Prayers, blessings, charms, and incantations: What Carmichael did and didn't print before Carmina Gadelica

From his papers we can calculate that during the time he lived in Uist, between 1864 and 1882, Alexander Carmichael recorded at least 62 charm texts. But in actual fact, Carmichael would print hardly any of this rich corpus under his own name before he published the first two volumes of Carmina Gadelica in 1900. What did appear was a number of prayers and blessings among other ‘old hymns’ included in ‘Grazing and Agrestic Customs of the Outer Hebrides’, Carmichael’s unorthodox contribution to Appendix A of the Napier Commission’s Report into the Condition of the Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1884), 451–82; these were republished in Lord Archibald Campbell’s Records of Argyll (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1885), 385–98. Some of these appeared again in the paper Carmichael gave on 24 December 188 about ‘Uist Old Hymns’ to the Gaelic Society of Glasgow, a revised version of a newspaper report of which was printed in the Society’s Transactions, i (1887–91), 34–47.

Now, it seems significant that neither of these pieces, ‘Grazing and Agrestic Customs’ or ‘Uist Old Hymns’, actually contains any item whatsoever which Carmichael would include in the second volume of Carmina Gadelica, the one mostly taken up with Uibe or Incantations. What we do have in these articles are what he was to describe in the first volume of CG as Achaine or Invocations: that is, blessings and prayers. This inevitably brings us to the delicate and problematic distinction between blessings and prayers, and charms and incantations. The Gaelic scholar Alexander Macbain, whom we’ll meet again shortly, anticipates a common, but by no means uncontroversial, modern definition of the latter when he writes:

An incantation consists of a formula of words which is recited to bring about certain physical results to which the meaning of the words has some correspondence more or less direct. [Alexander Macbain, ‘Gaelic incantations’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, xvii (1890–1), 222].

But strict, watertight divisions between the two genres are difficult to uphold. Macbain admits as such a few pages later on:

The exact line of demarcation on the one hand between what is an incantation and what is a prayer or hymn, and on the other hand between an incantation and an ordinary secular song, is often difficult to draw. [ibid., 230]

We can build on Macbain’s suggestion by suggesting that, pragmatically and in general, it was felt that charms tended to focus upon specific ailments or accidents, to ‘bespell’ people, or to protect them against evil eye. Of course prayers could also function to protect or cure; charms, however, often needed to be recited by a specific class of people to be efficacious: the luchd-eòlais, or ‘cunning folk’ in English. Charms were usually more ‘performance pieces’ than prayers, often delivered with the assistance of an object or an amulet, in specific places, at specific times, and under specific conditions of enactment. Most importantly of all, charms had to be kept secret. Often a charm couldn’t be given to just anybody. If it were to retain its efficacy, it had to be handed down under certain restrictions: a woman had to give a charm text to a man or vice versa, for example. Once the charm had been given to somebody else, the original reciter might lose their power to use it. Prayers, on the other hand, were much more portable, and much more public.

In both ‘Grazing and Agrestic Customs’ and ‘Uist Old Hymns’, it’s notable that Carmichael never uses the words ‘charm’ or ‘incantation’. We have ‘hymns’, ‘prayers’, ‘invocations’, ‘croons’, and ‘dedicatory hymns’, but no charms. If anything, Carmichael appears keen to play down the category: although he reprints six pieces from the Napier Commission Report in ‘Uist Old Hymns’, it may be significant that this time he misses out the Beannachadh Buachailleachd (‘Herding Blessing’) and the Rann Buachailleachd (‘Herding Rune’), prayers to protect cows which to our eyes shade suspiciously into charms to be recited by milkmaids and cattle herds. Mention is certainly made in ‘Uist Old Hymns’ of a Eòlas Ceartais, but this piece is described as a prayer rather than a charm for justice, and is not printed in the article. Incidentally, this was probably the Eòlas Ceartais obtained from Catrìona Macintosh, Staoidhligearraidh, on 20 May 1875 (CW87/17 [fos.12v–13]), and printed as Ora Ceartais, no. 20 in CG i, 52–3.

Two questions for the next blog on this subject: Which charms recorded by Alexander Carmichael had been published before Carmina? And why was he apparently so reluctant to see them in print once more?

References:
Alexander Carmichael, ‘Grazing and Agrestic Customs of the Outer Hebrides’, Parliamentary Report into the Condition of the Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1884), 451–82.
_____. ‘Prayers and hymns of the Hebrides’ in Lord Archibald Campbell (ed.), Records of Argyll (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1885), 385–98.
_____. ‘Uist old hymns’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Glasgow, i (1887–91), 34–47.
Alexander Macbain, ‘Gaelic incantations’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, xvii (1890–1), 222–66.

Images:
Staoiligearraidh, home of Catriona Macintosh

Highland Place-Names in the Carmichael Watson Collection

For this issue, we would like to welcome as guest blogger Dr Jake King of Ainmean-Àite na h-Alba, who as part of his work has been busy researching place-name evidence in the Carmichael Watson Collection.

The aim of Ainmean-Àite na h-Alba is to find the correct authoritative Gaelic forms of place-names.  As a researcher, part of my work is finding out what Gaelic forms were recorded by past scholars. Over the last few years I have been editing the unpublished notebooks of the Rev. Charles M. Robertson (MS selection at the National Library of Scotland) and to a lesser extent the notebooks of Prof. William J. Watson in the Carmichael Watson Collection. Throughout Robertson’s notes he made reference to his ‘cuttings books’, and I had previously been unable to discover the whereabouts of these, presuming them lost. After recent correspondence with Dòmhnall Uilleam however, we have discovered this collection, which also includes those of Watson and Alexander Macbain (the foremost place-name scholar of the generation prior to Watson). These people were the best Gaelic scholars of their day, and these newspaper cuttings contain many fascinating bits of information ranging from snippets to whole article series.  Here are some highlights:

I found the snippet pictured here loose, undated and unreferenced between two pages of Robertson’s place-names press cuttings book. The context puts it at some time in 1918. It is the published minutes of the executive Council of An Comunn Gaidhealach:

The meeting also agreed to proceed with the publication of a school map of Scotland for the Highland schools showing the place names in Gaelic. The Rev. Charles M. Robertson, Kilmachomaig U. F. Church Islay, is to provide the ‘copy’ for the publishers, and an application for a grant is to be made to the Carnegie Trust.

If anyone knows of any such Gaelic map was ever printed please get in touch!

About a century ago, William J. Watson set up a Mòd entry for papers on place-names,  hoping that this would encourage place-name research. The Gaelic writer Henry Whyte (1852–1913), a native of Easdale, entered this competition under his pen-name ‘Fionn’. His first paper on the place-names of Muckairn from the Oban Times in 1907 is known to Gaelic scholars and toponymists, but this collection contains a hitherto unknown sequel, on his native parish of Kilbrandon and Kilchattan. The value of the discovery of a survey of an entire Highland parish by a reliable native Gaelic speaker cannot be overestimated.

One of the problems I have had in editing the notebooks of Robertson is how to date them. They are not internally dated, and although some references give a terminus ante quem, I was not previously able to narrow the date ranges with much accuracy. CW538 and 539 has changed all that. These are two boxes of old newspapers stored in old envelopes. The content of the newspapers are in themselves interesting, but the addresses and date stamps on the recycled envelopes inadvertently give a fairly detailed account of Robertson’s residences over his life and as such help me to gain some context about the notebooks. By way of example, I can now surmise that the Sutherland notebooks were gathered while he lived in Kinbrace from 1899–1900, or that his Skye Gaelic article and place-names notebooks were researched while he was minister at Ardvasar in Sleat 1904–5.