideologies through modernism and beyond.
I would be sad if the name Fiona fell out of use. I’m very fond of many Fionas and am always excited to share what I’ve learned about their name: I’ve not met one who’s disappointed by the origins yet. What name isn’t a strange layering of centuries of storytelling? Fiona derives from texts and arguments that were central to Scottish literature, to the idea of Scotland, to what Scotland is today. If you’re looking for the complex truth of Scotland, you can’t do much better than a parody Disney Princess derived from a Celtic fantasy derived from a mistranscription of an invented translation of, somewhere, once, a story in verse, rehearsed and remembered and reconstructed, that one person told to another. Fiona is a truth told about a lie told about a truth told about a lie — and what’s more Scottish than that?
After Sharp’s death, his friend Catherine Janvier wrote an article for the North American Review, an account (and defense) of his life and work. She closes with a story of some time she and her husband had spent with William and Elizabeth on the Clyde coast in 1898, only a couple of years after Fiona Macleod had emerged into the world. As they were rowing along, so she says, they spotted a little white fishing boat with “Fiona” on the prow. A fisher stood up inside, and they spoke to him, thinking at last to find some authentic evidence of the name:
Mr. Sharp said to him: “That's a pretty name of your boat. For sure, it's a real name?”
The man answered in a very soft, agreeable voice: “Oh yes; for sure it's a real name.”
“And will it be the name of some one you know?”
“Ay, I've heard that the daughter of Mr. McLane—the minister out Iona way—is called Fiona.”
“Ah then, it will be after her?”
“No, no; for sure, it wasn't after her.”
“Then it will be after your wife or your sweetheart?”
“Ah, no, it only will be after a writing lady, a great Highland lady.”
“Oh, a writing lady. Who will that be ?”
“Well, she will be called Miss Fiona Macleod.”
What I’m Doing
On March 15th and 16th I’ll be at StAnza Poetry Festival in St Andrews, with a sound poetry event and a poetry zine workshop.
On March 30th I’ll be reading with other trans writers at Argonaut Books, Edinburgh.
What I’m Reading
Reading on Fiona Macleod can be found at the bottom of my last essay.
Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills cycle is the best and most delightful exploration of the meaning and purpose of storytelling that I’ve read.
Jessica Gaitán Johannesson’s The Nerves and their Endings helped me talk to my therapist about my history of environmental direct action and my current state of ecological trauma.
Sarah Gailey’s Know Your Station is a cheery, bloody little revenge fantasy with a killer afterword.
I’m hjosephinegiles on StoryGraph too, like everywhere, if you’d like to read along with me.
this is so fucking interesting