Scottish Folklore Research Articles

‘Come: It is time to keep your appointment with the Wicker Man’: The re-enchantment of Scotland through Wicker Man tourism

The location filming of The Wicker Man (1973) used a number of places to invent the Pagan Scottish island of Summerisle. In the film, Summerisle feels like a timeless place in the Inner or Outer Hebrides. The actual locations are well-known in fan and academic literature. The film begins with aerial shots of the plane carrying Sergeant Howie passing over the dramatic mountains of Skye. But the rest of the film was shot somewhere else. In this article, I will explore how fans online make sense of the construction of the film, and how that feeds into wider academic debates about horror films and outsiders, and Scottishness and Gaelicness. I will then discuss my own pilgrimage tourism to the location sites in Scotland and use my own pictures and reflections to argue that while all tourism is a highly contested leisure activity, Wicker Man tourism allows tourists to find themselves off the map. It also allows people to re-enchant Scotland, and make meaning of Scottish landscape and history, even if the film draws on English folklore and music and The Golden Bough as much as Scottish folklore and music.

Emily Lyle’s Jubilee

On December 19, Dr Emily Lyle, Honorary Fellow at the Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies, in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh, celebrated her ninetieth birthday. Emily is a prominent folklorist, a researcher of ritual calendars, myths, astronomy, and cosmology, a semiotician and a typologist, a connoisseur of Scottish folklore and culture, just to mention a few of her fields of interest. To honour this outstanding scholar, who founded the SIEF (Société Internationale d’Ethnologie et de Folklore) Ritual Year Working Group in 2004, the members of this academic community would like to share their reminiscences of Emily, along with a few words of homage and gratitude.

Burns, Satan, and the Sin of Rhyme

In this article I consider the ways that two of the chief influences on Burns’s creative life, the satanic and the sexual, are bedfellows and reveal Romantic ribaldry. Both sources of inspiration were discovered in his youth; both appear as mysterious, uncontrollable impulses that are not only depicted with humour but also suggest that, for Burns, comedy is drawn from and aligned with transgressive powers that are instinct with the making of poetry. Burns’s comic demonic is crucial to appreciating the distinctive character of his writing, but it also allows us to better appreciate the ways in which the ridiculous is aligned with the Romantic. Burns was no ‘Heaven-taught ploughman’ as we know. Though he played up to the image, he must have been tickled by it too, given how far from ‘heaven taught’ he liked to imagine his muses being. The laughter of Burns’s Satanism provides a vital contrast to the sublime, visionary company we have long associated with Romanticism. Encouraged by and combining the bawdier moments of Milton’s Paradise Lost with the supernaturalism of rural Scottish folklore, Burns’s comic demonic is something we would do well to take more seriously if not more solemnly as regards Romantic Satanism.

How Not to Drown by Jaimee Wriston

Reviewed by: How Not to Drown by Jaimee Wriston Em Williamson (bio) how not to drown Jaimee Wriston Alcove Press https://alcovepress.com/book/how-not-to-drown/ 336 pages; Cloth, $27.99 Amid a swirl of aquatic imagery and metaphor, Jaimee Wriston's new novel How Not to Drown ekes out a heartfelt message about climate change and [End Page 97] the ineluctability of family. The novel climaxes with a hurricane that feels as much like an omen for its readers as it does for its characters, though the intrinsic messaging never comes across as didactic or finger-wagging. Instead, through generous and lushly rendered prose, Wriston brings this message to life in the form of a northeastern American family that—sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally—seems constantly on the verge of drowning. The novel follows the frayed family dynamics of the MacQueen-French household along a particularly tumultuous year. We are introduced to the matriarch, Amelia, in the aftermath of her younger son's alleged murder (you guessed it—drowning), after which her unfortunately named granddaughter, Heaven, has moved in to live with her. What unfolds in the course of their unexpected and troubled cohabitation is an occasionally poignant, often messy family drama that has a tendency to lose sight of its own undeniable charms. Wriston is at her best when breathing life into the cast of characters that people her novel. Along with Amelia and Heaven, we are introduced early on to Amelia's forty-something agoraphobe son, Daniel, who has been bound to his childhood bedroom ever since nearly drowning in his youth (are you sensing a theme here?), and Leo, Amelia's photographer ex-husband, who has recently begun a slow decline into dementia. Wriston imbues each of these characters with a fully realized humanity; the MacQueen-Frenches are knotty and complicated people, demanding a reader's attention in the urgency with which they are depicted on the page. Though each of them comes equipped with some noxious trait or another, their flaws never veer into the quirky territory that plagues so many contemporary family dramas. Instead, Wriston writes her characters to life with utmost candor and nurturing attentiveness; observant readers will find themselves sympathizing with each of the disparate worldviews on display, sometimes troublingly so. Oddest among Wriston's cast of characters is Maggie MacQueen, a distant ancestor of Amelia and Heaven. A Scottish emigrant, Maggie exists apart from the contemporary sections of the rest of the novel, narrating her life to us from all the way back in 1852. Through Maggie's first-person narration, we are clued into the family's New England roots and ostensibly provided with some ancestral logic to the family's constant bouts with drowning. Unfortunately, this intergenerational crossover never fully integrates into the novel as [End Page 98] a whole; though no less well written, the Maggie chapters feel excrescent and unfocused when compared to those of the other MacQueen-Frenches. Wriston attempts to adhere these sections by weaving in a discussion of Scottish folklore into the novel's narrative present—Daniel exchanges tales of selkies and sirens with the susceptible Heaven until she determines to become a siren herself—but all this achieves in the end is a wonky sense of the fantastic that isn't quite seen to a satisfying end. What How Not to Drown most successfully depicts is a family at odds with itself, undone by the bonds that tie them all together. Ultimately, Maggie's analeptic chapters only ever feel like a distraction from the novel's more cogent proclivities. Even in its baggier moments, however, How Not to Drown is enlivened by a propulsive verbal energy. Wriston's prose is at once fleet-footed and comprehensive, filled with vivid imagery and stunning observation. Her ability to mine small, awkward interactions for narrative momentum calls to mind writers like Joy Williams or Peter Taylor. One can see this energy at its most crystalline in the interactions between Amelia and Heaven, whose intimately rendered differences and disagreements make for impossible-to-put-down reading. The only handicap to the novel's sharp, forward-moving sentences is its somewhat clunky expository impulse. Occasionally, the novel...

A Rush of Wings by Laura E. Weymouth

Reviewed by: A Rush of Wings by Laura E. Weymouth Natalie Berglind Weymouth, Laura E. A Rush of Wings. McElderry, 2021 [336p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781534493087 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781534493100 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 8-12 Rowenna’s mother, Mairead, is murdered by a supernatural creature on a stormy night in their Scottish seaside village, but then when Rowenna’s father and brother return from a day’s fishing, Mairead returns with them as well. The new Mairead is a fuath (evil spirit), though, threatening Rowenna and eventually cursing the entire family by transforming her brothers into swans and magically taking Rowenna’s ability to speak. With the blame for the dark magic on her shoulders, Rowenna must use the unrefined craft the real Mairead refused to teach her to break the curse—and she’ll get embroiled in Inverness politics and the gimmicks of a terrifying man named Torr Pendragon along the way. Weymouth’s novel is brimming with fairy-tale magic and creatures from Scottish folklore; while some of the places and events are fictional, the novel still maintains a wonderfully immersive historical fiction feel. Beyond its exquisite story and eighteenth-century Scottish setting, readers will be swept up in Rowenna’s battle with her inner demons, the choices she must make against a nuanced, realistically manipulative villain, and the struggle of prioritizing herself versus others in an oppressive situation. Those who enjoyed Lim’s Six Crimson Cranes (BCCB 7/21), also based on “The Wild Swans,” will have a lot to consider about each novel’s unique take on the source material. Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Arthur in Medieval Welsh Literature by O. J. Padel (review)

Reviewed by: Arthur in Medieval Welsh Literature by O. J. Padel David James Griffiths Padel, O. J., Arthur in Medieval Welsh Literature (Writers of Wales), new edn, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2013; paperback; pp. 166; R.R.P. US$25.00; ISBN 9780708326251. Arthur in Medieval Welsh Literature is an Important Book. While slight in appearance, its survey of medieval Welsh literary references to Arthur provides a useful compendium for those whose Welsh is a little rusty or even non-existent. Certainly its importance is underscored by its academic reputation: it is a fairly standard ‘go to’ for medieval Welsh and Arthurian study, and I have a fond nostalgia for it based on its appearance on several postgraduate reading lists. The publication of a second edition underscores its ubiquitousness, but unfortunately, the overall approach to updating the text is poorly lacking. The Introduction remains a brief and satisfying frame of what O. J. Padel’s scholarship explores – namely, the various depictions of Arthur and his associated legendarium – across a variety of Welsh texts. The Introduction makes it plain that those looking for deeper analysis and further connections will need to turn to Cornish, Breton, or southern Scottish folklore. The first section of the book briefly deals with the earliest Welsh texts, the Historia Brittonum, the Gododdin and other early heroic lament poetry, and the Welsh Annals. A simple dating of each text is given, with some mention of textual issues, before the focus is shifted to the portrayal of Arthur in the given text. Padel highlights early issues, such as the contradictory portrayal of Arthur in the Historia Brittonum, and makes a few rudimentary comments about other secondary analyses of the text, before moving on. Padel only mentions other scholars to gloss over or refute their interpretations and his assessments are not adequately contextualised within the scholarly disputes. This makes it hard to assess for ourselves and underscores the limitations of the book. [End Page 243] The next section, dealing with Culhwch and the Gatekeeper poem, continues this pattern. The analysis is solid, highlighting the deficiencies in considering a Welsh literary approach that typically casts Arthur not as a central figure but as a supporting character, designed to evoke a certain ethos or suggest a certain setting. Padel uses direct quotations from the text to allow for close reading, but does not make clear which version of the text he relies upon. At this point, Padel draws connections from the overall treatment of Arthur and his band, linking them to the Irish Fianna cycle of stories, and so locates Arthur in a supernatural, monster-infested ‘band of brothers’ routine, somewhat different from the battle lord of the earlier histories. What follows is a range of Welsh texts relating to the central Middle Ages. This includes a consideration of ‘Preiddau Annwn’, various Saints’ Lives, Welsh poetry of the period, and the work of Gerald of Wales. This section also uses the Welsh prophetic poetry of the period to examine a key facet of the portrayal of Arthur: his invariably explained absence. As in the work of Gildas, the Welsh prophetic poetry does not mention Arthur, as supernatural celebrant, war leader, or once and future king. In casting others into the role of restorer of Wales, the prophetic tradition perhaps underscores the use of Arthur by Bretons or Cornish, or as some sort of formative Other to the English. These are uses that Welsh literature does not posit, but literature about the Welsh says they do. Yet the texts discussed in this section have their own complications. The Saints’ Lives cast Arthur as a secular ruler and administrator of justice; while secular he is not evil and he does not oppose the saints so much as form part of society. He is even a ‘king’, possibly. The elegiac poetry and Gerald of Wales echo previous uses of Arthur: the warrior-comparison and the supernatural folk hero, respectively. The next three sections of the survey examine dialogue poems, the matter of Britain, and the context of the Welsh material within a continuing tradition. They continue the use of quotations and analysis that have given the rest of the book its strengths and...

Castes of Exception: Tradition and the Public Sphere in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Castes of ExceptionTradition and the Public Sphere in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner Daniel Stout The general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God him self. —Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity [O]n behalf of his Majesty's rights and titles; he therefore, for himself, and as prince and steward of Scotland … hereby grants to the said George Colwan, his heirs and assignees whatsomever, heritably and irrevocably, all and haill the lands and others underwritten … heritably and irrevocably in all time coming. —James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner1 Scholars of James Hogg have offered two major approaches to his most famous novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. One line of criticism has dealt with the novel as a gothic satire of Calvinist faith, particularly the belief in predestination. The other line has described the novel as both a performance of, and a commentary on, conditions of authorship in an Edinburgh public sphere under the sway of an increasingly monolithic English literary nationalism.2 Given that both approaches have combined to lend Hogg his status as a relatively major minor (which is to say importantly minor) romantic author, it bears noting that the critical views are themselves at cross purposes. For insofar as Scottish Presbyterian religion amounts to an indigenous tradition, the novel's ostensible critique of Calvinism rests uneasily alongside the claim that Hogg was attempting to develop a particularly Scottish form of culture over and against (possibly) a British and (certainly) an English one.3 We might, it would seem, argue that Hogg meant to elevate certain traditions above others—that he felt himself in a position to pick and choose the more attractive features [End Page 535] of a tradition, to side with one version of Scottishness rather than another. But beyond the difficulty of saying just which traditions the novel can be said to valorize—given that the novel's story of a haunted Calvinist blends religious tradition with (rather than culls that tradition from) other, and older, forms of Scottish folklore—there is the larger difficulty posed by the tendency to see national tradition as a holistic, integrated collection not really reducible to even a complete list of discrete particulars let alone some hived-off subset of practices. For both practical and theoretical reasons, then, there is a real question about the viability of taking the novel as both a critique of Calvinism and, at the same time, an endorsement of folk belief more generally; it looks as though what is true of Calvinism ought to be true of tradition more broadly construed. Despite the difficulties that, I am suggesting, attend any effort to see Hogg's novel as advocating straightforwardly for nationalist tradition, it is true that the novel gains a certain romantic currency by being understood as an engagement with the broader issue of tradition rather than with the more particular subject matter of the sinner's seventeenth-century religious enthusiasm. For while Scottish Presby-terianism, in balancing a sense of Scottish nativism with the desire for protestant succession, had been an important and complex political factor in both the run-up to the Act of Union and the monarchical struggles surrounding and following 1707, by 1824 the specific topic of Calvinism would have lacked the political charge that the Jacobite risings (the last of which, in 1745, features in Walter Scott's Waverly) still contained in the ambience of the French Revolution. It can, this is to say, be difficult to see just why Hogg would have found the subject of Calvinism particularly worth taking up. But broadening our description of the novel's interest—from a particular tradition (Calvinism) within Scottish history to the place of tradition itself within Scottish history—immediately extends the novel's purchase by making it a visible participant in the development of a romantic nationalism whose emphasis on local cultural identity sought to revivify the abstraction of statehood from within or, in the case of Scotland, to trouble the imposition of multi-statehood from without. If Calvinism indexes tradition more generally, it is possible to...

THE GHOST AND THE BROWNIE: SCOTTISH INFLUENCES ON EMILY BRONTË1

This article examines the influence of Scottish folklore and fairy-belief in the writings of Emily Brontë. The two selected motifs of the supernatural, the ghost and the brownie, which cover a central role in James Hogg's The Shepherd's Calendar, underlie the plot and characterization of episodes from the Gondal saga and Wuthering Heights. The seamless continuity between the seen and the unseen, signified by ghostly apparitions, and the brownie's moral ambivalence featured in Hogg's tales throw new light on the psychological treatment of the supernatural in Brontë's works.

Sea monsters and mermaids in Scottish folklore: Can these tales give us information on the historic occurrence of marine animals in Scotland?

The folklore of the highlands and islands of Scotland includes many stories about sightings of sea monsters and mermaids. However, several of these stories contain descriptions of unusual features that are also distinct characteristics of living marine animals, notably manatees (Trichechus spp.), leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea) and several cetacean species, including the narwhal (Monoceros monoceros). It is suggested that an analysis of folklore could provide information on the historical distribution and occurrence of certain distinctive marine animal species.

A Bibliography of the Revd. Walter Gregor's Publications

It is now over one hundred years since the Reverend Walter Gregor died in 1897, and yet, for such a seminal figure in the collecting of Scottish folklore, surprisingly a full bibliography of his publications is still lacking. Gregor is justly known for the material he collected from the North-east of Scotland, and published in his two bestknown books, An Echo of the Olden Time from the North of Scotland (1874) and Notes on the Folk-Lore of the North-East of Scotland (1881). The latter was described in 1929 by J.M. McPherson in the preface to his own Primitive Beliefs in the North-East of Scotland as 'epoch-making ' and one cannot but agree: exhaustive field collecting across folklore genres, a concern to record variants, naming of informants, and written in a style which wastes not one single word. Nevertheless, it is little realised that the Notes is just the start of Gregor's publishing record, and it is not in any way a culminating work. After its publication in 1881 he went on to contribute lengthy and, moreover, numerous pieces, to North-east journals such as the Transactions of the Buchan Field Club and the Transactions of the Banffshire Field Club, national journals in the form of the Folk-Lore Journal and its successor, Folk-Lore, and he also contributed articles to the French folklore periodical the Revue des Traditions Populaires. The writer is presently engaged in completing a collected edition, in both print and electronic formats, of Gregor's writings on Scottish folklore and this current listing has grown out of that effort. Work was begun on this bibliography in 1996 as the preliminary stage of this project. Since commencing gathering material for such a listing, a bibliography of Gregor's publications compiled by the late David Buchan and Ian Olson has appeared (see, 'Walter Gregor (1825-97): A Life and Preliminary Bibliography,' Folklore, 108 (1997), 115-17). That listing is not without its difficulties (there are several ghost entries, material included which was not authored by Gregor, and material overlooked) and the bibliography here is a more accurate guide to his publications. One question that arises from Gregor's activity as a folklorist is when and for how long did he collect? His Glossary of Banffshire dialect appeared in 1866 and several of the entries, as was typical for such publications, have in passing glosses containing items of folklore. Gregor's first book appeared in 1874, and several of its chapters deal with North-east custom and belief, material which was to be reproduced in the Notes of 1881. Likewise a piece on folk medicine from again 1874 appeared word-for-word in the Notes. This points to active collecting in the early 1870s at least, more likely since the 1860s. But Gregor published each and every year after 1881 until the year of his death. The Revue des Traditions Populaires had such a stock of his material in hand that six pieces appeared in 1898, the year after his death. Comments in passing by Gregor

The Ebb and Flow of Scottish Seaweed Use

Summary The coasts of Britain harbour a diverse seaweed flora comprising more than 600 species. This abundant natural resource has been widely used by humans, and has played an important part in the development of the socio-economy of Scotland, especially in the western coastal regions. Although the use of seaweeds was of greater social and economic importance in the past, domestic and industrial seaweed use continues in Scotland today. Domestically, seaweed has been used as a source of medicine, food, fodder and fertiliser, and appears in popular Scottish folklore. Industrially, seaweed was formerly used as a source of soda and potash for the glass and bleaching industries, and also as a source of iodine. These industries have typically followed a ‘boom-bust’ pattern. More recently seaweeds have been harvested for the alginates, fertiliser, cosmetics and health food industries. In addition, they have been used as biomonitors of pollution. Although there are a growing number of industries using seaweed in Scotland, strong international competition has threatened the livelihoods of local small-scale collectors, and most of these industries are now supplied by foreign sources.

Scottish Folklore Scraps

Scottish Folklore Scraps

Stray Notes on Scottish Folk-Lore

Stray Notes on Scottish Folk-Lore

Scottish Folk-Lore and Folk Life: Studies in Race, Culture and Tradition

MR. MACKENZIE gives his readers a comprehensive view of the main heads of Scottish folk-tradition and belief. He ranges from food taboos to giants, fairies and goddesses. One of the more remarkable of the topics with which he deals is the attitude of the Scottish people towards the pig. Among the other peoples of Britain it has always been more or less a staple article of diet; but in Scotland, although there is evidence that it was eaten and was a victim in sacrifice, generally, or at least widely, it has been avoided as an article of food. Mr. Mackenzie holds that this attitude is pre-Christian, and derives it from the East, whence he thinks it may have been taken by the eastern Celts from Attis worship and the legend of the slaying of the god by a boar.

Notes on Scottish Folklore

Notes on Scottish Folklore

Scottish Folklore.

Scottish Folklore.

Scraps of Scottish Folklore

Scraps of Scottish Folklore

Traces of River-Worship in Scottish Folk-Lore

Traces of River-Worship in Scottish Folk-Lore

Some Scottish Folklore of the Child and the Human Body

(1895). Some Scottish Folklore of the Child and the Human Body. Folklore: Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 394-411.