The Gaelic Renaissance: Sorley Maclean and Derick Thomson

Abstract

Interaction between Gaelic-speaking culture and the other cultures of the British Isles has been powerfully influenced by the distorted images the latter have of the former. First among these is the concept of Gaelic as an ‘old’ language with an ‘ancient’ literature, due to a large extent to the continuing effects of the Ossianic controversy which raged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Working from a slim handful of traditional ballads he did not always fully understand, James Macpherson produced a radically different literary artefact which was then projected back onto a culture to which it was in many ways alien.¹ Far from being ‘old’, Scottish Gaelic counts among the younger literary languages of Western Europe. It was only upon the definitive breakdown during the seventeenth century of a professional bardic system strongly linked to Ireland, with a shared literary koine, that verse in the vernacular of Gaelic Scotland reached the status of an independent tradition.² Since then there have been two periods of particular richness. The first roughly covers the years between 1740 and 1810, with the work of Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdair (Alexander MacDonald, c. 1695-c. 1770), Rob Donn (1714–78), Donnchadh Bàn Mac-an-t-Saoir (Duncan Bàn Macintyre, 1724–1812) and Uileam Ros (William Ross, 1762–?91).