Gaelic Culture Quotes

“And have you no music, no singing, no dancing now at your marriages?' 'May the Possessor keep you! I see that you are a stranger in Lewis, or you would not ask such a question,' the woman exclaimed with grief and surprise in her tone. 'It is long since we abandoned those foolish ways in Ness, and, indeed, throughout Lewis. In my young days there was hardly a house in Ness in which there was not one or two or three who could play the pipe, or the fiddle, or the trump. And I have heard it said that there were men, and women too, who could play things they called harps, and lyres, and bellow-pipes, but I do not know what these things were.' 'And why were those discontinued?' 'A blessed change came over the place and the people,' the woman replied in earnestness, 'and the good men and the good ministers who arose did away with the songs and the stories, the music and the dancing, the sports and the games, that were perverting the minds and ruining the souls of the people, leading them to folly and stumbling.' 'But how did the people themselves come to discard their sports and pastimes?' 'Oh, the good ministers and the good elders preached against them and went among the people, and besought them to forsake their follies and to return to wisdom. They made the people break and burn their pipes and fiddles.”
― Alexander Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica: Hymns and Incantations

“They were ashamed of it, or at least they didn’t think we should have it. The future was English. My grandad is dead no, but last year I went to my granny and said to her, in Gaelic, why did you hide it from us? And when she realised how much I could speak she started crying. She said they’d thought it was for the best. Gaelic would handicap us. But now I speak nothing but Gaelic to her and she loves it. I’m learning loads from her. I’m not fluent yet, but I’m getting close.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“Since the eighteenth century, the Celtic fringes have posed for the urban intellectual as a location of the wild, the natural, the creative and the insecure. We can often find it said, with warm approval, that the Celts are impetuous, natural, spiritual and naive. I try in what follows to make a clear that such an approval is drawing on the same system of structural oppositions as is the accusation that the Celt is violent (impetuous), animal (natural), devoid of any sense of property (spiritual), or without manners (naive). I include the bracketed terms as effective synonyms of the words that precede them, that we would use to praise rather than deride... We are dealing here with a rich verbal and metaphorical complex, and I have not thought it very important to distinguish between those who find a favourable opinion of the Gael within this complex, and those who dip into it to find the materials for derision. In both cases the coherence of the statements can only be found at their point of origin, the urban intellectual discourse of the English language, and not at their point of application, the Celt, the Gael, the primative who is ever departing, whether his exit be made to jeers or to tears.”
― Malcolm Chapman, The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture

“My Éireann by Stewart Stafford

Éireann is my maiden,
Titian grace spun gold,
Fêted for her fairness,
A goddess sacrificed.

All-seeing eye of piety,
But mauled with scars,
In repose and melding,
With the ire of the land.

In perennial motion,
Rivers meet the sea,
Gaze upon a dark pool,
Soubrette for new suitors.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Macpherson's [work] was largely inauthentic with respect to any genuine Gaelic verse tradition, but it was the very voice of authenticity for the developing sentiments of Romanticism in Europe.”
― Malcolm Chapman, The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture

“Perhaps the most significant intellectual trend of the eighteenth century was that towards what we now label 'Romanticism'. Within this often rather monstrous historical figment of retrospective definition, one of the commonest of theoretical concerns was to speculate on the nature of society, and on the nature of social development. Theories of Man's primitive nature blossomed, and the Romantics looked both to nature and to this primal human essence for their poetic and intellectual inspiration. At the same time as British intellectuals were becoming more and more interested in the nature of primitive man and primitive society, they had within their own national boundaries a fitting subject for their attention. The Scottish Gael fulfilled this role of the 'primitive', albeit one quickly and savagely tamed, at a time when every thinking man was turning towards such subjects. The Highlands of Scotland provided a location for this role that was distant enough to be exotic (in customs and language) but close enough to be noticed; that was near enough to visit, but had not been drawn so far into the calm waters of civilisation as to lose all its interest.”
― Malcolm Chapman, The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture