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Dis‑Locating and Re‑Membering: Memorial Space in the Oral Gaelic Poetry of Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh and Mairghread nighean Lachlainn

L’espace de mémoire dans la poésie orale gaélique de Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh et Mairghread nighean Lachlainn
Alice de Nanteuil

Résumés

Cet article explore les poèmes de Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh et Mairghread nighean Lachlainn, deux poètesses des Highlands écossais composant à la fin du dix‑septième siècle, et les façons dont le territoire y est évoqué pour commémorer une culture disparaissant à vue d’œil. Alors que les clans sont confrontés à une dépossession spatiale due à la présence anglaise empiétant sur leurs territoires, leurs poèmes mettent en exergue la topographie singulière, les multiples reliefs et les noms de lieux chargés de sens de leurs terres natales. En mêlant identité et territoires gaéliques, les chants de Màiri et Mairghread proposent une réparation poétique en réponse à cette destitution spatiale. Nommer les clans fait partie de ce processus de restitution territoriale. Dans leurs chants, issus de la tradition orale, la mémoire est à la fois l’outil et le but de leurs créations poétiques. La préoccupation spatiale de ces autrices opère une forme de représentation territoriale par l’oral, alors même que la poésie devient elle-même un espace de mémoire, un havre sûr, où l’intégrité des clans est restaurée et préservée dans la mémoire collective.

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Introduction

1In her elegy commemorating the death of her clansman, Eachann Maclean, the Gaelic poetess Mairghread nighean Lachlainn (c. 1660–post 1749) exclaims:

We are overcome, worn out with weeping, since every nobleman who could help and support us has gone: our sails have been torn, our chart is gone, our helm is broken, and may God grant you a pathway to Himself! (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 71)

  • 1 Their poems have been edited and translated from the original Gaelic by Colm Ó Baoill in Màiri nigh (...)

2Grief is signified as overwhelming disorientation, not only for the poet but for the entire clan. Here, the clan is poetically transmuted into a boat that is completely deprived of its bearings and thus unable to moor at a safe harbour. The absence of the clan leader, manning the helm, endangers the whole stability of the clan. Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh (c. 1615–1707), the second Gaelic poetess discussed in this paper, also uses the image of the loss of the helm in her lament for her MacLeod patron (Ó Baoill, 2014, p. 205).1 Notions of spatiality and loss are tightly bound up in the poetic productions of both poets. While grief is expressed in spatial terms, their poems also articulate profound anxiety over spatial alienation and dispossession.

  • 2 The names of the poetesses, literally translating to Mary, daughter of Red Alasdair and Margaret, d (...)
  • 3 The number of poems attributed to each of them is approximative because there are debates on additi (...)
  • 4 See the “Map of the clans of Scotland” by Johnston & Robertson (1899). Available on <www.electricsc (...)

3The contributions of Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh and of Mairghread nighean Lachlainn to the ancestral oral literature of the Gaelic clans are far from anecdotal.2 Their extant bodies of work, which amount to about eleven poems each, situate them among the most productive female Gaelic poets of that period.3 The contingencies of oral culture make it very probable that much of their work has been lost, while information about the poets themselves is sparse. It is held that Màiri was a MacLeod of Harris and Dunvegan and that Mairghread was a Maclean, as both poets devoted their poems to the noblemen and patrons of those respective clans. The lands of Màiri’s clan were on a section of the Isle of Skye and on the Isle of Harris of the Outer Hebrides, at the most north-western end of Scotland. Mairghread’s clan was implanted further south, on the Isle of Mull.4 Màiri and Mairghread are considered to have been both “clan poets”, and their poems disclose personal, even intimate links with the clan’s noblemen, indicating that they were close to the power centre of the chieftain.

4The variable nature of oral productions has long justified a scholarly neglect of their work; yet their poems bear testimony to the major cultural, political and religious changes that Scotland underwent throughout the “long” 17th century. In the Scottish Gaelic context, this period can be defined as starting with the Union of Crowns in 1603, which displaced the king to London and further anglicised the Scottish central government, and ending with the Battle of Culloden in 1746, commonly held as sealing the total collapse of the Highland clans. The encroaching anglicised presence decisively altered the Gaelic landscape, for instance, through land confiscations and the building of roads and military forts. Most importantly, it transformed the clans’ relationship to their own territories. In the Poetics of Space and Place in Scottish Literature, Monika Szuba and Julian Wolfreys explain how place can be defined as the experience of space, and underline the role of literary expression in this process:

Expression—language, writing—is the extension of sense, tracing the place and giving form to the experience and memory of place. Thus, the literary representation of place provides a formal means, irreducible to a single discourse, that which is the encounter between self and world. (2019, p. 6)

5For the Gaelic poets, this encounter is contentious since the ground they stand on is shifting: the recurrent motifs of disorientation and exile in their poetry reflect the sense of territorial estrangement creeping into Gaelic society at the time.

  • 5 The poems were generally written down in the 19th century, when Gaelic poetry collectors, alarmed b (...)

6Both authors appear to use poetry as a response to land dispossession. Through their continual preoccupation with the topography, the reliefs, the glens and the mountains of the land, Màiri and Mairghread delineate the outlines of the Gaelic territories within their poems. Because of the oral nature of Gaelic poetry, this poetic endeavour is primarily a memorial act. Memory and remembering indeed shape and condition this type of literature. Neither poet wrote down their poems; they have only survived through oral transmission from generation to generation.5 Poetic creation thus depends on the poet’s memorial abilities, while the circulation of the poems depends on those of the community. Màiri and Mairghread display a keen awareness that the subject matters that are celebrated or lamented in their poetry are committed to communal memory, and so to posterity. Through the evocation of the Highland scenery, the dislocation of the Gaeldom territories seems to be mended within the poems and thus within collective remembrance. At the same time, poetry itself becomes an ideal, safer place, where such reconstitution is possible. Because of the inextricable ties between territory and Gaelic identity, remembering the land is also tantamount to memorialising, and thus preserving, cultural integrity. The naming of the clans, a prime component of Màiri and Mairghread’s poems, is an integral part of the reaffirming of cultural, but also territorial, cohesion.

  • 6 My translation from the French original version: “La mémoire, le lieu d’impression des souvenirs, e (...)

7Claire Boulard Jouslin defines memory as such: “Memory, as the site where memories imprint themselves, is often associated with a beneficial exercise which saves from destruction, and with a creative process which establishes personal and collective identity” (2024, p. 3).6 By way of their poetry, Màiri and Mairghread can be seen to invest memory as a spatial entity where Gaelic identity is concomitantly articulated and preserved. This article will endeavour to show how the concern for territory within these poems constitutes a form of oral mapping: the lands that have undergone spatial and cultural dislocation are remembered, that is to say, put back together again, through the spoken word. The poets operate a territorial survey in their own terms, as their poetry becomes a self-defined memorial space.

8Confronted with the threat of cultural evanescence and spatial privation, the need to remember and memorialise imbues their poetry with urgency. Within an oral tradition which relies on multiple forms of memory transmission, Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh and Mairghread nighean Lachlainn strive to reconstitute and ensure the posterity of those threatened places. How do their poems enact a relocation from territorial dispossession to memorial reappropriation? How is the memorial space carved into the poems thought of as an answer to the destitution of concrete territory? How do they work at establishing memory as taking up symbolic, mental, and cultural space?

Uprooting the tree: displacement and oral memory in context

The tree imagery and the ruined orchards

9In praising Sir Tormod MacLeod of Berneray, Màiri describes him as the “topmost apple of the tall tree’s fruit” (Ó Baoill, 2014, p. 91). The imagery of the tree, rooting the clan chief within his land, is a bardic trope commonly found in Gaelic poetry: Mairghread also uses this organic metaphor to celebrate a Maclean nobleman as “the tallest tree in the grove” (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 103). The recurring trope is essential to the memory work required by oral literature (Notopoulos, 1938). The tree also echoes the early Celtic “nature poetry”, underlining the age‑old poetic engagement with environment that is a prevalent feature of Gaelic literary culture. Yet what prevails in Màiri and Mairghread’s poems is not the sturdy, sappy, flowering tree; rather, the trees they depict are severed and uprooted. While Màiri cries that “the tree has fallen headlong, the grain has showered to earth” (Ó Baoill, 2014, p. 29), Mairghread laments that “the great trees have been broken” and “the most priceless sap has been spilt” (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 95). The elegiac mode dominates their poetry. The poets usually devote each poem to weeping over the death of one eminent clansman; but through that single figure, they appear to also be grieving for their clan as a whole, for their society and for their culture. The organic metaphor is extended: “It is the apple-tree of this garden that I now lament” (Ó Baoill, 2014, p. 109, emphasis mine), Màiri deplores; “the orchard where the apple-tree was has fallen”, Mairghread sorrowfully states. The latter also compares the subject of her praise to the greatest tree “in the forest of the Gaels”, and then asks this desperate question: “Is there anyone who has eyes who would not accept how the forest has been stripped?” (Ó Baoill, 2009, pp. 103, 81). The spatial anxiety over the destruction of the Gaelic lands reflects the increasing territorial pressure that the Highland clans endured at the time. The impinging English presence and the anglicisation of the Scottish central government profoundly changed the clans’ relationship to their lands and their territory. It also destroyed the structure of bardic poetry on which Gaelic culture relied, thereby denaturing the foundations of this oral literature and modifying the role of memory within it.

Ruling the unruly: novel maps and absent chiefs

10The “unruliness” of the Highland territories had long been a contentious issue for the Scottish kings and central government. During James VI’s reign, the Scottish Parliament passed the 1587 act “for the quieting and keeping in obedience of the disordered subjects, inhabitants of the borders, highlands and isles”, forcing clan chieftains to pay fines for all “mischiefs” and “wicked” acts committed on their lands (Thomson & Innes, vol. 3, p. 461). The rocky, arduous, and wild landscapes of the Highlands were seen as enabling such “barbarous” conduct: the clans were as “uncivilised” as the land they occupied. The problem grew even more embarrassing with the delocalisation of the Scottish king to England in 1603: how to rule over those “troublesome subjects” from such a great distance? The Union of the Crowns also made the cultural differences between the Highlands and English society all the more salient.

  • 7 The Atlas has been entirely digitized on the website of the National Library of Scotland. Available (...)

11A significant way in which the Crown and the anglicised Scottish government sought to force the clans into submission was by establishing a systematic knowledge of their territories. The early modern period in Scotland is delimited at each end by two seminal cartographic acts: the Blaeu Atlas of Scotland and William Roy’s survey of Scotland. The Atlas, published in 1654 by Joan Blaeu, compiles the maps made in the 1580s and 1590s by the Scottish cartographer Timothy Pont.7 The accuracy and the level of detail of these maps were unprecedented in Scotland (Moir, 1973, p. 43), making Scotland “one of the best mapped countries in the world” (Stone, 1989). The exceptional character of Pont’s work lies greatly in the fact that he mapped out, at his own risk, the Highland territories. Robert Gordon insists upon this in his 1648 account of Pont’s journey: “[…] he visited all the islands, occupied for the most part by inhabitants hostile and uncivilized, and with a language different from our own” (Moir, 1973, p. 37). A century later, in the wake of the Battle of Culloden (1746), the military engineer William Roy was commissioned by King George II to produce a “Great Map of Scotland”, between 1747 and 1755. The repeated Jacobite rebellions prior to Culloden had led to constant warfare between the Highlanders and the English troops; the stubborn resistance of the clans was in great part imputed to the impenetrability of their territories. This was pointed out by General Wade in his scathing 1724 report to King George I on the Highlands and its inhabitants:

The Highlands of Scotland are still more impracticable, from the want of Roads, Bridges, and from excessive rain that almost continually falls in those parts, by which Nature and constant use become habitual for the Natives, but very difficultly supported by the Regular Troops. They are unacquainted with the Passages by which the Mountains are traversed, exposed to frequent Ambuscades, and Shots from the Tops of the Hills, which they return without effect. (p. 22)

12The unknowable aspect of these lands is what made them ungovernable. As Carolyn Anderson explains, the Crown grew anxious to obtain a careful mapping of this untameable area, “to assert territorial control” through military force (2010, pp. 3, 8). Progress in cartographic techniques was, at that time, thus tightly linked to such an endeavour, as “the maps were primarily tools of access for sending soldiers into the Highlands in order to police them” (Anderson, 2010, p. 21). At the same time, the building of fortifications, military barracks and a road system thoroughly and durably transfigured the landscape of the Highlands. Anderson further contends that the military mapping of 18th‑century Scotland is “typical of wider practices in European nations and their overseas colonies” (2010, p. 37).

13Another important way in which the clans came to be dismantled was through the breakdown of the ancestral links between the chief, the clan, and the land. In Highland society, the chief was the highest authority figure and maintained a deep inter-personal relationship based on loyalty and kinship with his clansmen. Though the land was thought of as belonging to the clan, the chief was its “head and representative”, distributing territories fairly and protecting them (Clifford-Vaughan, 1974, p. 74). Throughout the long 17th century, however, the chiefs were displaced out of their clan’s lands. Almost all of Mairghread’s poems are laments on the Macleans being “banished from their land and from their citadel” (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 49). In 1692, Mairghread’s chief, Sir Iain Maclean of Duart, lost his clan’s lands to the Earl of Argyll, of clan Campbell, forcing him to flee to France (Ó Baoill, 2009, pp. 114, 133). Mairghread repeatedly blames the Campbells and depicts the dissolution of the clan and the lands in the absence of a chief: “Your lands are the poorer for it, full of famine and poverty, and subject to false prophecies” (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 35). The conflict between the Campbells and the Macleans went beyond inter-clan feuding: the Campbells, one of the most powerful clans, were long-standing allies of the anglicised central government of Scotland. James A. Stewart Jr. indicates that “By the middle of the 17th century the Clan Campbell had made a dramatic shift […] to being the Lowland government’s tool for the destruction of conservative Gaeldom” (1992, p. 166).

14In addition to land dispossession, Crown policies forced the chieftains to leave their lands. In his 1724 report, General Wade explains that, before the Union of the Crowns, “The Chieftains of Clans were obliged to send their Children or nearest relation to Edinburgh as Hostages for the good behaviour of their respective Clans, and in default they might be by the Law put to death” (p. 19). After the Union, a series of laws compelled the chiefs to travel all the way down to Edinburgh, or even London, in order to represent their clan’s interests; they were gone for months, sometimes years at a time, with very few means of communicating with their clan. When she acceded to the throne in 1703, Queen Anne allowed Sir Iain Maclean to leave his French exile, but only if he came to live in London with a pension (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 26)—a fact that Mairghread mentions several times (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 51). The absenteeism of the Gaelic chiefs created great instability within the clans, deprived of their helms, while also anglicising the chieftains (Coira, 2012, p. 41). Màiri cautions her chief against this risk through a nostalgic depiction of Highland scenery (Newton, 2000, p. 203): “It was not the plains of the Lowlanders you were used to under your feet, with the avarice and greed of Parliament: your preference was a glen, a hunt at full speed, as you traversed the high mountains” (Ó Baoill, 2014, p. 151). Travelling south also cost a great deal, and together with the Civil War period and the Jacobite movement, the 17th century was a time of great financial ruin for the chiefs (Watt, 2006).

15The accumulation of debt, combined with the influence of English models, led to a profound restructuring of land management where the chiefs’ ownership turned from “clanship to commercial landlordism” (McInnes, 1998). This fundamentally altered the clans’ relationship to land, as well as the social bonds between the chief and his clansmen, who had by then turned into his tenants. In her poem to Sir Eachann Maclean, Mairghread denounces simultaneously the treacherous alliance between the Earl of Argyll and England, and the problem of rent:

There is a mighty old man [the Earl of Argyll] settled in this kingdom; he is well protected in his land […] if the men of England were to come […], he would give them a place, and there would be no rent to cause them trouble! (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 105).

The bardic poet and safekeeping memory

  • 8 For the overlapping of oral and print cultures in Scotland, Ireland and Wales, see Chedgzoy, 2012, (...)

16Classical bardic poetry collapsed alongside the clans’ socio-political system. This highly codified, hierarchical, and purely oral literary institution was a deep-rooted pillar of Gaelic society (Carney, 1978, p. 238). The filidh, or professional poet, was very close to the clan’s centre of power: the chief was his patron, whom he praised in his poetry. Through his eulogies of the chief, he acted as “validator of political leadership” (Coira, 2021, p. 2). The filidh was at once historian, chronicler, genealogist, and teacher; he was the safekeeper of the clan’s memory and thus wielded great authority. Kate Chedgzoy explains that, within the “memorial culture” such as that of the Gaelic clans, the bardic poet’s work was intended for posterity: “His responsibility, then, was to produce, for the benefit of the future, a record of the present understood as a continuation of the traditions and achievements of the past”; also, the bardic poet was responsible for “sustaining cultural identity by ‘materializing social memory’ in poetic form, for performance in communal situations” (2007, p. 54). Within this oral culture, memory was also the principal means of creation: the poets had to train for many years in bardic schools to extend their memory’s ability, reciting verse hours on end in complete darkness (Carney, 1973, p. 238). By the early 18th century, however, the class of the filidh had disappeared (Coira, 2012, p. 40). Pía Coira writes that “the demise of the poetic order was accelerated by a combination of adverse external circumstances, such as upstart encroachment, lack of patronage and the spread of print” (2012, p. 41). Gaelic memorial culture was prevented, at least for a time, from completely dying out by the rise of the non‑professional, vernacular poets in the 17th century—among whom an unusual number of women poets came to the fore, such as Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh and Mairghread nighean Lachlainn.8 While bardic poetry was mostly reserved for an elite circle of learned men, the vernacular poets used less complex language and versification, granting more people access to their work. The structural shift within Gaelic oral literature affected the articulation of poetry with memory. What cultural content did the vernacular poets seek to memorise and transmit, and in what way did their poetic practices enable them to do so?

  • 9 The original songs do not contain a title. Titles have been established through tradition, and gene (...)

17It appears that music played a major role in the memorisation and transmission of the vernacular poets’ work, and particularly of Màiri and Mairghread’s poetry. The titles of their poems, later ascribed through tradition, bear witness to their musical nature.9 Several of their poems, such as Màiri’s “MacLeod’s Lilt”, contain a chorus of vocables, meant to be sung communally. Those poems are thus to be considered with their tunes (Ó Baoill, 2014, p. 17). In the Gaelic poetical system, song-making was thought to be a low‑ranking activity because it was more popular, and mostly within the purview of women’s cultural contribution. Yet the mnemonic abilities of music, with the accessibility of their verse language, are in great part what enabled these poets’ work to thrive and be transmitted. As their songs were within reach of more people, instead of a restricted elite only, they were also able to literally take up more space. Pía Coira also notes that, while the professional bards focused almost exclusively on celebrating their patrons, the vernacular poets were concerned with recording contemporary events. As Màiri and Mairghread’s poetry shows, the territorial dislocation of the ancestral Gaelic lands was an event that both poets could not avoid contending with. Their poetry is not only one of loss; however, their songs also constitute a place where the Gaelic lands are reappropriated by being recorded in poetry, thereby committing them to social memory.

Re‑mapping the Gaelic lands

The landscape in motion

18Though contemporary accounts portray the Highland clans as being in a perpetual “State of Anarchy and Confusion” (Wade, 1724, p. 20) and so condemned to prostrated decline, what emerges from Màiri and Mairghread’s poems is a great sense of movement and animation. The poets celebrate their patrons’ active and dignified occupations, such as hunting, riding, or sailing: their bodies are in motion within their environment, as they engage directly with it. The individuals they praise also embarked on many travels, and their trajectories stretch across wide spaces. So Mairghread says to her nobleman: “seed of the noble earls, you travelled from Spain long ago” (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 69). But the journeys are not always wilfully taken on, nor are they always seen positively. The departure of the Macleans, “driven out” of their territory, is a disaster for Mairghread: “It has been a tragic journey, devoid of gain or benefit, since the day you all bade a final farewell to the heir of high-arched Duart” (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 81). Yet the prospect of a long-gone clansman finally coming home is an over-joyous one, and Màiri turns to her craft to celebrate the return of her patron: “Your return from death is a cause of delight to us and to the whole clan; […] My hope is in God that you will have a happy journey to yon fortress” (Ó Baoill, 2014, p. 125, 127). The movements of the noblemen also set the poets in motion. Màiri is ready to “travel from the west under the glowering of the storms” to meet with the returned MacLeod chief; Mairghread depicts herself approaching the shore in hope that “the Maclean chief will yet come across the seas—and we will then go out most happily to meet him” (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 109). What the poets choose to show in their songs, and thus to memorialise, are clans that have not yet resigned themselves to fatal paralysis. Faced with the threat of territorial alienation, the clansmen’s high mobility reveals their acute attachment to their lands, thereby performing a claim to ownership. Màiri and Mairghread additionally convey this poetic reappropriation of space by drawing out the topographic details of the Highlands on proper Gaelic terms, while tying Gaelic identity to territory.

19Movement is, in fact, enabled by the very nature of the territories that both poets delineate. Mairghread describes her chief as a great “stalker of the hills” (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 57), while Màiri shows her patron to deeply appreciate “traversing the peaked hills” (Ó Baoill, 2014, p. 43). Their poems bring to the fore the topographic diversity of the Highland scenery. In “MacLeod’s Lilt”, Màiri particularly plays on landscape variation. She first mentions “the land which lies in the shadow of the rugged peaks”, then she later evokes her patron enjoying “climbing the rough hollows” (Ó Baoill, 2014, pp. 61, 67, emphasis mine). The Gaelic words used are garbhbheann and garbhghlac, where garbh means “rugged, rough”. Firstly, the insistence on that word identifies the land as Gaelic through and through, since at the time the Highland territories were referred to in Gaelic as na Garbh-Chrìochan, or “The Rough Bounds” (Newton, 2019, p. 223). Then, in this poetic context, the word garbh could also be an intensifier, in which case we could translate those words as “the great, or highest peak” and “the great, or deepest hollow”. By building an echo between the two words, Màiri underlines their stark contrast and thus makes the relief of the land all the more striking. The poems inscribe themselves within a precise landscape that is not flat and still but rather bursting with depths and heights. The mountainous aspect of the land is especially insisted upon, through the recurrence of words such as “hills; knolls; moorlands; slopes”. As mentioned earlier, it was precisely the Highland mountains that General Wade reported as problematic because uncharted by the central government (1724, p. 22). By celebrating the plural reliefs of their native territories, the poets memorialise an important source of resistance and vitality for the Gaelic clans. For Màiri, the higher station offered by the land’s reliefs is also a propitious place for poetic creation, as she starts one of her songs “sit[ting] on the knoll” (Ó Baoill, 2014, p. 61).

Identifying the land of the Gaels

20The cultural singularity and identity of the clans seem to be shaped by the terrain they inhabit. In an extract quoted above, Màiri warns her chief against the risks of anglicisation at court by reminding him of typical Gaelic landscapes. To do so, she favours the “glens” and “high mountains” over the “machair nan Gall”, or “plains of the Lowlanders” (Ó Baoill, 2014, p. 151). Similarly, when Mairghread describes her patron “coming down from the glens to the low country” (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 41), it is the word machair that is translated by “low country”. The scenery of the flat, static machair is thus intrinsically associated with the Lowlanders, while the Highland character is tied to the dynamic variety of the mountains and glens. The poets’ frequent designation of the Lowlander as Gall, which in Gaelic etymology means “the foreigner”, versus the Highlander as Gael, already re‑enacts the social, political, and linguistic opposition between those two cultural groups: their descriptions of the landscape indicate that this distinction is also to be read in Scotland’s very topography. Identity is thereby integrated within territory, through contrasting entities. Conversely, Màiri and Mairghread also define the Gàidhealtachd, or Gaeldom, by connecting it with remote territories. In “MacLeod’s Lilt”, Màiri traces her patron’s genealogy in such terms:

And your lineage and nobility were no trifle to trace: from the direct bloodline of the kings of Lochlann, that was the beginning of your ancestry: your kinship is easy to see with every earl in Scotland and with the nobles of Ireland. (Ó Baoill, 2014, p. 63)

21Lochlann, or “Land of the Lakes”, refers to Scandinavia; the historical Irish and Norse origins of the Scottish Gaels are extolled by Màiri, and she uses them to craft her patron’s personal mythology. Similarly, Mairghread emphasizes the historical ties between Ireland and Scotland as she celebrates her patron and “all the brave deeds [he] performed in Ireland and Scotland” (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 75); she also posits the “Earl of Antrim, illustrious rider of the coursers from Ireland” (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 59) as one of her chief’s powerful allies. Another origin myth holds that the Gaels first originated in Egypt, which Màiri mentions, then went through Spain, which Mairghread mentions, to reach Ireland and finally Scotland (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 128). Both poets are concerned with tracing the Gaels’ territorial origins, from which they can derive spatial legitimacy and which they integrate into constructions of Gaelic identity. Such mentions open up the confines of the Gàidhealtachd and underline the poets’ spatial awareness. They present Gaelic territories as not isolated, but as embedded within a far‑reaching network. Presenting Gaeldom boundaries as exceeding the geographical Highlands is arguably a poetic counteraction against the increasingly constraining crowding coming from the southern parts of the British Isles.

Delimiting the dùthaich

22Borders and territorial limits in fact appear to be quite a porous concept in Màiri and Mairghread’s songs, and in Gaelic society in general. Both poets use a fair number of different words to talk about land and territory, such as talamh, fearann or tìr, each corresponding to a certain geographical manifestation or territorial reality that is difficult to render in English. The closest Gaelic word which entertains the notion of borders would be the word crìoch. It is far from being the one that most recurs in Màiri and Mairghread’s songs, as it appears once in each of their extant bodies of work. Màiri uses crìoch to say that her patron is of the finest lineage “from the surrounding lands” (Ó Baoill, 2014, p. 89, emphasis mine), and Mairghread to say that “gloom has descended on the territories since [her nobleman] submitted to leaving” (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 35, emphasis mine). In both cases, it is not so much the idea of limits that is conveyed but rather the idea that the globality of the land is concerned, up to its supposed edges. The Highlands’ lack of hard borders was pointed out by General Wade in his 1724 report to the king: “The Highlands are the Mountainous Parts of Scotland, not defined or described by any precise Limits or Boundaries of Counties or Shires but are Tracts of Mountains […]” (p. 15). For the central government, an undelimited territory was an uncivilised one.

23What seemed to matter more in the Gàidhealtachd was not the crìoch and its potential borders, but rather the dùthaich. Counting among the many Gaelic words referring to territory, dùthaich is usually translated as “land, country”. One of Màiri’s poems is traditionally known as “Dùthaich Mhic Leoid” or “MacLeod’s Country”, owing to its first line: “I will gladly go the land [dùthaich] of Macleod, steering my course towards the ready-handed kin” (Ó Baoill, 2014, p. 149). The semantic plurality of this word can hardly be accounted for in English. In Gaelic, dùthaich also conveys a strong sense of inheritance: as the proximity with the word “kin” shows in the above example, the dùthaich is the land of the clan, of the family; It is the inherited land of the ancestors, the land owned by hereditary right (Newton, 2000, p. 209). It is in that sense that the word is to be understood when Mairghread deplores how “the Macleans were banished from the land [dùthaich] and from their citadel” (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 49) because of the Campbells’ conquest. By her deliberate use of the word dùthaich, she appeals to her clan’s hereditary claim to the land, which was a core traditional value of Gaelic society; in so doing, she challenges the legitimacy of territorial acquisition by the sword. Because dùthaich also refers to an individual’s hereditary qualities or culture, expulsion from one’s ancestral lands could result in identity alienation. In the same fashion, Màiri uses the word dùthaich when lamenting that her chief could not be buried within his clan’s grounds: “this news that I have of Ruairidh is painful, that your body is not in this land [dùthaich], in your hereditary tomb” (Ó Baoill, 2014, p. 111). Memorial continuity, guaranteed by territorial binding, is here severed. In using the word in those specific contexts, both poets underline how memory is etched within the land. The territory of the clan is not so much delimited by concrete boundaries as it is thought of as the repository for ancestral memory. Spatial dispossession and displacement are all the more experienced as total structural and personal rupture.

24By recording the reliefs of the Highlands, Màiri and Mairghread commit to memory how imbued these lands are with the Gaelic essence, and how Gaelic identity can hardly be conceived without an innate sense of place. The poets hereby offer an alternative mode of mapping through the spoken word, which could be seen as a response to the systemic itemisation of the Gaelic territories conducted through the concrete cartographical instruments wielded by the southern forces.

Place-names and Gaelic unity

Naming the land

25In addition to inscribing the topographical realities of the Gaelic lands within their poetry, a feature of note in Màiri and Mairghead’s songs is the quantity of actual place-names that are called up. There are hardly any of their poems that do not contain at least one noun of a locality that is part of the Gàidhealtachd. Sometimes, the poets even mention an array of different places within the space of a song. For example, in her poem “The Croon”, Màiri brings up Sleat, Glengarry, Knoydart, Aird, Kintail, Breacachadh and Brolas; in “A Song to Lachlann Maclean”, Mairghread enumerates Canna, Loch Buidhe, Strath, Leathad, Moidart, Ross, Asgag, Islay, and even Antrim in Ireland. Such poems become spatially dense and cover vast stretches of land. With this poetic practice, both poets are aligned with the long-standing vernacular Gaelic tradition of incorporating place-names and place-lore in oral culture. In fact, as Thomas Sinton attests in 1906, “It is probable that mostly all the names connected with every countryside in the Highlands have been fashioned into rhyme” (Newton, 2000, p. 216). In an oral culture such as that of the Highlands, poetry and songs are a particularly effective medium for ensuring the collective remembrance of places. Moreover, the origins of place-names were the result of local stories and folktales. Dinn-seanchais, or place-name lore, held such significance in Gaelic culture that knowing it was a specific and highly valued skill set of the bardic poet. Place-names are thus deeply evocative and hold memories of past or recent events. One of Màiri’s poems is devoted to the laird of “majestic blessed Applecross” (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 27). The original Gaelic name for Applecross is actually A’ Chomraich, meaning ‘The Sanctuary’, in commemoration of Saint Máel Ruba settling there from Ireland in the 7th century. By using the adjective “blessed” (an àigh), Màiri seems to purposefully call to mind the story contained in the place-name, perhaps to draw a parallel between her laird and the saint. Mairghread mentions Islay, an island in the south-west of the Hebrides, in three different songs (Ó Baoill, 2014, pp. 47, 59, 89): every time she names the island, she mentions the traumatic event during which Maclean men were betrayed and slaughtered by the MacDonalds (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 142), or in her words, when “the earls of the many cups […] were being torn to pieces in Islay” (Ó Baoill, 2014, p. 89). It is as if the place-name itself immediately brings her back to the event.

26Place-names hold collective memories and histories in Gaelic tradition, and place-naming establishes itself as a powerful memorial act, which comes into full realisation in poetry. Mairghread indeed turns to poetry to conjure up lost territories: “Yours was the castle of Moie, the two towers of Creaga Maigheadh and the two handsome Ceàrnaborgs” (Ó Baoill, 2014, p. 61). During the 1690 Williamite offensive led by the Earl of Argyll of clan Campbell, her chief, Sir Iain Maclean, had to retreat to Moie/Maigheadh, then to the Ceàrnaborg islands (Ó Baoill, 2014, p. 145), to finally capitulate in 1692. Mairghread makes sure that it is known within collective memory that those territories once belonged to the Macleans. Through poetry, Màiri and Mairghread tap into the memories of the land or ascribe memory to the land. In the Gaelic oral tradition, naming, and place-naming especially, is an act of immediate creation, and the name reflects the essence of that which is named (Newton, 2000, p. 216). For John MacInnes, “the native system of naming” is a “process [that] mediates between an alien, hostile world and an intelligible order, endowing their names with potency in its own terms” (MacInnes, 1978, p. 451). Place-naming brings into existence spatial entities and is, therefore, a form of oral mapping which both poets make use of.

27The frequency of place-names in Màiri and Mairghread’s songs also leads one to question the poetic value of these nouns. A cogent example is the fourth stanza of Màiri’s “MacLeod’s Lilt”, mentioned earlier, where the poet claims that her patron is related to “every earl in Scotland”, to “the nobles of Ireland”, and to “the kings of Lochlann” (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 63). The original Gaelic song is made up of a standard eight-line stanza, with two stresses per line. The rhyming pattern depends on the stressed vowel clusters, making the following words rhyme together: “uaisle; leamhainn; Lochlainn; sheanchais; so‑iarraidh; Albainn; Èireann; dearbh” (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 62, emphasis mine), that is to say: “nobility; tracing; Lochlann; ancestry; easy to ascertain; Scotland; Ireland; true”. Place-names are carefully woven into the poetic tapestry, while the rhyming pattern is used to ascertain the veracity of the chieftain’s distinguished genealogy. In the same song, the final couplet of a stanza is repeated as the initial couplet of the following stanza, which was common practice for this sort of vernacular song. In oral poetry, repetition is crucial to allow the poet to create ex tempore the following verse (Notopoulos, 1938); It is also very useful for the community to whom the song was passed down, as it can jog the memory. Significantly, in “MacLeod’s Lilt”, the final couplet of a stanza often contains a reference to a specific place, such as “Jura, Scarba, Ireland, Galway, deer-forest, rough hollows” (Ó Baoill, 2009, pp. 61–67), and each of which is then subsequently repeated. The same process occurs in Mairghread’s “Song to Lachlann Maclean”, this time with the words “orchard, homeland, land, territories, Argyll” (Ó Baoill, 2014, pp. 35–37). In that regard, it would seem that those spaces act as place-holders of memory, on which the poet can rely to continue her song.

People and place: the ally convention

28It is to be emphasised that, in most instances in which place-names are mentioned in Màiri and Mairghread’s songs, they are directly related to people—that is to say, place-names are used as a distinctive attribute to designate a specific group. Mairghread speaks of “the family of Duart”, “the people of Airceig and Lòchaidh” or “Murchadh of Loch Buidhe”; and Màiri of “Sir Donald from Sleat”, “the men of Strath”, “Kyntire’s warriors” or “the men of Taymouth and Breadalbane”, to quote but a few. Territory is an identity-marker: where those people are from is who they are. Michael Newton indeed asserts that “in Gaelic tradition, people belong to places, rather than places belonging to people” (2000, p. 209). The context in which all those individuals come about in the songs is clearly defined: they are either listed as ancestors or as allies of the poet’s patron. Màiri claims her MacLeod chief to be “of the race of Kyntire’s warriors, the earls of Islay and Ross”, and in another poem devoted to him she says: “Down from Glengarry will come the guarantee of an army which would never fail you: theirs was no cold love, those men from the plain of Knoydart” (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 131). The distinction between blood-relative or ally is even often blurred. In an elegy to her nobleman, Mairghread declares: “Your kinship to the Lord of Moidart can be shown […]; You are kinsman of Lachlainn from dark Ros of the thickets” (Ó Baoill, 2014, p. 59). The bonds of kinship shape the socio-political structure of traditional Highland society; in these poems, the Gaelic words expressing kinship are built on the root càr, meaning equally “relative” and “friend”. In any case, tracing the patron’s genealogy and listing his allies are among the most important poetic conventions in the bardic tradition. In his seminal work, John MacInnes has shown how such conventions fit into an overarching “panegyric code” which the Gaelic poets, from professional to vernacular, used to praise their patrons (MacInnes, 1978). Specific elements were expected in a bardic eulogy or elegy, and the same commonplaces can be found in a great number of Gaelic poems. Tree imagery, or the physical beauty of the chief, are examples of those recurrent poetic motifs. The listing of allies is a predominant feature in the songs of Màiri and Mairghread. The entire second half of Mairghread’s “Song to Lachlann Maclean” is devoted to reciting the kinship bounds of her patron. In her “Lament for MacLeod”, Màiri’s enumeration of allies is akin to a roll‑call:

[…] our allies are widespread should need of them arise.
To your cause would rally Clan Ranald and Clan Donald and the house of Maclean, firmly knit in friendship with you; and the men of Glengarry over from Knoydart, and Clan Cameron too from the camp of Inverlochy.
No marvel that the MacKenzies should gather round your shoulders, since you had a threefold bond of friendship with their clan.
(Ó Baoill, 2009, pp. 111, 113)

29The ally convention in bardic poetry has the distinctive purpose of reaffirming traditional values and maintaining the social order in times of crisis, such as the death of the clan’s chief (MacInnes, 1978). Within this tradition, the claims of allyship intertwine the ideal within the real: it is not so much about naming actual allies but rather about creating an imaginary precedent of possible allyship. For instance, the MacDonalds and the Campbells were locked into relentless warfare throughout the early modern period. They each represented one of the two conflicting positions available to the Gaelic clans under the duress of an anglicised central government, namely either resistance or collaboration (MacInnes, 1978). Yet in her poem to MacDonald, Màiri draws quite a lengthy listing of allies, and the Earl of Argyll, leader of the Campbell clan, is at the very top of that list:

Your renown is well-guarded: your friends the Earl of Argyll, Mac Coinnich and Viscount Tarbat are with you, the men of Taymouth and Breadalbane, Glengarry and the men of the Rough Bound are with you, and this Colla who would not fail and the Camerons from Lochy. (Ó Baoill, 2014, p. 163)

30According to MacInnes, the ally convention in bardic poetry also aimed at “preserving a conceptual Gaelic unity” (MacInnes, 1978, p. 436). This is what both poets seem to express, when Màiri says to her MacLeod chief: “All the Gaels are kinsmen to you” (Ó Baoill, 2009, p. 131), or when Mairghread declares that her Maclean patron is “the Gaels’ key in both garden and fortress” (Ó Baoill, 2014, p. 37). Though a bardic trope, the listing of allies appears to acquire a new meaning at the end of the 17th century, at a time when the clans were constantly under attack and saw their physical and cultural space shrink at an alarming pace. MacInnes identifies the period between c. 1600 and 1745 as the height of panegyric poetry, which corresponds to the rising period of the vernacular poets, and the increasing destabilisation of the Highland clan society (1978, p. 459). Given their simpler language, the vernacular poets had a larger social reach and seem to have been particularly endowed with the responsibility of preserving unity.

Clan‑naming as map‑making

31The naming of the clans is thus primordial to the ally convention and the maintenance of Gaelic integrity. What the examples above show is that clans and place-names emerge in the same context within the poem. In an oral literature where the structure of a poem relies on associations of ideas, clans and place-names are seamlessly woven within one another. In that regard, it is my contention that the clans have as much geographical and topographical value for the poets as specific place-names, glens and mountains. Because of the ironclad bond between people and place in the Gaelic world (Newton, 2000, p. 210), bringing up clans in a poem amounts to bringing up whole parcels of Gaelic territories. By repeatedly emphasising that their chief’s allies are “widespread”, Màiri and Mairghread draw attention to the spatial anchoring of the clans. Clan-naming is an equally integral part of the oral mapping process that the poets achieve with their poetry. Based on Johnston and Robertson’s map of the clans of Scotland, I have traced all the place-names and clans mentioned in the body of work of each poet. The end result is a richly detailed representation of the Highland territories, thereby highlighting the poets’ acute spatial consciousness. The ideal of Gaelic unity is thus not only symbolic; It is also about concretely preserving the territorial cohesion of the clans and of the Gàidhealtachd, at a time when it was spatially compromised by English infringement. As they evoke the reliefs of the land, place-names and clans, the poets’ preoccupation with landscape and territories establishes itself as a poetic response to territorial dispossession. Through their poetry, they mesh those spatial entities with Gaelic identity. Given the nature of this oral tradition, this poetic endeavour is, fundamentally, a memorial act and a commitment of these Gaelic spaces to posterity.

Conclusion

32Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh and Mairghread nighean Lachlainn’s poems, rooted in oral tradition, articulate an urgency to remember and memorialise clan society whose cultural and spatial integrity is increasingly compromised. By bringing out the place-names, the local colours and varied reliefs of the lands, the authors conduct a form of oral mapping within their poems by piecing the Gaelic territories back together. Interweaving territory within poetry enables the safekeeping of Gaelic identity and memory. Clan-naming is an integral part of this territorial restitution process, as it participates in creating an ideal Gaelic unity that is not only symbolic and cultural but also material and spatial. The songs of Màiri and Mairghread seek to offer poetic reparation for tangible territorial destitution. In doing so, poetry itself is crafted into a memorial space, a safer haven, where the integrity of the clans is restored and preserved for posterity. The exceptionality of those two women’s voices might precisely reside in their poetic recovery of Gaelic space: as they could not directly fight, like their male counterparts, for their landed rights, they battled for territorial and memorial conservation by the word instead of sword, making the territorial preoccupation in their songs all the more compelling (Frater, 1994, p. 319). After Culloden and throughout the 19th century, the Highland Clearances completely dismantled the Gaeldom lands and their communities. The lands that Màiri and Mairghread tried to preserve in their poetry are entirely and definitely lost, as expressed by Dòmhnall MacFhionghain, a Gaelic poet of the Clearances, in his “Song on the Crofter’s Plight” (1885):

From the Butt of Lewis to the Mull of Kintyre,
in the islands, the straths and the glens,
the folks are being flayed by rents, while the land is worthless,
and their patches are thin, while their price is fat.
Much soil that is good is in the possession of the Lowlanders,
and there is no place for the descendants of the Gaels;
if they ask for land, they will be rewarded at present
by having Englishmen’s hounds sent speedily there.
(Meek, 1995, p. 241)

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Bibliographie

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Notes

1 Their poems have been edited and translated from the original Gaelic by Colm Ó Baoill in Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh: Song-maker of Skye and Berneray (2014) and Mairghread nighean Lachlainn: Song-maker of Mull (2009). Those editions are used as primary sources, and the translations quoted here are Ó Baoill’s. Though the original poems are in verse with regular meters, Ó Baoill has opted for a prose translation throughout.

2 The names of the poetesses, literally translating to Mary, daughter of Red Alasdair and Margaret, daughter of Lachlann, have been anglicized respectively as Mary MacLeod and Margaret Lachlann. This paper will use their Gaelic names. For practical reasons, they will be referred to by their first name instead of their surname.

3 The number of poems attributed to each of them is approximative because there are debates on additional poems which may or may not be the work of Màiri or Mairghread.

4 See the “Map of the clans of Scotland” by Johnston & Robertson (1899). Available on <www.electricscotland.com/webclans/geog/clanmap_150.jpg> (accessed 4 March 2026).

5 The poems were generally written down in the 19th century, when Gaelic poetry collectors, alarmed by how quickly this tradition was disappearing, went around Gaelic communities and compiled the poems the people remembered from oral transmission. Some examples include: Turner’s Collection (1813); D. Macpherson’s An Duanaire: A New Collection of Gaelic Songs and Poems (1868); A. Maclean Sinclair, The Gaelic Bards from 1411 to 1715 (1890).

6 My translation from the French original version: “La mémoire, le lieu d’impression des souvenirs, est souvent associée à un exercice bénéfique de sauvetage face à la destruction et à un processus créatif de constitution de l’identité personnelle et collective” (Jouslin, 2024, p. 3).

7 The Atlas has been entirely digitized on the website of the National Library of Scotland. Available on <https://maps.nls.uk/atlas/blaeu/> (accessed 4 March 2026).

8 For the overlapping of oral and print cultures in Scotland, Ireland and Wales, see Chedgzoy, 2012, pp. 50–51.

9 The original songs do not contain a title. Titles have been established through tradition, and generally consist in the first line of the song or the general theme and address of the song. I have followed the titles chosen by Ó Baoill in his editions of the poems.

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Alice de Nanteuil, « Dis‑Locating and Re‑Membering: Memorial Space in the Oral Gaelic Poetry of Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh and Mairghread nighean Lachlainn »Études écossaises [En ligne], 25 | 2026, mis en ligne le 09 avril 2026, consulté le 12 juin 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesecossaises/6794 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/161mv

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Auteur

Alice de Nanteuil

Université de Rouen-Normandie (ERIAC)
alice.de-nanteuil@univ-rouen.fr
 
Alice de Nanteuil is a PhD student at the Université de Rouen-Normandie. She graduated from the ENS de Lyon and obtained the agrégation of English in 2020. Her thesis explores the poetry of women in Scotland and Ireland during the early modern period, and focuses more precisely on the transition from spoken to written culture. Her research has led her to look at texts in English, Scots, Irish and Scottish Gaelic that were originally circulated through print, manuscript or oral transmission. In 2025, she received an award from the SEAA 17–18 for her master’s dissertation entitled: Women and Poetry in Early Modern Scotland (2022).
 
Alice de Nanteuil est doctorante à l’université de Rouen-Normandie. Elle est diplômée de l’ENS de Lyon et a obtenu l’agrégation d’anglais en 2020. Sa thèse explore la poésie des femmes irlandaises et écossaises pendant la période de la première modernité et se concentre plus précisément sur la transition entre la culture orale et la culture écrite. Sa recherche l’a menée à s’intéresser à des écrits en anglais, en scots, en irlandais et en gaélique écossais, qui ont d’abord circulé sous forme manuscrite ou imprimée, ou à travers la transmission orale. En 2025, elle a reçu le prix de master de la SEAA 17-18 pour son mémoire intitulé : Women and Poetry in Early Modern Scotland (2022).

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