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Scottish Traditional Tales
All over the world traditional tales used to be told at the fireseide until their place came to be taken by books, newspapers, radio and television. This is an entertaining collection from Scotland, recorded and collected by researchers from the School of Scottish Studies at Edinburgh University over the past fifty years. Taken from a variety of sources, from the Hebridean Gaelic tradition to recordings of Lowland cairds (travelling people), some are well-known tales which have equivalents in other cultures and languages, whilst others are unique to Scotland. The tales are arranged by theme: - tall tales - hero tales - legends of ghosts and evil spirits - tales of fate and religion - fairies and sea-folk - children's tales - trickster tales - tales of clan feuds - robber tales This is a welcome reprint of a book that quickly established itself as a classic. It was previously published by Polygon.
- GenresFairy Tales
572 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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July 12, 2024
A small tome of fairy tales, legends, and other myths from Scotland, totalling one hundred and fourteen tales; including a thorough introduction to the tradition and academic notes for those so interested.
A disclaimer is warranted before this reviewer dives into the review proper. As a tourist rather than a native Scotsman, my experience of this book is inevitably going to be different. To a local the stories will call upon and blend them with the innate knowledge they hold in virtue of being a part of the culture, and therefore they will come to them rich in nuance and with a sense of familiarity, whereas I will have to comprehend them as my curiosity dictates. Nevertheless, within the storytelling traditions of Scotland lies the knowledge of how to captivate an audience, and therefore the tourist only needs to be willing to be captivated for these stories to work their magic on them.
On the subject of magic: It's fitting that the Scottish national animal is a unicorn. Though the reason for this has everything to do with royalty and nothing to do with common folk, it nevertheless seems appropriate to have a fictional animal represent such an imaginative people. Their stories would be told in just about every home, to adults as well as children, often while doing necessary yet monotonous indoors work where a good story would be more than welcome to relieve the tedium, and if a known storyteller passed by then they might be invited to perform at a local ceilidh house (a house made for local social gatherings). As the stories would pass from mouth to ear and to mouth again they changed over time. The same tale exists in more versions than there are storytellers; an experienced storyteller could often tell the same story in different ways at different times. Even stories from abroad would in the same way be taken apart and remade to fit a local audience, coloured, of course, by the specific style of the person who retells them. It is a proud and strong tradition, and fortunately there have been quite a lot of Scottish storytellers who have been willing to have their stories recorded for posterity.
Scottish Traditional Tales is but a small, small tip of a vast iceberg of such tales, a cultural treasure of immeasurable value. This is intended to be an introduction to the oral aspect of this tradition and the stories here have been selected to show how wide and nuanced it is; taken from unpublished sources (mainly from the archives of the School of Scottish Studies) to supplement the material that has been published in previous collections. The book covers multiple genres of both fiction and non-fiction and clever in-betweens, while sometimes including more than one version of what is essentially the same tale just to show how malleable these tales are, how they change from the idiomatic wording of one storyteller to that of another. Included are stories both in Scots and translations from Scottish Gaelic, as well as a rather sizeable contribution of stories recorded from The Travelling People (the book uses the term 'cairds' to avoid confusion since there was more than one people who lived as travellers, while avoiding the derogatory term 'tinkers').
Some kinds of stories were excluded, however: Urban legends, superstition held to be true, local anecdotes, comic tales, and certain really long tales from cairds that don't fit well into any of the set categories and don't really resemble other Scottish tales, haven't been considered for inclusion in this collection. Neither has the famed storyteller Betsy Whyte been included more than twice because her tales have previously been so widely discussed and collected already that the editors saw no need for more.
The first category is for children's tales, and it's surprisingly small. Well, surprising to those who aren't already in the know of how these tales work. Nowadays we often associate the term 'fairy tale' with stories meant for children's ears, but as Bruford states in the introduction:
This is a popular misconception about folktales or at least 'fairy-tales'. Very few traditional tales are meant only for children: the first eight in this book are the only stories in it that would normally have been told to children under the age of eight or nine: the rest were intended for adults. (p. 4)
And yet this reviewer would argue that while these tales provided children with moral stances they could understand, to form them into good people as they grew up, for adults the same tales provided a sense of confirmation, that their own morals have remained good and thus that they remain good people. Therefore even the children's tales wouldn't have been lost on adult ears.
Besides the children's tales the editors have included ten other categories. These are based on function of the tales rather than their format (e.g. fairy tale, legend, local story, ghost story, etc.):
– Children's Tales (stories often told to children)
– Fortune Tales (fantastical tales of people who seek their fortune)
– Hero Tales (based on old Gaelic traditions, strength and bravery is what comes to their aid rather than luck)
– Trickster Tales (wherein the heroes outwits others, but aren't necessarily morally upstanding people)
– Other Cleverness, Stupidity and Nonsense (other funny tales where trickery isn't involved on the hero's part, as well as tall tales intended to dupe the listener)
– Fate, Morals and Religion (tales varying between the wondrous, legendary, and factual, often Christian in nature, that show that Fate is absolute)
– Origin and Didactic Legends (unbelievable origin myths and tales that intend to reveal something about human behaviour)
– Legends of Ghosts and Evil Spirits
– Legends of Fairies and Sea-Folk
– Legends of Witchcraft (all three of these categories cover legends meant to scare or explain things)
– Robbers, Archers and Clan Feuds (historically based tales, potentially with elements from the other categories)
Just about all of the tales of this book were transcribed from recordings, but a few exceptions exist where the tale has been put to writing on the spot. This means that for the most part the stories read just as they were told by the storyteller; this is first and foremost an oral tradition, and as text the tales should reflect this, the reader should feel as if the voice which told the story is still there – the room, the audience should still be there in spirit. If that isn't enough, a lot of these recordings can be found in Tobar an Dualchais – this is particularly useful for the stories with some kind of melody in them¹ – though it should be mentioned that the tales don't always have the same name – e.g. 'The Stolen Blankets' by Jack Cockburn is named 'A Tramp Who Had Stolen a Blanket Inadvertently Returned to the Farm from Which He Had Stolen It', and Jack is named John there for some reason (as a side note, his surname is also misspelled as Cockbum in the book's registry). The easiest way to find these tales in the database is to search using the track ID, which can be found in the notes connected to the stories. Quite a few of the tales were translated from Gaelic, and these original recordings are, unsurprisingly, in Gaelic – which limits the amount of recordings that are of any use to those who don't understand the language. And also, let's be fair, not all dialects of Scots is easy to understand just because one happens to understand English. In some cases this goes for the transcription too, and I'll gladly use a tale by Tom Tulloch, one of the book's most proliferate contributors, and a personal favourite of mine, as example. This is just after the boy of the tale has lost his brüni:
So he partit the heather an he oagit in ... amang it to see if he could find and retrieve his brüni. But when he oapen't up the heather, he cam upon a graet big gully o a holl leadin into the hill, an he oagit into this gully, an the farther he cam in, the bigger the gully turn't. And finally he laundit in atil a great big cave, and they were nobody in i the cave aless a graet owld wife, an he noaticed 'at shö wis blinnd an couldna see him. (pp. 50-51, 'The Boy and the Brüni')
However, in my experience, by persevering through the first five to ten tales I had attained a feeling for the language, and reading the rest of the stories went far easier. Additionally, the footnotes for each tale usually explain the most difficult words, (for this tale, e.g. “Aless: unless, except; atil: until, to; ’at: that; brüni: a bannock, large round oatcake; [...] oagit: crawled” (pp. 481-482)). In general the two editors have made a huge effort to make the stories as readable as possible while keeping the transcription quite close to the original recording.
These footnotes are also surprisingly informative, giving us not just where it was recorded and the storyteller, but also on variations of the particular story, it's potential origins and more. E.g. on 'The Boy and the Brüni' the attached note says that
[t]he core of the story corresponds to that of AT 327 [Aarne-Thompson type number, a classification of stories by their assumed origins] 'The Children and the Ogre' (best known as 'Hänsel and Gretel), but it is a very individual Yell form [Tulloch lived in Yell on Shetland]. [...] Tom felt that this story must have been known in other parts of Shetland, associated with other landmarks than the Erne's Knowe (Eagle's Knoll – the K is pronounced), but we have heard no other version. Tom not only noted this opportunity for improvisation but suggested a moral, a warning against playing with your food, though as the final result is wealth for the boy's whole family it hardly seems a clear warning!” (p. 481)
This is just a piece of the whole note, an example of just how well these notes enrich the reading experience, and almost every such note is as rewarding to read as this one is. (Also Bruford isn't seeing the full picture here. There are two morals, the second one being that even if you make yourself a bad situation there is always the potential to get out of it again if you're just that clever about it.)
Then there is the introduction that Bruford wrote for this collection. It gives an insight into the tradition, how the collection was structured and why they landed on this choice, and into the field of study that is traditional stories. There is no doubt that it is informative, but it's also such a heavy read – perhaps not by academic standards, but it's still far too much to ask from the regular reader to work their way through it. There have been made attempts to put anecdotes into the text, particularly in the beginning of it, but much of it is very dry. Perhaps the biggest sinners are the paragraphs, many of which are over a page long in a small font size, but the language used isn't entirely innocent either. There is no doubt that turning academia into something that is readable is a challenge, especially if you want it to keep it's academic value intact – in this case it feels like the struggle of making the text work in both ways is still unresolved. Nevertheless, it's a very worthwhile read for those who are interested in the tradition.
As a tourist this book lived up to my curiosity – whether or not a local would find this book to reflect their own traditions well enough, is up for someone else to say. But this much I can say: Bruford died the year after this collection was published, having spent more than half his life dedicated to recording these tales and studying them. His father was one of the key lobbyists for what was to become the School of Scottish Studies, the place which he would spend thirty years of his life as the Archivist of. His author page in Tobar an Dualchais describes him as having had a profound influence, which I do not doubt when taking his career into consideration. MacDonald is just as an important name in the study of Scottish tales. He had already been working at the school for three years when Bruford arrived, and they had been working closely since early on. Additionally, both of them grew up with this tradition. The book itself has become important enough that others have made studies on how the tales were transcribed (e.g. Lindahl, C., 2018, 'Storytelling among Lowland Scots since 1800: An All-Female, Upper-Middle-Class Family Oral Tradition in the Context of Written Tale Collections'), which goes to show how central it has become. So, having looked at what others say who ought to know the qualities of this book better than I do, it seems like this is an essential book made by well experienced scholars who intimately know what they are presenting and who understand to present it correctly. That is good enough for me.
1. Melodies are hard to read for most of us, so I've compiled a list of direct links to the tales where there are melodies, whenever such a recording is available to us. Unfortunately the recording for story number five, 'The Wee Bird' by Jimmy MacPhee, isn't available.
Story 27: 'How to Diddle' by George Jamieson. Title in the archive: 'Dramatic Rendition of Escaping a Charge, and Also the Lawyer's Fee by Pretending to Be a Simpleton'. Link to recording.
Story 64b: 'The Fiddler o Gord' by George Peterson. Title in the archive: 'The Fiddler Visited the Trows and Was Gone for a Hundred Years; Others Learned a Tune from Him Before He Crumbled to Dust'. Link to recording. The recording the story is transcribed from is unfortunately not available, but here is an older recording of the same story by the same storyteller. Neither had the melody, and the recording referenced in the footnote is unavaliable. Fortunately the melody can be heard here at 6:55 mins. Link to recording of the melody.
Story 65: 'The Humph at the Fit o the Glen and the Humph at the Head o the Glen' by Bella Higgins. Title in the archive: 'A Hunchback Added to a Fairy Song and Was Rewarded; Another Did the Same and Was Punished'. Link to recording.
Story 86: 'The Dancing Reapers' by William MacDonald. Title in the archive: 'Na daoine nach b' urrainn stad a dhannsa'. Link to recording. It's in Scottish Gaelic, so for those of us who don't understand that and only want to know the melody, the song begins at 1:55 mins.
A disclaimer is warranted before this reviewer dives into the review proper. As a tourist rather than a native Scotsman, my experience of this book is inevitably going to be different. To a local the stories will call upon and blend them with the innate knowledge they hold in virtue of being a part of the culture, and therefore they will come to them rich in nuance and with a sense of familiarity, whereas I will have to comprehend them as my curiosity dictates. Nevertheless, within the storytelling traditions of Scotland lies the knowledge of how to captivate an audience, and therefore the tourist only needs to be willing to be captivated for these stories to work their magic on them.
On the subject of magic: It's fitting that the Scottish national animal is a unicorn. Though the reason for this has everything to do with royalty and nothing to do with common folk, it nevertheless seems appropriate to have a fictional animal represent such an imaginative people. Their stories would be told in just about every home, to adults as well as children, often while doing necessary yet monotonous indoors work where a good story would be more than welcome to relieve the tedium, and if a known storyteller passed by then they might be invited to perform at a local ceilidh house (a house made for local social gatherings). As the stories would pass from mouth to ear and to mouth again they changed over time. The same tale exists in more versions than there are storytellers; an experienced storyteller could often tell the same story in different ways at different times. Even stories from abroad would in the same way be taken apart and remade to fit a local audience, coloured, of course, by the specific style of the person who retells them. It is a proud and strong tradition, and fortunately there have been quite a lot of Scottish storytellers who have been willing to have their stories recorded for posterity.
Scottish Traditional Tales is but a small, small tip of a vast iceberg of such tales, a cultural treasure of immeasurable value. This is intended to be an introduction to the oral aspect of this tradition and the stories here have been selected to show how wide and nuanced it is; taken from unpublished sources (mainly from the archives of the School of Scottish Studies) to supplement the material that has been published in previous collections. The book covers multiple genres of both fiction and non-fiction and clever in-betweens, while sometimes including more than one version of what is essentially the same tale just to show how malleable these tales are, how they change from the idiomatic wording of one storyteller to that of another. Included are stories both in Scots and translations from Scottish Gaelic, as well as a rather sizeable contribution of stories recorded from The Travelling People (the book uses the term 'cairds' to avoid confusion since there was more than one people who lived as travellers, while avoiding the derogatory term 'tinkers').
Some kinds of stories were excluded, however: Urban legends, superstition held to be true, local anecdotes, comic tales, and certain really long tales from cairds that don't fit well into any of the set categories and don't really resemble other Scottish tales, haven't been considered for inclusion in this collection. Neither has the famed storyteller Betsy Whyte been included more than twice because her tales have previously been so widely discussed and collected already that the editors saw no need for more.
The first category is for children's tales, and it's surprisingly small. Well, surprising to those who aren't already in the know of how these tales work. Nowadays we often associate the term 'fairy tale' with stories meant for children's ears, but as Bruford states in the introduction:
This is a popular misconception about folktales or at least 'fairy-tales'. Very few traditional tales are meant only for children: the first eight in this book are the only stories in it that would normally have been told to children under the age of eight or nine: the rest were intended for adults. (p. 4)
And yet this reviewer would argue that while these tales provided children with moral stances they could understand, to form them into good people as they grew up, for adults the same tales provided a sense of confirmation, that their own morals have remained good and thus that they remain good people. Therefore even the children's tales wouldn't have been lost on adult ears.
Besides the children's tales the editors have included ten other categories. These are based on function of the tales rather than their format (e.g. fairy tale, legend, local story, ghost story, etc.):
– Children's Tales (stories often told to children)
– Fortune Tales (fantastical tales of people who seek their fortune)
– Hero Tales (based on old Gaelic traditions, strength and bravery is what comes to their aid rather than luck)
– Trickster Tales (wherein the heroes outwits others, but aren't necessarily morally upstanding people)
– Other Cleverness, Stupidity and Nonsense (other funny tales where trickery isn't involved on the hero's part, as well as tall tales intended to dupe the listener)
– Fate, Morals and Religion (tales varying between the wondrous, legendary, and factual, often Christian in nature, that show that Fate is absolute)
– Origin and Didactic Legends (unbelievable origin myths and tales that intend to reveal something about human behaviour)
– Legends of Ghosts and Evil Spirits
– Legends of Fairies and Sea-Folk
– Legends of Witchcraft (all three of these categories cover legends meant to scare or explain things)
– Robbers, Archers and Clan Feuds (historically based tales, potentially with elements from the other categories)
Just about all of the tales of this book were transcribed from recordings, but a few exceptions exist where the tale has been put to writing on the spot. This means that for the most part the stories read just as they were told by the storyteller; this is first and foremost an oral tradition, and as text the tales should reflect this, the reader should feel as if the voice which told the story is still there – the room, the audience should still be there in spirit. If that isn't enough, a lot of these recordings can be found in Tobar an Dualchais – this is particularly useful for the stories with some kind of melody in them¹ – though it should be mentioned that the tales don't always have the same name – e.g. 'The Stolen Blankets' by Jack Cockburn is named 'A Tramp Who Had Stolen a Blanket Inadvertently Returned to the Farm from Which He Had Stolen It', and Jack is named John there for some reason (as a side note, his surname is also misspelled as Cockbum in the book's registry). The easiest way to find these tales in the database is to search using the track ID, which can be found in the notes connected to the stories. Quite a few of the tales were translated from Gaelic, and these original recordings are, unsurprisingly, in Gaelic – which limits the amount of recordings that are of any use to those who don't understand the language. And also, let's be fair, not all dialects of Scots is easy to understand just because one happens to understand English. In some cases this goes for the transcription too, and I'll gladly use a tale by Tom Tulloch, one of the book's most proliferate contributors, and a personal favourite of mine, as example. This is just after the boy of the tale has lost his brüni:
So he partit the heather an he oagit in ... amang it to see if he could find and retrieve his brüni. But when he oapen't up the heather, he cam upon a graet big gully o a holl leadin into the hill, an he oagit into this gully, an the farther he cam in, the bigger the gully turn't. And finally he laundit in atil a great big cave, and they were nobody in i the cave aless a graet owld wife, an he noaticed 'at shö wis blinnd an couldna see him. (pp. 50-51, 'The Boy and the Brüni')
However, in my experience, by persevering through the first five to ten tales I had attained a feeling for the language, and reading the rest of the stories went far easier. Additionally, the footnotes for each tale usually explain the most difficult words, (for this tale, e.g. “Aless: unless, except; atil: until, to; ’at: that; brüni: a bannock, large round oatcake; [...] oagit: crawled” (pp. 481-482)). In general the two editors have made a huge effort to make the stories as readable as possible while keeping the transcription quite close to the original recording.
These footnotes are also surprisingly informative, giving us not just where it was recorded and the storyteller, but also on variations of the particular story, it's potential origins and more. E.g. on 'The Boy and the Brüni' the attached note says that
[t]he core of the story corresponds to that of AT 327 [Aarne-Thompson type number, a classification of stories by their assumed origins] 'The Children and the Ogre' (best known as 'Hänsel and Gretel), but it is a very individual Yell form [Tulloch lived in Yell on Shetland]. [...] Tom felt that this story must have been known in other parts of Shetland, associated with other landmarks than the Erne's Knowe (Eagle's Knoll – the K is pronounced), but we have heard no other version. Tom not only noted this opportunity for improvisation but suggested a moral, a warning against playing with your food, though as the final result is wealth for the boy's whole family it hardly seems a clear warning!” (p. 481)
This is just a piece of the whole note, an example of just how well these notes enrich the reading experience, and almost every such note is as rewarding to read as this one is. (Also Bruford isn't seeing the full picture here. There are two morals, the second one being that even if you make yourself a bad situation there is always the potential to get out of it again if you're just that clever about it.)
Then there is the introduction that Bruford wrote for this collection. It gives an insight into the tradition, how the collection was structured and why they landed on this choice, and into the field of study that is traditional stories. There is no doubt that it is informative, but it's also such a heavy read – perhaps not by academic standards, but it's still far too much to ask from the regular reader to work their way through it. There have been made attempts to put anecdotes into the text, particularly in the beginning of it, but much of it is very dry. Perhaps the biggest sinners are the paragraphs, many of which are over a page long in a small font size, but the language used isn't entirely innocent either. There is no doubt that turning academia into something that is readable is a challenge, especially if you want it to keep it's academic value intact – in this case it feels like the struggle of making the text work in both ways is still unresolved. Nevertheless, it's a very worthwhile read for those who are interested in the tradition.
As a tourist this book lived up to my curiosity – whether or not a local would find this book to reflect their own traditions well enough, is up for someone else to say. But this much I can say: Bruford died the year after this collection was published, having spent more than half his life dedicated to recording these tales and studying them. His father was one of the key lobbyists for what was to become the School of Scottish Studies, the place which he would spend thirty years of his life as the Archivist of. His author page in Tobar an Dualchais describes him as having had a profound influence, which I do not doubt when taking his career into consideration. MacDonald is just as an important name in the study of Scottish tales. He had already been working at the school for three years when Bruford arrived, and they had been working closely since early on. Additionally, both of them grew up with this tradition. The book itself has become important enough that others have made studies on how the tales were transcribed (e.g. Lindahl, C., 2018, 'Storytelling among Lowland Scots since 1800: An All-Female, Upper-Middle-Class Family Oral Tradition in the Context of Written Tale Collections'), which goes to show how central it has become. So, having looked at what others say who ought to know the qualities of this book better than I do, it seems like this is an essential book made by well experienced scholars who intimately know what they are presenting and who understand to present it correctly. That is good enough for me.
1. Melodies are hard to read for most of us, so I've compiled a list of direct links to the tales where there are melodies, whenever such a recording is available to us. Unfortunately the recording for story number five, 'The Wee Bird' by Jimmy MacPhee, isn't available.
Story 27: 'How to Diddle' by George Jamieson. Title in the archive: 'Dramatic Rendition of Escaping a Charge, and Also the Lawyer's Fee by Pretending to Be a Simpleton'. Link to recording.
Story 64b: 'The Fiddler o Gord' by George Peterson. Title in the archive: 'The Fiddler Visited the Trows and Was Gone for a Hundred Years; Others Learned a Tune from Him Before He Crumbled to Dust'. Link to recording. The recording the story is transcribed from is unfortunately not available, but here is an older recording of the same story by the same storyteller. Neither had the melody, and the recording referenced in the footnote is unavaliable. Fortunately the melody can be heard here at 6:55 mins. Link to recording of the melody.
Story 65: 'The Humph at the Fit o the Glen and the Humph at the Head o the Glen' by Bella Higgins. Title in the archive: 'A Hunchback Added to a Fairy Song and Was Rewarded; Another Did the Same and Was Punished'. Link to recording.
Story 86: 'The Dancing Reapers' by William MacDonald. Title in the archive: 'Na daoine nach b' urrainn stad a dhannsa'. Link to recording. It's in Scottish Gaelic, so for those of us who don't understand that and only want to know the melody, the song begins at 1:55 mins.
July 28, 2020
The stories are interesting. But there is a flaw I noticed in the book. Gillesasbuig does not mean Archibald. It has another one, gillesasbuig is Gillespie my own surname.
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