Collecting Scotland: Song in the 19th century

what was the controversy of James MacPhearson’s ‘Ossian’

• he published it as a translation of poems from a bard he claimed to have met in the rural hills, with the poems coming frmo centuries prior

• this was a fraudulent claim and they were based very loosely on oral sources

• its publication however did pique an interest in oral tradition, seen in the trend of collecting ;genuine classic stories’

why did the Brothers Grimm get into collecting

• one brother was part of the philoogy movementm which was cented around trying to piece together a history of the Indo-European languages

• they followed the logic thay if we can construct such a heritage tree fir languages and grammars then we can maybe do the saem for stories

what were the issues with the Grimms’ editing practices

• they had no recording devies but were basing their research on actual speech

• they refined speech frmo High German to Low German and made the language more palatable for literary consumption

• they allowed their work to undergo some changes due to social responses, for example changing from the evil mother to the evil step mother

how did John Franics Campbell get into collecting ethnological materials

• he was encouraged by George Webb Dasent, a friend of Jakob Grimm, to take an interest in hus native folklore as he grew up in a Gaelic speaking area

how did Campbell go about his collecting

• he was very busy so enlisted others to collect stories for him

• he encouraged his collectors to pay their contributors for their time which was a relatively new and uncommon practice

• he was also revolutionary for his time in that he also collected ethnographic and contextual data of his reciters, considering the factors of diffusion, variation, settings and translations in his analysis, producing a ‘taxonomy of tale types’

what was Alexander Carmichael’s ethics and approach for collection

• he was less concerned with taking down stories verbatim and instead focused on popularising Gaelic texts

• he performed lots of editing through the addition of esoteric words, tweaked plots, added and deleted lines and impressive-soundung names for minor characters and places

why is there such an interest in collecting

it comes frm the urge to preserve beliefs and community customs in songs, their variety and breadth in application and purpose makes them a rich source of culutral analysis

what chaarcterised the early publication of collected Gaelic song

• its first publishings did not include words

• despite Gaelic music using a mixolydian scale, collectors like Patrick MacDonald acted under popularising motives and adapted it to more standard, major, minor or pentatonic scales

whywas Frances Tolmie a salient collector

• she was a Gaelic speaker from Skye and was fuelled by a genuine interest in collecting

• this motivation lead her to offer true to the original versions of songs, not adapted to be more palatable to a wider audience

why was Margaret Fay Shaw an important collector

• she was Americna born but integrated herself for two years into the community, living in the Hebrides with two sisters and learning Gaelic

• her publications were divided into sections by drama, an important step in the movement of classification