Introduction

For writers of a minority language, culture is of greater significance than gender. In the case of Gaelic, ‘writer’ itself is a misnomer for a great many of its producers of words. ‘Writer’ brings with it a misleading set of expectations which do not apply to ‘oracy’ - expectations perhaps of originality in content and form and certainly of distinctiveness in voice. Cultural criticism in general is geared to plotting progress as a series of movements in those fields. But originality has to be thought of differently in an oral culture where the transmission of verbal pieces depends utterly on their acceptance by the group. Nowadays, as it is mostly in printed form that we know this originally orally transmitted work, it is imperative that we recognise its oral origins and its essential difference from work conceived for and transmitted in writing. Almost by definition, oral work is not individualistic. It uses formulae, fugitive passages, runs, stock characters and the like, and the very process of oral transmission subverts our notions of authorship. Possibly it is not a matter of forgetting, but of non-ownership, that accounts for the vast majority of this work being anonymous. The work is generally heavily conventionalised in both form and content; voice remains generically rather than personally determined, and attitudes are group-generated. The undeniable identity of individual pieces is primarily aural, afforded by rhythm (even in prose), rhyme and tune, and the occasional unusual image.

Only in the last few decades have the practice and the consumption of writing produced the sort of individualism in some Gaelic authors that makes reasonable comparison with other written literatures. Writing skills in Gaelic among the ordinary people were connected with the publication of the Bible in Scottish Gaelic, made widely available after 1807. It is significant that the work of Mairi Mhdr (1821-98), though belonging to the latter half of the nineteenth century, was still produced without recourse to writing - her songs in many ways being an extension of the 18,000 lines of traditional poetry she knew by heart. From the formal point of view, she composed new words to old tunes, often using existing rhyme schemes.