The Gaelic oral Tradition

Babygael · The Gaelic oral Tradition

An extract from "Gaelic in Scottish History and Culture"....Michael Newton.

Gaels were among the earliest peoples in Europe to adopt the practice of writing,the first in Europe to to write their vernacular literature.Gaelic culture as a whole, however, has always been a tradition based on the spoken word. The values,the history,the music,the sense of identity and rootedness, the very sense of being a Gael, have been articulated and transmitted by living tradition bearers through the Gaelic tongue.

From the earliest of times,the poet has had a central role in Celtic society, filling a key political and religious function.Celtic society,s leaders had to be validated by the Bardic order, which in turn depended upon the social order for patronage. It is no wonder that the Romans attacked the druidic order to destroy the intellectual force that that upheald and propagated Celtic values. Anglo-centric Imperialism followed the same course, outlawing bards, destroying centres of learning and exterminating the language.

Besides upholding the traditional values of Gaelic society, the Bardic order has always been a bastion of the standards of the language itself, pushing it's ability to express new ideas to the limit, keeping the vocabulary rich and flexible and providing a rich store of literature to draw from. Even when all other Gaelic social institutions had been destroyed, knowledge of the champions of the oral tradition, the Bards, provided conceptual role models to Gaels

There are a number of different genres within the Gaelic oral tradition: Songs, tales, proverbs, riddles and so on. These different genres tend to express and encapsulate different kinds of experience and ideas: Proverbs express the wit and wisdom of the Gaelic culture; tales cover history, genealogical themes, promote role models and supply entertainment; Songs provide the outlet for emotional expression of the community and the propagation of news; and so on.

A significant characteristic of the oral tradition, however, is the inter-dependency between different elements, and their relation with the language itself.Each of these elements apprears in, and is dependent upon, the others.. Proverbs can often be condensations of events or situations which require a long tale to explain. Songs often quote proverbs, and lines from songs become proverbs in their own right. stories often accompany songs to explain who wrote them, when, why and how.Tales are frequently accompanied by or interspersed with song -like poems.

This is reflected in Gaelic tradition-bearers themselves, who tend to be well versed in all generes even if specialising in a particular one.This was noted as early as the middle of the 1800's by the renowned folklore collector, John F Cambell.

The language itself is densley entangled within this literary web. It has been noted all across Gaeldom that good Gaelic speakers use a high percentage of proverbs and literary allusions in their normal daily speech.

Gaelic literature has always been consciously and deliberately cultivated to maintain a distinctivly Gaelic cosmology, rather than one reliant upon a classical world-view. When the classical literary pantheon had long eclipsed the native symbols and traditions of most of the rest of Europe, Gaelic literature held up it's pre-christian heroes and symbols as yardsticks of praise and models of exellence. This is not as some believe, because they were really pagans, or because they were stuck in a backward cultural time-warp: They were thoroughly familiar with classical literature and had translated much of it into Gaelic. This is simply an unequivocal statement of the self- confident and worth which they felt about their own native literature and cultural symbols. Thus characters from literature, such as the Fianna, represent praiseworthy qualities, and all manner of plants and animals appear as metaphors in a rich symbolic vocabulary elaborated and reinforced in song and story.

Languages belonging to distinct cultures have different means of classiifying and expressing experience.The classical example of that is colour, for not every language has the same mapping from words to sections of the colour spectrum. The Gaelic word "GORM", for example, is often interpeted in English as 'blue', 'dark grey' or green,but it is never used for the colour of grass or water. There are many examples of unique cultural structures or catagories reflected in the language, such as the calendar, kin systems, degrees of ownership and possession, animal taxonomies implicit in nomenclature, and so on, which cannot be directly translated into another language because of the nuances they contain.

Words are not just independent ,individual units, but are bundles of associations which operate according to the internal logic of the language and it's cultural experience. For example the term 'gorm' can also mean 'hot' or 'great, illustrious'. All good poetry and literature depend on the rich interplay and juxtaposition of the many semantic fields of words within themselves and between each other in the context of the phrase and larger literary setting. Puns, which are extreamly language specific, are the most obivious example of this.

Not only words but phrases and expressions also carry the historical weight of their previous usages, and skillful speakers and writers will intentionally use phrases with previous literary existance to invoke their associations. Newspaper writers frequently borrow and cleverly modify catch-phrases, proverbial expressions or lines from songs to convey an idea quickly, and in a similar fashion Gaelic literature frequently invokes phrases well known to the audience to conjure up a complex situation or feeling.

To under score the importance of the language in the maintenance of the culture, we can observe the ferocity with which the language was attacked as a means of destroying the culture and the degree of sucess of the Anglicisation campaign by teaching the English language.