The Silver Chanter E-Book

Stuart McHardy

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 395

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

All over the world people associate the bagpipes with Scotland. In this informative and entertaining book Stuart McHardy introduces Scotland's national instrument - its history, development and repertoire - and examines the part that the piper himself has played in Highland and Lowland society over the centuries. The main bulk of the book is a series of thematically grouped tales from all periods and parts of the country in which we see aspects of traditional lore in stories of warriors, musicians, ghostly battles, the hand of friendship, exemplary heroism and the cost of supernatural help. There are tales of the MacCrimmons, the most famous island pipers of all, as well as Habbie Simpson, who was possibly the most famous of all the Lowland pipers. Whether dealing with great bravery or contemptible jealousy, the supernatural or the mundane, these stories reflect the central role that the bagpipes have played, and continue to play, in Scottish traditional culture.

Leseprobe

The Silver Chanter andOther Piper Tales

The Silver Chanter andOther Piper Tales

by

Stuart McHardy

First published in Great Britain in 2004 by

Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Stuart McHardy, 2004

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

The right of Stuart McHardy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

ISBN 1 84158 291 3

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

Typeset by Initial Typesetting Services, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by

MPG Books Limited, Bodmin

Contents

Introduction

The MacCrimmons

Competition

Pipers and the Supernatural

A Royal Piper

Lowland Pipers

Fighting Tales

Odds and Ends

Introduction

The sound of Scottish bagpipes skirling through the night to the accompaniment of the intricate and unique patterns of Scottish snare drumming is a sound that is known throughout the world. It is somewhat ironic that this widespread popularity of the Scottish bagpipes is a result of Scottish regiments going round the world as part of the expanding British empire. That same British state had destroyed the Highland society which many people today believe is the original home of the bagpipes. This is of course totally wrong. Bagpipes are no more Scottish in origin than they are Indian or Croatian.

Bagpipes are known in hundreds of different societies. The Czechs, French, Germans, Greeks, Hungarians, Italians and Spanish all have their own bagpipes and outside Europe they can be found in India and Tunisia. Bagpipes had also been popular in England up to the sixteenth century. There is a widespread misapprehension that the bagpipes are in some way ‘Celtic’ because people in areas where the Celtic languages were once, and in some cases still are spoken, all play the bagpipes. While this includes such putative Celtic areas as Galicia in the north-western corner of Spain, where they play the long-droned gaita, it takes no account of the fact that the Welsh, a vibrant Celtic-speaking culture, do not have the bagpipes. The confusion of ideas regarding notions of Celticity can best be summed up by the Interceltique Festival at L’Orient in Brittany. This marvellous annual event is a celebration of the cultures of the Celtic-speaking peoples, with a particular emphasis on bagpipes. However, interviewing the pipe-bands representing Scotland in 1989 I discovered there was not one Gaelic-speaker among them – they were virtually all Scots speakers from Lowland areas, but dressed in the necessary kilts, bearskin hats etc. The dress of pipe bands is of course derived from the uniforms of the Highland Regiments of the British army and thus is hardly Scottish at all, even if the kilt was part of the traditional dress of the Scottish Highlander.

Despite the problems of Scottish history in general there is no doubt that the bagpipes are nowadays seen by many people throughout the world as being particularly Scottish. Pipers of course often play at weddings and I believe it says a lot for modern Scotland that a recent Sikh wedding in Edinburgh had the groom, in a golden turban, leaving the house for the marriage on a white horse – he and his brothers preceded by a piper and all of them in full Highland dress. The authenticity of modern Highland dress may be dubious but is now well-entrenched in Scottish society and it is a sign of a vibrant culture that it can change and develop rather than being rooted in an overly respectful attitude towards the past. But as ever in Scotland, there are always contradictions.

The point about the pipes not being a purely Highland instrument can be seen in ‘Tam o’Shanter’, one of the masterpieces of the incomparable poet Robert Burns.

There sat Auld Nick, in shape o beast,

A touzie tyke, black, grim and large,

To gie them music was his charge:

He screw’d the pipes an gart them skirl,

Till roof and rafters aw did dirl.

Here he is satirising the Scottish idea of the devil, someone far removed from His Satanic Majesty, the personification of all evil, and the familiar term ‘Auld Nick’ shows a being that can be treated humorously. The point here is that Auld Nick is playing at Auld Alloway Kirk, in Ayrshire on Scotland’s southwest coast, far from the Scottish Highlands.

Pipers were never limited to the Highland areas of Scotland. In the Lowlands in the sixteenth century and later, many towns had an official piper whose role was to play through the streets every morning and evening at specified times as a means of public time-keeping. Effectively they woke the people up and later told them what time to go to bed. They would also play at regular events like feasts and fairs. While many of these town pipers did not survive beyond the seventeenth century, in some places the pipers held their positions; the Jedburgh pipers – the Hastie family – stayed on till 1790, and some pipers survived even longer. The position of town piper often included both a wage and a house. We have no records or traditions in the Lowlands of the schools of piping like that attributed to the MacCrimmons, or of any particular master pipers. The musicians would of course have had to have been instructed by someone, but we do not hear of any outstanding individual pipers in the Lowland areas. Their job was essentially to provide music for the community, something that can be said of pipers within Highland society too, even if the social occasions which called for pipers might vary. Much has been made of the piper’s role in Highland society since the early nineteenth century, but like much else from that period pertaining to Highland society, there has been a great deal of romanticising. There are stories here of Lowland origin and it is clear from what records we have that piping was widespread and common throughout Scotland from the Middle Ages onwards.

The History of the Bagpipe

Bagpipes are known in much of the world. Trying to figure out where and when they were first invented is an exercise in futility. Representations of bagpipes have been found in the Middle East and Egypt from the second millennium BC and there are mentions of the instrument in the Bible. Some records tell of the Chinese having a bagpipe as early as 2585 BC; it was known in ancient India and there are also classical Greek references to bagpipes. It is therefore quite obvious that bagpipes have developed in many different parts of the world over a long time and to try and find out how they came to Scotland, far less where they were first played, is a hopeless task. Due to the way western culture has developed there has long been a particular fascination with the civilisations of Greece and Rome. This has led to the suggestion that the Romans must have brought the bagpipes to Scotland because we have representations of bagpipes in a Roman carving at Richmond Castle in Kent and another from Stanwix, near Carlisle, a fort on Hadrian’s Wall. Another similar carving was found near Bo’ness on the river Forth in 1870 and there have been suggestions that the bagpipe was the favoured instrument of the Roman infantry just as the cavalry used the trumpet. The existence of the bagpipes before the first century is mentioned by the Greek playwright Aristophanes in his work The Acharnians, where he wrote, ‘You pipers who are here from Thebes, with bone pipes blow the posterior of a dog.’ This could be a reference to a skin bag. There was one very famous piper in Rome – Nero, who considered himself a good piper. During his reign the bagpipes were even included on a coin. Dio Chrysostom wrote in AD 115, ‘They say he can ... play the aulos both with his mouth and also with his armpit, a big bag being thrown under it.’

The lack of early written references to the bagpipe in Scotland has led to suggestions of it being imported at a later date but we should remember that, due to ongoing struggles with her southern neighbour, Scotland has very few early written sources. The invasions of both Edward I and Oliver Cromwell, nearly four hundred years apart, both saw widespread destruction of indigenous written material. When you add in the destruction that accompanied the Reformation in Scotland, when many churches, the natural places for old records to survive, were vandalised, it is easy to understand the lack of early Scottish documentation.

For a long time in the western world it has been the norm to see ‘civilisation’ and ‘progress’ as something that spread out from the Mediterranean cultures to the barbarians in the north and west. While writing and the development of cities were undoubtedly spread with the advance of the Roman empire, the idea that we in Scotland were unenlightened savages awaiting education at the hands of the invading Romans is an insult. We also have a problem in understanding the past in that it became the norm in European universities to stress the influence of classical culture. The notion that there is no significant culture without writing has led to suggestions that Scotland was an isolated and backward wee country far behind the Mediterranean centres of civilisation. This is demonstrably untrue as there were great megalithic structures like Calanais in Lewis and Maes Howe in Orkney being raised in the fourth millennium BC, before the Egyptians started building their pyramids. Recent research underlines the reality that sea transport was extensive in such distant times and that cultural exchange was the norm over wide areas. Widespread evidence suggests that there was some form of bagpipe in use over much of Europe when the Romans began to create their empire. If one person has an idea in one place it is quite likely that someone else will have the same idea somewhere else, and the wide variety of types of bagpipe would suggest that far from being local responses to outside influences, they are in fact local variants on a common approach to musical development.

Given that in Scotland a carnyx, a sophisticated bronze Caledonian war trumpet dating back to the first century AD, was found on the shores of the Moray Firth, it seems just as likely that there would have been an indigenous form of the bagpipe at that time in Scotland. There is also a carved stone representation of a man playing a double pipe on a Pictish symbol stone from St Vigeans at Arbroath. This seems likely to have been a pipe with a drone, suggesting that early in the first millennium AD some of the technology of the bagpipe was in use in Scotland.

The earliest specific evidence for the bagpipe in Scotland is thought to be two sculptures that used to be visible at Melrose Abbey. This is mentioned by Dalyell in his Musical Memoirs of 1849. One of these carvings was of a pig playing the pipes and Manson in The Highland Bagpipe mentioned a tradition that it was carved during the reign of James IV as a satire on the Highlanders. While there is no doubt that the Stewart monarchs were in a constant struggle with the Highland clans, the idea of the pipes being specifically associated with the Highlands in this period cannot be sustained.

The bagpipe was still used in England in the time of Chaucer and the tradition of the Lowland pipes is itself of considerable antiquity. Again in this respect we should remember that bellows pipes are a variation of the same basic idea of the bagpipe. The Lowland, Border and Northumbrian piping traditions are as authentic as those of the Highlands and the notion that they are separate and distinct traditions arises from an obsession with differentiating people on the grounds of language. While much of the tradition of the Highland pipes developed among Gaelic speakers and that of the Borders amongst Scots speakers, the idea that people speaking different languages are separated in a similar fashion to people living along the borders of modern nation states is somewhat simplistic. The norm for many human beings in much of the world is not to speak just one language but rather to speak two or more. Professor Sandy Fenton made a telling point at the conference founding the Elphinstone Institute in the 1990s when he said to forget the Highland line, and to think of a Highland sausage – an area where two overlapping language groups share various aspects of culture and social existence.

The world-famous fifteenth-century Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh has carvings of pipers and piping, and we have growing references to the use of pipes amongst the Highland clans from the fourteenth century onwards. Traditions that survived amongst the Macdonald and Menzies clans maintained that their ancestors were playing the pipes at Bannockburn.

The Scottish bagpipe is undoubtedly the best-known form of bagpipe in the world. While all bagpipes are a development of earlier blown pipes – the bag allowing both continuous playing and considerably more volume than the lungs themselves – the Scottish bagpipe has become known all over the world because of its use by the British army. In country after country the Scottish regiments were the shock troops of the British empire and the massed pipes of the army bands have had an incredible effect on peoples of all religions, races and cultures. This is somewhat ironic when one considers that the people amongst whom the ‘piob mhor’ developed – the tribal peoples of the Scottish Highlands – were discouraged by the government from playing it themselves in the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745–53. The Disarming Acts of 1746 banned the carrying of arms and the wearing of the kilt, while the playing of bagpipes, like other aspects of ancient Highland culture, was actively discouraged, though not specifically banned. Many commentators mention the fact that as a musical instrument of war, the ‘great pipes’ of the Highlands were without equal. The loud and shrill notes of the bagpipe, sometimes likened by those unappreciative of their majesty to the caterwauling of cats, could be heard above the noise of hand-to-hand fighting and can carry up to ten miles in favourable climatic conditions.

The banning of traditional Highland weapons and dress in the Disarming Act can, in today’s terms, be seen as a deliberate attempt at cultural annihilation, even if it did not specify the bagpipes as an instrument of war. From the 1730s onwards, when General Wade began driving modern metalled roads into the Scottish Highlands, the days of Highland society, the last Celtic-speaking warrior society of Europe, were numbered. British society was shaken to the core in 1745 by how close the Highland army, with its pipers, came to taking over London and reimposing the Stewart monarchy. However in the aftermath of this struggle, which carried on in a desultory guerrilla campaign in the Highlands till the mid-1750s, the British army continued to use the bagpipes in the regiments that had been raised from the Highland regions. The tradition of the pipes stirring up the Highland warriors to battle was adapted by the expanding military machine of the British empire, with great effect.

It is one of the ironies of history that in the modern world the pipes have become synonymous with Scottish Highland culture throughout the world. Despite their assault on Highland Gaelic society the British government fully appreciated the power of the pipes in battle and the Scottish Highland regiments, raised from the 1730s onwards, were allowed to use them throughout the period. They were also allowed to wear a form of their traditional dress, though it was banned in the Highlands. This is not quite as anomalous as it seems. We should remember that the Jacobite rebellions of the eighteenth century were in reality part of an ongoing civil war and that some of the worst atrocities committed in the Highlands after Culloden were perpetrated by Scotsmen. There were Highlanders and Lowlanders, and pipers, on both sides.

The army pipers must have helped to preserve the role of piping within Scottish society as a whole, for Highland pipers in the British army often returned home to Scotland; it is stretching belief to think not one of them would have played a note out of uniform over the period. During the period 1746–53, when the British army garrisoned virtually the entire Highlands of Scotland and her major cities, there was probably a substantial falling-off in bagpipe-playing by ‘civilians’ but, just as weapons were hidden, so bagpipes must have been, and once the troops left the glens it seems likely that pipers would have gone back to their playing. It is not difficult to envisage a scene where the British army garrison departed from a glen in the early 1750s and immediately a set of pipes appeared and music was played in celebration.

One view of history tries to suggest that the ’45 was a struggle between Scotland and England. It was not. Scots and English fought on both sides and were driven by religious and political beliefs. The end result, however, was that the Highlands – where for centuries both Edinburgh and London had been unable to impose their will – were changed for ever and a society that in many ways preserved ancient continuities with the Iron Age disappeared.

With the revival of interest in all things ‘Celtic’, a word that would have meant nothing to any of the Celtic-speaking peoples before 1700, piping became very popular in the early nineteenth century. This was partly due to the romanticised vision of Highland society presented by Sir Walter Scott. His organisation of the royal visit of 1822, when George IV went out and about in Edinburgh in a kilt (and pink tights!), helped to make such interest fashionable. It would, however, be wrong to dismiss the vigour of indigenous culture in the second half of the eighteenth century as being solely inspired by such romanticism. A strange form of nationalism had developed in which the poet Robert Burns, a radical freethinker and avid supporter of the French Revolution, could pen songs in support of the Jacobite cause. The Jacobites had supported the Stewarts, a dynasty well known for their scorn of Gaelic culture, belief in the divine right of kings and latterly, total indifference to Scotland. This strange combination of beliefs stemmed from a variety of causes: the resentment of the corruption that led to the Union of the Parliaments in 1707; the lack of benefits for most of the population from that union; the revulsion at the activities of the British army after Culloden; and probably partially from nostalgia as shown in the very idea of Auld Lang Syne – a vague time in the past when life was much better than the present.

By the mid-nineteenth century Romanticism had taken over and what is know seen as tartan kitsch was in full swing. The creation of the modern formal Highland dress, while based on the philabeg or little kilt – the full plaid was the philamore, or great kilt – is a nineteenth-century invention. Piping, with the pipers wearing the militarised derivative of actual Highland dress devised by the British army, became a very obvious symbol of this touristic version of Scottish culture. However, in amongst all this, the revival of piping, despite the myths and fantasies, did represent a new flowering of Scottish music. It has long been accepted wisdom amongst writers on piping that the tradition survived through the Middle Ages due to the patronage of Highland chiefs. I would suggest that this is only part, and probably a small part, of the story.

The Construction of the Bagpipe

The basic construction of the bagpipe consists of:

– a chanter

– a bag of skin or leather

– a mouthpiece

– a set of drones, nowadays three but originally just one

The chanter is the part of the instrument played by the fingers and contains a double reed. It has seven finger-holes and a thumb-hole, and has a usual range of an octave and one note. It is attached to a skin bag, which allows a continuous supply of air to be maintained by the player through the mouthpiece. This contains a round piece of leather hinged onto the bag end which acts as a one-way valve. As the player blows air in, the flap opens; when he stops blowing the air pressure within the bag forces the flap shut – as opposed to playing a fife or whistle directly with air from the lungs. Early pipes, which survive in different parts of Europe like the Balkans and Galicia, have a single drone, a device which lets the player finger the tune to an accompanying steady note. This is the earliest form of the bagpipe and was in use in Scotland as late as the sixteenth century. By squeezing the bag with his left hand while a breath is taken, the piper can keep up a flow of air in both the drone pipe(s) and chanter. The drones, two tenor and one bass, each have their own double reed. It seems likely that the first pipes in Scotland, no matter how they got here, would have been single drone pipes. The development of a two-drone pipe in Scotland happened in the first half of the sixteenth century. Adding a second tenor drone gave the pipes a richer harmonic complexity. The addition of a third drone, a bass drone, making the great pipes as we know them today, didn’t take place till the early 1700s. This further increased the harmonic depth of the instrument and of course also greatly increased the volume of the pipes. Previous to this there was a mention of the ‘great pipes’ in 1623 but this probably referred to a two-drone set. Given the problems later associated with the pipes, it is noteworthy that in 1623 the piper playing the great pipes at Perth was prosecuted for playing his instrument on a Sunday and thus profaning the Sabbath.

The Music of the Pipes

PIBROCH

The Gaelic word ‘piobaireachd’, now ‘pibroch’ in Scots and English, means ‘what a piper does’ and underlines the importance of the classical pibroch tradition in the history and development of the Highland bagpipe over the past couple of centuries. Today a pibroch consists of an ‘urlar’, Gaelic for ground, which presents the theme, followed by a series of variations of increasing complexity on that theme. Once the piper has exhausted the tune, or his own possibilities for variation, he returns to the theme before finishing the piece. Around three hundred old pibrochs have been preserved. Among the oldest are thought to be ‘The Battle of Harlaw’ (1411), ‘Black Donald’s March to the Isles’ (1427), ‘The End of the Great Bridge’ (1427), ‘MacRae’s March’ (1491), ‘The Park Piobaireachd’ (1491), ‘MacIntosh’s Lament’ (1526), ‘The Battle of Waternish’ (1578), and ‘Hector MacLean’s Warning’ (1579). The dates are in fact speculative. Some pibrochs have also been used as tunes within the song traditions of both Gaelic and Scots. In the aftermath of the 1746 Disarming Acts a whole generation was discouraged from playing the pipes outside the army and it seems certain that in this period many great tunes were lost forever. The piping tradition in Scotland, having survived the Disarming Acts, has developed with levels of commitment and seriousness that have led to the claim that the old pibrochs have survived as they used to be played, note for note, thus preserving the ancient authenticity of the tradition even as it continued to develop. This idea is hard to sustain, given the effectiveness of the Disarming Acts, and people may believe it or not as they will. In recent years the innovations of player/composer Martyn Bennett serve to show that this ancient tradition still has plenty of potential for future development, even for young audiences raised on a diet of electronic music.

Pibroch can be understood as the classical music of the Highland bagpipe although the instrument can of course be used in many other settings. Weddings, funerals, dances and parades have all been using pipers, either solo or in bands with drummers, for a long time in Scotland. The repertoire of Scottish music suitable for the pipes consists of reels, Strathspeys, schottisches and marches, many of which are extremely popular. All Scottish piping music arises from our traditional indigenous music and, while no one can dispute the majesty and wonder of good pibroch playing, to suggest that its origin is different from ‘ceol beg’, the little music, comprising dances, marches, airs etc, is unsustainable. We have no definitive proof of the origin of ‘ceol mor’, the big music. Opinion amongst many music historians is that the development of ceol mor, with pibroch at its heart, came about after the final development of what we today think of as the classic Scottish Highland bagpipe with its three drones. This only happened in the seventeenth century. In a contradiction that is typically Scottish, while pibroch is uniquely Scottish and has its roots in traditional Scottish music, its great flowering since the early years of the nineteenth century owes a great deal to the Highland Societies which were formed from amongst the middle classes of Scotland and England and were driven by an overlyromanticised idea of Scottish history.

CEOL BEG

Literally meaning ‘the little music’, this is the term used to describe the music most people associate with the pipes – reels, strathspeys, marches and jigs, as well as song tunes. The reels, strathspeys and jigs are dance music, Scotland having long had a vibrant dance tradition. Reels were the most common form of dance and it is likely that the name was originally Norse. The great flowering of culture under the Lordship of the Isles in the late Middle Ages drew on both Norse and Gaelic traditions, language and culture. Dancing seems to have always been popular in the Highlands and it was considered a manly art amongst the warriors of the clan. Nowadays it is believed that the Highlanders used a set of pipes smaller than the full Highland bagpipe for accompanying dancing. It is also worth noting that for much of the year Highland weather can be somewhat unpleasant and playing the full Highland bagpipes in a ‘tigh dubh’ (traditional Highland black house) with its low roof would have been a painful experience for all present. The smaller pipes could be used indoors and there have been suggestions that some of the smaller pipes might have been bellows-driven, as in the Borders and Northumbria. Today the bagpipes are used to accompany competition dancing, particularly in the dozens of Highland Games that still take place all across Scotland every summer.

These games also have piping competitions, which are taken very seriously by all involved, no matter how small a gathering they take place at. These piping and dancing competitions show the dynamism and health of traditional Scottish culture. Though many of the bigger gatherings attract hosts of tourists, most of the smaller events are run solely for the benefit of the local population, and competitors in the various competitions often come a good distance to compete. Collections of ceol beg were relatively rare until the later years of the nineteenth century, after which many collections were published based on the repertoires of the pipe bands of the various Scottish regiments. Here again the influence of the British army pipe bands was of considerable importance. While pibroch can be seen as the classical music of the pipes, ceol beg fulfils the role of popular music, if such differentiations have any real meaning. Most pipe bands and individual pipers play ceol beg but the pibroch tradition of ceol mor continues to have a central role in modern piping. Much of the ceol beg tradition, like all traditional or folk music, has come down to us from an indeterminate time in the past, and though many of the tunes are now available as written music, their survival formerly depended on being passed from piper to piper.

CANNTAIREACHD

Already in the sixteenth century pipe masters and their pupils were using a sing-song that could imitate and convey both the pitch and length of the notes as well as all the grace notes that would occur in the pieces to be played on the Scottish bagpipes. Work on transcribing the pieces preserved orally in canntaireachd did not start until the nineteenth century. It appears to have begun with the publication of a small book written in 1828 by Neil MacLeod of Gesto, known generally, in the Scottish fashion, by the place he inhabited, as Gesto. He was a bit of an eccentric with a taste for litigation, particularly against MacLeod of MacLeod. However, the transcription of what was probably an individual style of using vocables to represent the tunes has since become rigid. We should remember that the canntaireachd arose from within a society in which oral transmission was the norm. The idea that there could be a single codified system of representing the wide variety of tunes played on the bagpipes is difficult to prove. Piping is a form of music that despite its codification and structuring since the early 1800s arose within the wider folk music tradition of Scotland and would therefore have strong regional stylistic variations.

The Clans

Many writers on the bagpipes in Scotland have emphasised the role of the piper as a servant of the chief. Particularly in the nineteenth century the belief arose that the Highland clan system was inherently feudal. The idea of the clan chief as some sort of feudal overlord of all the clan is not borne out by what we actually know about clan society. The chief’s role, like that of the piper, was bound by unwritten rules developing from the social organisation of the clan itself, a kin-group arrangement that was in some ways more like that of the North American plains tribes than any form of feudalism. One well-known incident shows that the chiefs were far from hereditary despots. A young chief of the MacDonalds was brought back on the death of his predecessor from the clan with whom he had been fostered. When he saw the great feast arranged to honour him he made the unfortunate comment that a few hens would have done as well as the deer, oxen, sheep and other game that had been cooked. He was immediately taken off the clan lands and his brother substituted as clan chief. He did not understand that the investiture of a new chief was of central importance to the entire clan and that as chief he was answerable to the clan, as they were to him. The fact that most clan chiefs were known simply as, for example, ‘The MacDonald’ or ‘The Chisholm’ is a clear manifestation of tribal reality within the clan system. The chief was the closest direct descendant of the original clan founder and as such was both leader and representative of the entire kin-group that formed the clan. People coming into specific clan areas could take on the name of the local clan and be treated as full members. Rennie, in The Scottish Nation mentions that on several occasions chiefs who misruled were ‘removed’. Partly due to the highly romanticised writings of Sir Walter Scott and partly to the fashion for all things Highland that he stimulated after the royal visit of George IV in 1822, the idea that the chiefs treated their clanspeople as little more than serfs became widespread.

The reality was different, as is shown by the following from Burt’s Letters from a Gentleman, a collection of letters from the 1730s. He tells us about the Highlanders’ relationship with their chief:

. . . and as the meanest among them pretend to be his Relations by Consanguinity, they insist upon the Privilege of taking him by the Hand whenever they meet him. Concerning this last, I once saw a Number of very discontented Countenances when a certain Lord, one of the Chiefs, endeavoured to evade this Ceremony. It was in Presence of an English Gentleman in high station, from whom he would have willingly have concealed the Knowledge of such seeming Familiarity with slaves of so wretched Appearance, and thinking it, I suppose, as a kind of Contradiction to what he had often boasted at other Times, viz., his despotic Power over his Clan.

It is noticeable that he says that it is the member of the clan who was insisting on his right to shake his chief’s hand. While this does not mean that the two were absolute equals it does show that within the tribal/clan system there was a social system totally unlike that of England where there were aristocracy, gentry and, effectively, serfs, or as Burt himself put it, slaves. There is a level of egalitarianism that not only contradicts but has no obvious precursors in feudalism. The supposed absolute power of the Scottish chief over his clansmen does not fit in with this eyewitness account. The piper’s role in earlier times was probably more akin to that of the town piper in the Lowland areas in that he had a role within the clan system as a whole, both for entertainment at a range of social occasions, providing the music at important events and marching into battle. The idea that the Highland pipers were the personal servants of the chiefs comes from the period after the clan system had gone into decline and the chiefs were more concerned with their rents than their relations – who at one point were the entire clan. The chief was the centre of much of the social, economic and even ritual activity of the clan and the piper’s role would be closely involved with such activities.

Language

Many of the tales here were originally in Gaelic and have become part of the wider Scottish tradition through translation into Scots or English. Others, from the Lowland areas, would have originated in Scots. Both Gaelic and Scots have been spoken in Scotland for more than 1,500 years, while English as it is spoken today in Scotland has come in over the past three or four centuries. Stories survive in the everyday languages that people speak and no one language is a guarantee of a story’s authenticity. Some people like to think that Scots is a direct descendant of English and thus is a less truly indigenous language than Gaelic. In fact Scots comes from the same roots as English but developed separately from it. Both Scots and English are Germanic languages and we know that Germanic tribes were fighting in Scotland alongside both P-Celtic (Welsh) and Q-Celtic (Gaelic) speaking tribes, as far back as the fourth century, so to claim one language as being of more antiquity or authenticity than another is to misunderstand history.

Story

The material in this book comes from traditional tales that have in the main been written down over the past century or so. It is only recently that the role of storytelling has begun to be understood. While there has always been an awareness that the oral tradition contained remnants of ancient beliefs, it is now understood that in some cases story can pass on hard facts over periods that can be as long as thousands of years. While historians tend to concentrate on the written word to tell us of our past and archaeologists rely on physical artefacts, stories have probably been told for as long as human beings have had the power of language. The process of storytelling was how knowledge was passed on from generation to generation, whether it was practical knowledge, mythology and ritual, or tales of heroes and heroines. Such tales continue to be told for as long the audience finds them relevant and are not necessarily superseded by the arrival of literacy. There is at the moment a worldwide resurgence of interest in storytelling and we are only now beginning to understand that these remnants of the past can teach us a great deal about our ancestors. We should remember that even today in the modern western world not everyone can read and write. Just a couple of hundred years ago literacy was often very limited amongst the rural and urban working classes. So although the storytelling tradition was not as structured as it had been in earlier times it continued to flourish.

Even today you hear people in pubs, at parties and other social gatherings who are natural storytellers and often the stories they tell are based on traditional material – old tales in new clothes. The historians’ obsession with paper and dates has blinded us to the fact that oral transmission retains a great deal of what life was like for our ancestors and how they themselves saw the world they inhabited. One type of common piping tale illustrates this very well (see ‘A Long Night’s Playing’). This story type also includes fiddlers and other musicians in different local traditions. Basically, the story is that a couple of pipers are on their way home from a wedding or other social event, when they come upon a fairy hill with its door wide open. The fairies invite them in and get them to play throughout the night, plying them with high-quality whisky, and in the morning they are sent on their way. They find themselves in a world totally unlike the one they had left and in some cases they are said to have been in the fairy hill for a century or more. Once they realise what has happened they usually crumble away to dust. Variants of this story continued to be told well into the twentieth century, with the version told here having the pipers coming across motorcars in the streets of Inverness when all they had known was horse transport.

It seems at least possible that the ‘pipers in the fairy mound’ stories contain echoes of ancient rituals at burial chambers – fairy mounds in local stories often turn out to be burial mounds. Similarly there are legends of hollow hills where Arthur or Finn MacCoul lie sleeping, accompanied by armed warriors awaiting a summons to come forth to save the land. Such hills are often associated with the old pagan communal fire festivals of Beltane (1st May) and Samhain (Soween), or Halloween. If there is anything to this suggestion, the type of instrument played by the musicians in such tales has probably changed over the hundreds and hundreds of years these stories have been told. However, it does underline that the bagpipes are an integral part of Scottish culture and have been so for some considerable time.

Different versions of the same basic tales crop up in a variety of places. This is because for maximum impact stories were set within the known environment of the audience. This would be particularly important for children, who would be given most of their moral and social education through the medium of storytelling. For maximum effect it was best if the stories and their characters inhabited the landscape that the children knew. It is because of this need that there are so many different locales where, for example, stories of King Arthur survive in Britain, several of them in Scotland. People in many parts of Scotland, Wales and Cornwall spoke similar Brythonnic languages up to about a thousand years ago, languages which were the antecedents of modern Welsh. This is something that is only now beginning to be truly understood – in the past the similarity between stories told in Scotland to others from England, Germany or Greece was explained as having come about by someone bringing the story here. The existence of many instances of Finn MacCoul stories surviving in the Gaelic-speaking population of the west has been said to be a result of the Gaels having come initially from Ireland. Recent research shows categorically that the ancient Gaelic-speaking kingdom of Dalriada was not founded by settlers from Ireland. People speaking the same language tend to have the same legendary and mythological stories and cultural contact is a complex process. The cultural situation vis à vis Scotland and Ireland is better regarded as being a two-way street.

Stories can, however, also have something to teach the modern world. In this respect it is worth remembering that the discovery of the ancient Greek city of Troy came about through the German amateur archaeologist Schliemann following up the literary references in Homer’s Iliad – references which historians and archaeologists of the time had no doubt were derived from earlier oral tradition and thus fictional. Written literature has only been around for a few thousand years, one of the earliest examples of writing coming from ancient Mesopotamia, modern Iraq, from about 3500 BC, but humans have been on the planet since long before then. It is plain that for most of that time people have been handing down stories from one generation to the next.

Stories survive in different locales, and in various languages and cultures, because they address common human understanding. There are some stories from Australia’s aboriginal Dreamtime that tell of giant marsupial creatures. Dismissed as fantasy for many years, the bones of these creatures began to turn up during mining operations in the 1950s. When they were dated they turned out to be over 30,000 years old and many were found near what were clearly hearth fires. Stories about them had survived by oral transmission for all that time. While our piping tales are of course much more recent than that, some of them are certainly part of a continuum of tradition that is truly ancient. In how they tell us of the people involved and the society they inhabited they retain the capacity to speak to those of us ready to listen.

In the latter half of the twentieth century storytelling became the focus of considerable academic research in Scotland and the extent of the treasure that was held by various communities began to be realised. One of these communities was Scotland’s travelling people, many of whom have for centuries wandered all over both Scotland and Ireland. Some of the stories retold here are from that tradition, while others come from mainly rural locations amongst both Gaelic and Scots speakers. Yet others have been gleaned from local histories and literary collections. Stories from the distant past have survived alongside stories from more modern times, and both types appear here. As interest in storytelling grows we are beginning to appreciate what these tales can tell us of our history, and what life was like for our ancestors. History itself has until recently been concerned with the activities of the ‘high heid yins’, kings and nobles, soldiers, religious leaders and the rich. As social history becomes more developed the storytelling tradition can help to remind us that the material used by historians refers to no more than a tiny portion of human society at any one time. Tales can be seen as telling us the true story of the common people, to a certain extent in their own words. Stories survive because people still want to hear them. And in Scotland the pipes have always been important to the people playing them and the people listening to them, not just to the lairds who could afford to maintain a professional piper. In his book The MacCrimmon Legend, Campsie inadvertently shows the limitations of what one might call the ‘educated’ attitude towards Highland society. He tells us:

The nation was wholly illiterate. Neither bards nor seannachies could write or read; but if they were ignorant, there was no danger of detection; they were believed by those whose vanity they flattered.

This statement misses the point spectacularly. He refers to the seannachies in a note as ‘storytellers’, but they were in fact also the guardians of the genealogies of the clans, a matter of great importance in a tribal society claiming descent from an original common ancestor. We should remember that it was this shared common ancestry amongst all the people of a clan that made the role of the bards and the seannachies central to clan society. Campsie, in assuming that there was something feudal about clan structure, misses the fact that in general the seannachies would not be able to simply flatter the chiefs – their responsibility was to the entire clan and in many cases they were raised to fulfil a hereditary role, being trained in the necessary memory skills from a very early age. In this respect they were perhaps more like the ancient druids than the flattering sycophants of a medieval feudal court.

The repetition of a traditional story in oral-based societies is something different from mere entertainment, in that its authenticity is a matter of importance for the entire group. There would always be people present who themselves had considerable knowledge of traditional story, as well as the bard or seannachie. In fact because of the nature of oral tradition the same stories would have been told and retold and most, if not all, of the social group would have a considerable knowledge of them, making it virtually impossible to alter or distort the inherent matter of such stories.

The Stories

Some of the stories in this book provide examples of motifs which occur in different parts of Scotland. I have reworked them without, I hope, taking away any of their essence. The tale ‘A Long Night’s Playing’ is known in several versions – some of them make the musicians fiddlers rather than pipers – while ‘The Piper of Keils’ employs a motif that turns up in other places in Scotland where there are caves – on Tiree and at Dickmontlaw in Angus, for example. As already suggested, the possibility exists that stories of the musicians in the fairy hills and perhaps even the pipers in caves might hark back to ancient practices. The entertainment aspect of traditional storytelling has been exaggerated; the stories were always much more than mere entertainment. But I hope that the tales in this collection will entertain you, and hopefully, now and again, perhaps inform you as well.

The MacCrimmons

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