My Bard is in the Highlands: Burns 2009 and a National Scottish Literature

My Bard is in the Highlands

Burns 2009 and a National Scottish Literature

Page 2/2. Go back to page 1.

Not all Gaels were willing to allow the Burns Cult to upstage their own literary traditions without a protest, however. A correspondent to the Scottish-American Journal (printed in New York) complained in 1911:

The Burns craze, strange to say, has never caught on to the Highlands, despite the Celtic sympathies of the bard. Except in some of the Highland towns, like Oban, Fort William, and Inverness, where Burns Clubs have been established by aliens, the native population never thinks of the 25th of January. The Gael is not even elated with the attempts to make Burns a Gael. The poet's works are not familiar to the native Gael who does not know the Doric, and so he does not effect to drink to the "Immortal Memory."

Cape Breton contained some of the immigrant communities in North America whose Gaelic cultural traditions remained distinctive and resilient enough to resist being pulled immediately into the Burns cult in the nineteenth century. The American writer Charles Dudley Warner wrote a series of articles about his travels to Cape Breton in the Atlantic Monthly in 1874 with the condescending tone of the urban sophisticate typical of the era. As soon as he entered the Gaelic-speaking community of the island, he engaged a local man in conversation which led deliberately towards the subject of literature. (It was also a popular practice to represent the words of any Scotsman in broad Scots, regardless of his actual speech patterns. The Highland immigrants of Nova Scotia, including Cape Breton, certainly did not speak in this manner.)

From life, we diverted the talk to literature. We inquired what books they had.
'Of course you all have the poems of Burns?'
'What's the name o' the mon?'
'Burns, Robert Burns.'
'Never heerd talk of such a mon. Have heard of Robert Bruce. He was a Scotchman.'
This was nothing short of refreshing, to find a Scotchman who had never heard of Robert Burns!

As Rob Dunbar observes in a recent and extensive survey of the literature of Highland immigrants in Nova Scotia, 'The Poetry of the Emigrant Generation' (Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness 64), the 'Otherness' of Burns is explicitly mentioned in at least one nineteenth-century poem from Cape Breton which praises the accomplishments of Gaelic poets:

Tha Virgil cliùiteach 's a' Ròimh
'S Burns sònraichte am measg Ghall —
Ach dh'fhàs an rannta creimneach truagh
Bhon thog na baird ruadh' an ceann.

Virgil is famous in Rome
And Burns is outstanding amongst Lowlanders —
But their verses became rough and poor
After the red-headed Gaelic poets appeared.

Burns' poetry was simply not an element in the repertoire of emigrant Highlanders until the late nineteenth century, and it never played a part in the native oral traditions of the Highlands. Emigrants sang and admired the work of Iain Lom, Donnchadh Bàn Mac an t-Saoir, Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh, and dozens of other Gaelic poets whose verse has been remembered and performed to the present day. It is fraudulent to sell Burns to diasporic audiences as though he is an exemplar of the literature of all their ancestors given how many of those ancestors were emigrant Highlanders. The conceit of a canonical national literature in Scots with Burns at its head is a reminder that all too often 'Scottish' literature is still largely exclusionary of Gaelic tradition, the only literary tradition in Scotland whose history spans that of the nation itself.

It is vexing to me that I can't go into a centre supposedly dedicated to Scottish Highland heritage without seeing a portrait of Burns in a prominent place. My own academic home, Saint Francis Xavier University of Nova Scotia, boasts the only undergraduate Celtic Studies programme in North America and probably the best collection of Scottish Gaelic texts outside of Scotland. In the centre of the Hall of the Clans in the university library are portraits of Robert Burns and Walter Scott as well as a bust of Scott, but not a single depiction of a Gaelic poet. I could name a half dozen other such places with similar configurations. Burns and Scott are as appropriate to the celebration of Highland heritage as James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would be in a hall dedicated to Native American heritage.

It's not that Burns doesn't deserve to be recognised for his literary merits on their own grounds. It's just that time and again his star has eclipsed those that Gaelic poets ought to enjoy in their own places. Why don't Gaelic Scotland's authors and literature deserve their own place at the Scottish table? I don't remember any national recognition of the 300th anniversary of the birth of Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair (aka 'Alexander MacDonald'), probably the most important Scottish Gaelic poet of the eighteenth century, in 1998. Will there be celebrations for the 300th birthdays of Dugald Buchanan in 2016 and Donnchadh Bàn in 2024, or the 200th birthday of Màiri Mhór nan Òran in 2021? Seeing the accomplishments of the Gaelic literati acknowledged alongside the likes of Burns would be a real cause of celebration for those at home and abroad.

Michael Newton
Assistant Professor, Department of Celtic Studies
St. Francis Xavier University
mnewton @ stfx.ca

Go back to page 1. Or view the entire article.