GAELIC STORYTELLER

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 11, Issue 62, 4 August 1947, Page 8

GAELIC STORYTELLER

TALES RECORDED FOR ALL TIME ORAL FOLKLORE TRADITION STILL LINGERS

In the remote island communities of the Outer Hebrides, where the tradition of oral folklore lingers on, tHe last descendants of the line of storytellers which stretches back into unrecorded history .are now telling their Gaelic sagas into a recording machine. During the winter evenings, recounting the old stories was once the sole form of recreation. Today here and there it fights a losing battle against novels, broadcasting, and, in the bigger communities, films. In Barra, where 100 storytellers used to enthral its 2000 inhabitants, now only James Mackinnon, an 80-year-old fisherman, keeps the ar.t alive: In Benbecula, another octogenarian, Angus MacMillan, still presides at the ceilidhs, the housevisiting with which the islanders beguile the long nights. He is the last link in the island’s chain of storytellers, and until recently it seemed that the heritage would pass away with him. But an unexpected disciple arrived on the island. In Angus’s stone cottage 32-year-old Calum Maclean, a member of the Irish Folklore Commission, was found at his immense task of preserving the old man’s stories from oblivion. Angus cannot write Gaelic —folklore was handed down by word of mouth—so he dictates into a recording machine.

Afterwards Maclean listens to the records and laboriously transcribes the stories in Gaelic on to paper, thus recording them for all time for a wider audience than Angus ever reached in his long life on the island.

For eight years Maclean has been touring the remoter area's of Scotland and Ireland with his machine. He spent last winter in Barra with James Mackinnan. While there he heard the fame of Angus MacMillan. He now believes that he has stumbled on the most remarkable storyteller in his experience and probably the greatest surviving exponent of his art in Europe.