The Gaelic poetic traditions of the Scottish Highlands developed under the reciprocal influence of oral performativity and manuscript compilations, and only gradually made their way into print and/or reached an interested readership outside their own language community. Early Scottish Gaelic poem-books have a precarious survival rate. Some were composed in an orthography modelled after classical Gaelic, albeit often written in Roman letters, while in others the vernacular was spelt according to Lowland Scots conventions. Both types were rooted in a culture which, having spanned the Gaelic-language regions of both Ireland and Scotland, gradually sundered during the early modern period. As the ties linking the oral cultures of the Highlands and Gaelic Ireland weakened, a vernacular, specifically and self-consciously Scottish Gaelic literature emerged.

A manuscript collection (now lost) was compiled by poet, lexicographer, and pioneer “language planner” Alexander MacDonald or Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair (c. 1698–1770), from the western Highlands. MacDonald, a participant in both Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745, may have been encouraged to collect Scottish Gaelic literature by the example of his friend Allan Ramsay’s patriotic historical anthology of Lowland Scots literature, The Ever Green (1724). His pioneering collection of his poems Ais-eiridh na Sean Chánoin Albannaich (‘Resurrection of the Ancient Scottish tongue’) was printed in 1751. MacDonald’s manuscripts probably provided many or even all of the items printed in Comh-chruinneachidh Orannaigh Gaidhealach (“A collection of Gaelic songs”, known as the “Eigg Collection”), an anthology of Gaelic poetry by his son Ranald, which was printed in 1776 as a patriotic riposte to the denigration of Highland culture published the previous year in Dr Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland.

MacDonald was not the only collector of Scottish Gaelic oral literature at this time. Around the mid-century Dr Hector Maclean was compiling a duanaire (poetry anthology) of Clan Maclean verse; in the northern Highlands, the Rev. Alexander Pope recorded a collection of Ossian-themed verse in 1739. Probably in response to the publication of MacDonald’s Ais-eiridh, a group of divinity students from the southern Highlands at the University of St Andrews themselves began to collect and collate Gaelic verse. A fellow St Andrews alumnus, Jerome Stone, learnt Gaelic, collected Ossianic verse and in 1756 published a loose adaptation, “Albin and the daughter of May”, in the Scots Magazine, which may have served as a model to James Macpherson for his Ossianic work.

The amount of MS transcription, of course, was miniscule compared to the ongoing work of performative memorization by which the oral repertoire maintained its existence throughout the region. This oral praxis, however, may itself have been influenced by the presence of literate recordings. Archibald Fletcher in Argyllshire began to commit to memory what grew into a comprehensive collection of Ossianic ballads; later in the century these poems were written down from his recitation and the resulting manuscript was subsequently sold to the Highland Society of Scotland. The repertoire of Alexander Macnab, blacksmith in Dalmally, would also be written down by later collectors. The complex and often unexpected braidings of literate and oral culture in Scotland’s Gaelic-speaking areas provide an framework in which to assess the Ossianic editions of James Macpherson and his ambition both to record his native culture and to act as a cultural broker between a purportedly archaic Gaelic oral tradition and contemporary English literature.

Macpherson first attracted the attention of patrons immersed in the Scottish Enlightenment while working as a tutor in Highland Perthshire. Their sponsorship allowed him to undertake two collecting tours in 1760, during which he encountered oral versions of Ossianic ballads and gathered a number of manuscripts: older productions in classical Gaelic and some vernacular anthologies as noted above. The success of Macpherson’s Ossian, and the ensuing controversy over its authenticity, spurred further collecting of Gaelic oral material, as well as the contrivance of supposedly authentic Gaelic ballads in a Macphersonian style by Duncan Kennedy (1763–1836) and the Rev. Dr John Smith (1747–1807) (Sean Dàna, “Ancient poems”, 1787). The conclusion of a major institutional collecting enterprise was published in 1805 as the Report of the Ossian Committee of the Highland Society of Scotland, appointed to inquire into the nature and authenticity of Ossian. Having circulated queries, and collected and assessed evidence from manuscripts, oral tradition, correspondence, and reminiscences relating to Macpherson’s controversial epics, the committee delivered a carefully hedged but inescapably sceptical judgement; the Ossianic controversy would remain a whetstone for 19th-century Scottish Gaelic scholarship.

Another stimulus for fieldwork was the printing of the Scottish Gaelic New Testament in 1767. Translation of the Bible and other religious texts entailed intensive efforts to provide standards for a clear, elegant and modern orthography, vocabulary, and grammar. This encouraged efforts to collect specimens of pure “bardic” diction, envisaged by the likes of the Gaelic religious poet and schoolteacher Dugald Buchanan. From this emerged the abortive Gaelic “Gentlemen’s Dictionary” project, undertaken by a group of men, mainly ministers, supervised by the Rev. John Stuart of Luss (1743–1821), eventual translator of much of the Old Testament and himself a collector of Gaelic song. The planned dictionary and grammar did not appear, being forestalled by William Shaw’s 2-volume Galic and English Dictionary (1780); that work’s publication was supported by none other than James Macpherson’s nemesis, Dr Samuel Johnson. Nevertheless, a poetry anthology was published relying heavily on the ministers’ collections. Sean Dain, agus Orain Ghaidhealach (“Ancient Gaelic lays and songs”, 1786), known as the Gillies Collection after its publisher John Gillies, offered readers a remarkably broad literary spectrum including clan and historical verse, work songs, anonymous popular love songs, and specimens of authentic Fenian ballads: the poetry which Macpherson had made use of as the starting point for his Ossianic epics.

Six years before the publication of his poetry collection, Gillies had reprinted The history of the feuds and conflicts of the clans (1780), with an appendix of “Gallic songs” incorporating (probably unwittingly) some remarkably broad and bawdy compositions that were clearly popular in the oral tradition. Such songs certainly did not make it into the later anthologizing tradition, focused upon the creation of a high-status canon lending itself to a somewhat idealized depiction of Scottish Gaelic culture. Among these works, generally funded by subscription, are the brothers’ Alexander and Donald Stewart’s two-volume Cochruinneacha Taoghta de Shaothair nam Bard Gaëlach (“An excellent collection of works by Gaelic bards”, 1804), and Patrick Turner’s Comhchruinneacha do dh’Orain Taghta, Ghaidhealach (“A collection of excellent Gaelic songs”, 1813). Popular love songs, including direct translations of fashionable English tragic love ballads, take up a much greater share in commercially published miscellanies such as Duncan Lothian’s Orannaigh Gaedhealach agus Bearla (“Gaelic and English songs”, 1780); Aonghas Caimbeul’s Orain Nuadh Ghaidhleach (“New Gaelic songs”, 1785); the Co-chruinneachadh Nuadh do dh’Orannibh Gaidhealach (“A new collection of Gaelic songs”, 1806, known as the Inverness Collection); Griogair MacGriogar’s Eoin Bheag nan Creagaibh Aosda (“The little birds of the ancient crags”, 1819); and the Rev. Duncan MacCallum’s Co-chruinneacha Dhan, Orain, &c. &c. (“A collection of lays, songs, &c. &c.”, 1821). This inclination towards fashionable popular love song is even more marked in the Gaelic song tunes recorded in collections of Highland music such as Elizabeth Ross’s manuscript “Original Highland airs collected at Raasay in 1812”, Simon Fraser’s Airs and melodies peculiar to the Highlands of Scotland and the Isles (1816), and Finlay Dun’s Orain na h-Alban (“Songs of Scotland”, 1848).

By far the most influential song collection was the much-reprinted canonical anthology Sàr Obair nam Bard Gaelach, or, the beauties of Gaelic poetry (1841), by the industrious editor and translator John MacKenzie (1806–1848). Furnished with anecdotal critical biographies in English, as well as a broad introduction by ethnographer and antiquarian James Logan (1797–1872), the volume became the standard compendium of Scottish Gaelic verse, offering authorized texts and literary assessments that in turn fed back into the oral tradition. Expanded, reissued, and pirated throughout the 19th century, MacKenzie’s overview was complemented in the late 19th century by cheaper poetry collections edited and printed by the Rev. Alexander Maclean Sinclair (1840–1924) in Prince Edward Island.

In the wake of Sàr Obair, Scottish Gaelic poetry collecting and publishing tended to focus upon particular areas or kindreds, for example Donald C. Macpherson’s An Duanaire (“The poem-book”, 1868), compiled in his home district of Brae Lochaber. Clan partisanship was espoused in other works such as Keith Norman MacDonald’s MacDonald bards from mediaeval times (1900) and the Revs Angus and Archibald Macdonald’s The MacDonald collection of Gaelic poetry (1911). More extensive in scope was Archibald Sinclair’s folksong anthology The Gaelic songster: An t-Òranaiche (1879), the flagship volume for Sinclair’s Glasgow-based Gaelic publishing company offering a contemporary folksong canon to complement the more literary work presented in MacKenzie’s Sàr Obair.

The most significant 19th-century collecting initiative, however, was not in the field of song, but rather focused primarily upon uirsgeulan, extended wonder tales, possibly a relatively recent narrative genre drawing on source traditions ranging from literary heroic romances and printed chapbooks  to fairy tales and adaptations from the Arabian Nights. The fieldwork was financed and supervised by John Francis Campbell (1821–1885), an Islay-born and Gaelic-speaking aristocrat, traveller, and polymath. His interest in oral narrative was piqued by George Dasent’s Popular tales from the Norse (1859), the English-language edition of Asbjørnsen and Moe’s Norske folkeeventyr. Campbell (who had himself travelled extensively in Scandinavia) recognized stories he had heard in childhood – not only the longer narratives translated from Norse, but also the Caribbean trickster animal tales added as an appendix by Dasent. He was also provoked by Dasent’s introduction, in which it was confidently stated that no such narratives were now told in Britain. Campbell, then working as a government bureaucrat, recruited a team of literate Gaelic speakers in the Highlands to undertake collecting expeditions on his behalf. Altogether nearly 800 manuscript tales were written down for the project. An edited and translated selection, together with a miscellany of extended complementary essays, made up most of the resulting four volumes of Popular tales of the West Highlands (1860–62). Campbell, apprehensive about stirring up a second Ossianic controversy, followed Dasent’s guidelines recommending meticulous verbatim recording, the inclusion of Gaelic originals, literal English translations, and full contextual details. This made the Popular tales a scholarly milestone; it also, to the despair of the publisher, made for an uninviting publication, its scholarly punctilio thwarting any chances of popular literary success. Similarly, Campbell’s Leabhar na Féinne (“The book of the Féinn”, 1872), a rebarbative scholarly presentation of genuine Gaelic Fenian ballads intended to debunk the claims of Macpherson’s Ossianic epics once and for all, fell stillborn from the press. Nevertheless, the Popular tales project inspired at least two major collections of Gaelic traditions. The first was compiled by John Dewar (1802–1872), one of Campbell’s most talented, if headstrong, collectors. Under the patronage of the eighth Duke of Argyll, Dewar spent a decade assembling and transcribing a massive collection of oral historical traditions. The Duke’s interest in folklore was taken up by his second son, the banker and antiquary Lord Archibald Campbell. After compiling local traditions in the sumptuous Records of Argyll (1885), he supervised the production of five volumes, mostly of historical and heroic narratives collected by the Revs Duncan MacInnes, James MacDougall, and John Gregorson Campbell, published by Alfred Nutt as Waifs and strays of Celtic tradition: Argyllshire series (1889–95).

The second major folklorist whose career began under the auspices of John Francis Campbell was Alexander Carmichael (1832–1912), who took advantage of his employment as an exciseman and tax collector in the Outer Hebrides to compile a major folklore collection ranging from proverbs to wonder tales, as well as a plethora of archeological, environmental, and social data, and a significant collection of material culture. Carmichael’s work synthesized two hitherto largely separate strands of folklore collecting in Scotland’s Gaelic-speaking areas: on the one hand, the collection of oral literature, whose history has been traced above; on the other, the collection of popular customs and beliefs.

Preternatural occurences and instances of second sight had been related in some early compendia (Martin Martin’s Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, 1703; Rev. Robert Kirk’s “Secret commonwealth of elves and fairies” c. 1691), and surveyed, often with a critical eye, in the Old Statistical Account of Scotland (21 vols, 1791–99). Subsequently, such popular customs and beliefs had become part of Romantic Highland antiquarianism, with its clan nostalgia and sentimental Jacobitism, and had provided local colour for literary authors such as Sir Walter Scott and Joanna Baillie (Family legend, 1810). Two penetrating and sympathetic accounts were collected by authors who had learnt the language: Mrs Anne Grant of Laggan (1755–1838; Essays on the superstitions of the Highlanders of Scotland, 2 vols, 1811) and James Logan (The Scottish Gaël, 2 vols, 1831). Perhaps the most significant comprehensive early survey of custom and belief, however, was Popular superstitions and festive amusements of the Highlanders of Scotland (1823) by the resolutely unsentimental William Grant Stewart (1797–1869). Stewart’s systematic, albeit eccentric, account forms the principal basis for Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s assessment of “The elves in Scotland” printed in the third volume of Thomas Crofton Croker’s Fairy legends and traditions of the south of Ireland (1825–28). It would also provide the structure for the compendious survey of the Gaelic supernatural by Alexander Carmichael’s contemporary the Rev. John Gregorson Campbell (1836–1891). The product of a lifetime’s study and obsessive fieldwork in his home parish, Campbell’s folkloric accounts were published posthumously as Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1900), and Witchcraft and second sight in the west Highlands (1901), the whole re-edited by Ronald Black as The Gaelic otherworld (2006).

During retirement in Edinburgh, Alexander Carmichael, with the help of his wife Mary Frances Macbean (1837–1928), focused on editing, or even rewriting, some of the short religious texts he had recorded: hymns, blessings, prayers, and verbal charms. His Carmina Gadelica (2 vols, 1900; 4 subsequent, posthumous volumes 1928–71) presented an idealized, romanticized, influential, and subsequently extremely controversial depiction of a traditional life whose daily customs and beliefs were infused with and sanctified by a devout, mystical spirituality expressed in primeval, allusive, elaborately formulated verses of the highest literary quality. This chimed with the Celticism of Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold, which pervaded fin de siècle taste; but it also served to counter anti-Highland invective that was equally widespread at the time, triggered by crofting disturbances and ecclesiastical disputes. Similar materials were published (in probably more authentic form) in collections by the historian Alexander Mackenzie (1838-1898) (Historical tales and legends of the Highlands, 1878) and the lexicographer and philologist Alexander Macbain (1855–1907) (Celtic mythology and religion, 1885).

Macbain and Carmichael formed part of an informal nucleus of foklore-minded intellectuals centered around Inverness and Edinburgh. Among others involved were Carmichael’s daughter Ella(1870-1928), herself a field worker and Celtic scholar; George Henderson (1866–1912); Donald Mackinnon (1839–1914) and William J. Watson (1865–1948). These last three mark the commencement of the academic professionalization of folklore studies in Scotland. After studying the subject at Vienna and Jesus College, Oxford, Henderson was appointed lecturer in Celtic at Glasgow University in 1906; in 1882, Mackinnon became the first incumbent of the newly-created Chair of Celtic at Edinburgh University; he was succeeded in 1914 by Watson, the husband of Ella Carmichael. Watson’s pioneering scholarly textbook Bàrdachd Ghàidhlig: Specimens of Gaelic poetry, 1550–1900 appeared in 1918.

Carmichael’s own published work was inspired by a romantic mentality and latterly permeated by the aesthetics of the Celtic Twilight. His Celticist penchant was to some extent shared by his acquaintance Father Allan McDonald (1895–1905), Catholic priest, poet and charismatic activist for the rights of his parishioners. McDonald’s manuscript folklore collections were heavily drawn upon – to the point of plagiarism – by the clairvoyant and spiritualist Ada Goodrich Freer (The Outer Isles, 1902, mainly on second sight in the Hebrides). Such Celtic Twilight mysticism can be usefully contrasted with the massive – and mostly unpublished – ethnographic collection assembled by Edinburgh-based businessman Robert Craig Maclagan (1839–1919) for the Folklore Society in London (The games and diversions of Argyleshire, 1901; Evil eye in the Western Highlands, 1902). Much of Maclagan’s collection was actually compiled by his principal fieldworker Elizabeth Kerr, whose recordings often open a space for distinctive, often unheard female – and feminist – voices. A similar focus on women’s experiences comes through in the literary ethnographies composed by Mary MacKellar (1834-1890) (Poems and songs, Gaelic and English, 1880), and Katherine Whyte Grant (1845-1928), who, having spent three years in Bucharest and travelled widely in central Europe, provides a wider European perspective on Scottish Gaelic folklore (Myth, tradition and story from western Argyll, 1925). Frances Tolmie (1840-1926), brought up within a cultivated gentry family on the Isle of Skye, was urged to write down her extensive song repertoire, airs as well as texts, by George Henderson. The resulting 105 folksongs were published in 1911 by the Folk-Song Society in its Journal. The journal’s editor, Lucy Broadwood, had herself made pioneering sound recordings of Gaelic songs on visits to the western Highlands in 1906 and 1907. Tolmie’s collection, composed mostly of anonymous women’s work songs from oral tradition, represents both a riposte to John MacKenzie’s canonical, overtly masculine Sàr Obair nam Bard Gaelach and, to a certain extent, a further stage in the Celtic Revival programme of aestheticizing traditional Gaelic everyday life.

Oral tradition circulated in the columns and correspondence of Gaelic-focused periodicals such as An Teachdaire Gaelach, An Gàidheal, and the Celtic Magazine, as well as in Highland newspapers such as the Inverness Courier, the Oban Times, the Northern Chronicle, and local editions of the People’s Journal. The relatively short-lived Nova Scotian Gaelic newspaper Mac-Talla also published a copious amount of folkloric material. As well as supplying readers – and listeners – with items for entertainment, discussion, and debate, these publications offered letter writers and columnists a clearing house for ideas, as well as an arena in which to test out and refine proposals for subsequent articles and books. The press continues to publish and discuss items of Gaelic folklore up to the present day. The newspaper format favoured shorter items such as charms, place-names, and proverbs, a genre whose most important collection was compiled by the eccentric Scottish Episcopal clergyman and Gaelic scholar Donald Mackintosh (1743–1808) (Gaelic proverbs, 1785), and expanded by Sheriff Alexander  Nicolson (1827-1893) (Collection of Gaelic proverbs and familiar phrases, 1881).

Pioneered by Lucy Broadwood, wax sound recordings, particularly favourable for the collection of musical performances, were coming into wider use. During two decades of fieldwork the composer Marjory Kennedy-Fraser (1857-1930) recorded some five hundred song airs. Her pioneering achievements as a collector have been overshadowed by the controversy arising from her influential art song collections Songs from the Hebrides (3 vols, 1909–21), From the Hebrides (1925), and More songs from the Hebrides (1929), in which Gaelic songs were substantially reworked, elaborated, and reimagined for concert recitals, as well as encumbered with highly romanticized “Celtic Twilight” translations and prose entr’actes.

The experience of hearing a concert recital by Marjory Kennedy-Fraser in 1920 inspired the lifelong commitment to Gaelic culture of one of the most important twentieth-century folklorists in the field, Margaret Fay  Shaw (1903–2004). From a monied background in Pennsylvania steel, Shaw spent four years in a thatched cottage in South Uist documenting and photographing the daily life and culture of the local community: the basis for her masterwork Folksongs and folklore of South Uist (1955). While in Uist, she met her future husband John Lorne Campbell (1906–1996), himself half-American, but with an Argyllshire gentry upbringing against which he had rebelled through cultural nationalism, romantic Catholic Jacobitism, and, later, radical rural communitarianism. Spurred by an expedition to the Nova Scotian diaspora Gàidhealtachd and several years living in the Isle of Barra, Campbell’s initial interests in Jacobite song and Gaelic dialectology had blossomed into a major collecting programme, facilitated by the best recording technology he could afford. Shaw and Campbell married in 1935; three years later Campbell bought the Isle of Canna, where, after the unsettled war years, the couple were able to lead a life both scholarly and bohemian, assembling a major archive of some 2,000 items of folklore recordings, 5,000 photographic negatives, and numerous manuscripts, all now preserved in Canna House, as well as editing and publishing several important collections of Gaelic song and oral narrative.

Following the founding of the Irish Folklore Commission/Coimisiún Béaloideasa Éireann in 1935, the notion of a permanent Scottish national folklore archive began to be mooted, a repository for material in both Gaelic and Lowland Scots. James Delargy, head of the IFC, had first encouraged such a scheme under the auspices of the Scottish Anthropological and Folklore Society, a body founded in 1934 as the Scottish Anthropological Society, with a folklore remit added two years later. The outbreak of war effectively put an end to this initiative, though the proposal was taken up by the short-lived Folklore Institute of Scotland (FIOS), founded in 1947 and headed by John Lorne Campbell. It was the establishment of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Scottish Studies in 1951, that folklore finally became academically institutionalized in Scotland, with a particular focus on the threatened Scottish Gaelic culture of the Highlands. From the 1980s onwards, the School’s now somewhat faltering national recording programme was complemented by the district-focused work of comainn eachdraidh (local history societies) across the Hebrides and western Highlands. Today, however, most folklore collecting in Scottish Gaelic is effectively being undertaken by the staff of BBC Radio nan Gàidheal. The station records and broadcasts a blend of high-status performance items from the past, fashionable music and song, and informal, topical conversation, commentary, and debate: a contemporary céilidh house on the airwaves and online.