Scotland

Scotland [L Scotti, Irish]. Constituent country of the United Kingdom, occupying 30,405 square miles in northern Great Britain. Slightly smaller than Ireland, it has the largest population of all Celtic lands, more than 5,200,000; yet not all Scottish persons are of Celtic heritage. Known as Alba in ancient times, still its name in Scottish Gaelic, Scotland was not always distinguished from the rest of Britain until the Romans failed to conquer it and tried to close it off with walls, Hadrian's in AD 122 and the Antonine Wall further north in AD 138. The native populations of what was then Alba/Scotland, the Caledonii or the Picts, spoke P-Celtic languages related to what was to become Welsh. One of the greatest poems from early Welsh tradition, Y Gododdin, is represented as taking place partially in what is now Scotland; Kenneth Jackson (1969), perhaps mischievously, called it ‘the oldest Scottish poem’.

Scotland takes its name from Irish [L Scotti] invaders who migrated in large numbers to Argyll [ScG Oirer Ghaidheal, coast of the Gael], establishing the small kingdom of Dál Riada. After many a century of armed struggle with the Picts and the Brythonic kingdom of Strathclyde, the leader of the Q-Celtic, Goidelic Scotti, Cináed mac Ailpín [Kenneth MacAlpin] (d. 858), merged the three forces into one nation, called Scotland after its most powerful component. In the following centuries the Gaelic language [ScG Gaidhlig] spread across much of Scotland, except for parts of Norse-dominated Caithness and the islands of Orkney and Shetland to the north and the English-dominated regions like Roxburgh and Berwick to the south-east. But pressure against Gaelic began at the top of the power pyramid, as English became the language at court during the reign of Malcolm III, 1058–93, under the influence of his Wessex-born wife, (St) Margaret. Over the next nine centuries English and the English-related Scots dialect (the language of Robert Burns) superseded Gaelic gradually in all but the Hebrides and those parts of the Highlands beyond the Grampian mountains, i.e. the former counties (until 1974) of Argyll, Inverness, Ross and Cromarty, Sutherland, and portions of Perthshire. Called the Gaidhealtachd [Gaelic-speaking area], this region occupies portions of the post-1974 counties of Strathclyde and Highland. The Act of Union (1707) with England somewhat diminished the Scottish sense of nationhood. Far more damaging to Highland culture was the failure of the Jacobite Rebellion (1745–6) and the subsequent suppression of the Gaelic language and culture of those who had supported it. Much of the 19th century saw mass migration from the Gaelic Highlands, some of it forced through clearances, in which crofters (tenant farmers) were driven from small farms to be replaced by herds of sheep. At the end of the twentieth century, Scottish Gaelic is spoken by about 65,000 people in Scotland and fewer than 5,000 in Nova Scotia.

Although Scottish Gaelic passages, linguistically distinguishable from their Old Irish parent, appear in the 12th-century Gaelic notes to the 9th-century Book of Deer, the first extensive record of Scottish Gaelic tradition is found in the Book of the Dean of Lismore (1512–26), in which the spellings are rendered as they would sound phonetically in English, much as Manx is. The Scottish Gaelic bardic tradition continued into the 19th century under clan patronage, producing such distinguished poets as Iain Lóm (c.1625–c.1710), Alastair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair (c.1695–c.1770), Rob Donn (1714–78), and Donnachadh Bàn Mac-an-t-Saoir [Duncan Bàn Macintyre] (1724–1812). Despite the differences in geography and political history, not to mention the Norse invasions and the Reformation, much of Scottish Gaelic tradition remained linked to Ireland. Many Scottish Gaelic stories are parallels of Irish stories and have Irish settings. Characters in Irish stories, such as Deirdre or Cúchulainn, travel to Scotland and appear familiar with its geography, although often Scotland is seen as a place of magic and adventure, like other foreign countries. From medieval through to early modern times, commerce and social intercourse continued between Gaelic Scotland and Ireland: large numbers of Highland mercenaries, the galloglasses [Ir. gall, stranger; óglach, soldier] migrated to Ireland, and Irish Franciscan missionaries resisted the tide of Calvinism in the Highlands. The now archaic English word for Scottish Gaelic, Erse [Irish], signals a historical perception of this unity. But in the mid-18th century the enormously popular ‘translator’ James Macpherson (1736–96) promoted the still-persistent canard that Scottish Gaelic tradition was separate from and older than its Irish roots. Macpherson's Poems of Ossian (1760–3), drawing on unacknowledged Scottish Gaelic ballads, purported to be a lost epic, contemporary with the ancient classics. The widespread acceptance of this imposture promoted an international interest in Irish and other Celtic traditions. By the mid to late 19th century, informed collectors had assembled large collections of Scottish Gaelic tradition: John Francis Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands (4 vols., Paisley, 1861); Archibald Campbell, Waifs and Strays in Celtic Tradition (4 vols., London, 1889–91); Alexander Cameron, Reliquiae Celticae (2 vols., Inverness, 1894). OIr. Albu, Alba; ModIr. Alba(in); Manx Nalbin; W Alban; Corn. Alban; Bret. Bro-Skos.

Bibliography

See also Charles W. J. Withers , Gaelic in Scotland, 1698–1981: A Geographical History of a Language (Edinburgh, 1984);
Derick S. Thomson (ed.), The Companion to Gaelic Scotland (Oxford, 1983; Glasgow, 1994).
See Bibliography under ‘Scottish Gaelic’ for collections of Scottish Gaelic traditions.