Gaelic Boating Songs: Ancient and (more) Modern

Image: Harbour and Castle at Helmsdale, Am Baile ID QZP40_Card_5608 Highland Libraries Postcard Collection

It’s a truism that the Gaels had songs for every important life moment, but really, they did. This post looks at the complex relationship between ancient and modern songs about boats, myth and reality.

Romantic Boating

Nineteenth and early 20^th century collections of Gaelic songs recognised that some were framed around rowing; for example, Frances Tolmie’s manuscripts include three labelled as possible rowing songs, or ‘iorraim’:

• Iùraidh O-Hi, Iùraibh O-Hù (opening line “I see the place where I stayed last year”) – Tolmie’s notes suggested this could be used for waulking cloth or rowing. Tolmie MSS NLS 14903 pp.40-41.
• Éile Na Hùraibh O-Ho (or, Èileadh’s Na Hùraibh O Ho) (opening line “The night is wet”) has an obvious call-and-response pattern that makes this sound plausible as a work-song. Tolmie MSS NLS MS 14902 p.38.
• O Hi Ibh Ò (opening line “A greeting from me”) – another call and response song, but again, Tolmie notes that it was collected from women who used it for waulking.

In short – although these might have been used for rowing, the fieldworkers who collected these songs often noted that they were recirculated by women during cloth working (waulking). Both activities needed steady rhythms; reasonably, it is easier to collect songs from women on land than on a rowing boat on stormy waters.

Boat songs might also attract unto themselves Victorian lyrics that wove new stories, such as the ubiquitous modern-day ear-worm, the Skye Boat song.  This melody was apparently collected in Skye by Anne Campbell MacLeod, and was in a popular anthology before both Robert Louis Stevenson and Harold Boulton wrote new words for it, fixing it in the popular memory as a celebration of Bonnie Prince Charlie and Flora Macdonald’s escape after Cullodon. nb Wikipedia says the Gaelic original was Cuachag nan Craobh, or “Cuckoo of the Tree”, lyrics by William Ross (b.1762).  However, the melody for that song on Tobar An Dualchais is very different from “Speed Bonnie Boat”, so whatever happened in the 19^th century chain of transmission, the end-point was far from any original Gaelic fountainhead.

The Victorians and their early 20^th century heirs were also much taken with the idea that rowing songs might double as laments, as boats rowed the bodies of chiefs and Kings to heir final resting places: for Kings, the Abbey at Iona. The words to the song known in modern anthologies as the “Iona Boat Song” were, however, written by Hugh Roberton (1874-1952) for his Glasgow Orpheus Choir. There may well have been antecedents.  Fiona MacLeod, writing about ‘Iona’ lore in 1900, remembered speaking to an elderly Iona man, and asking him about ancient Iona boat songs: “there was an old Iona iorram, or boat-song, I was anxious to have; he had never heard of it.”  A storm then blows up, and MacLeod recounted the alarmed sailor instinctively chanting “a strange sea-chant” that was the ancient song she was looking for (MacLeod, 1900, p.694).  Whether or not this bore any resemblance to Roberton’s song, I can only speculate.

Boat songs in the historic circumstances of the 19th century might also be about leaving islands by boats to emigrate, such as ‘Moladh Na Landaidh’, translated as ‘In Praise of Islay’ by Thomas Pattison (1828-1865) (Pattison, 1890, p.264).  Pattison also provided an English translation (Pattison, p.138-9) of the Gaelic song Fear a Bhàta, in which a woman thinks about a man who has gone overseas, by boat, leaving his home for ever.

Boat Blessing and Elegies

Boat songs also survive that show how the dangers of seafaring hooked into local patterns of faith and belief.

The first song translated into English in Pattison’s Gaelic Bards is Alexander Mhaighistir MacDonald of Moidart’s 18^th century poem Birlinn Chlann Raghnaill (‘The Manning of the Birlinn’, or The Blessing of a Ship), written for the crew of a boat owned by the Chief of the Clan Ranald (Pattison, p.8-28) in the last, Jacobite, period of heroic Gaelic culture.  A footnote to this song in Pattison’s collection suggests that a 1567 Gaelic prayerbook by Bishop John Carswell contained a similar prayer to the Trinity, suggesting that this practice was held by both Reformed and Old-Faith Gaels. This needs to be verified; although Seon Carsuel (John Carswell) did produced a Gaelic translation of the Book of Common Order, Foirm na n-Urrnuidheadh, in 1567. The song asks God to bless the boat, its many weapons (swords and bows), and the fighting crew. As Kevin Grant describes it, this poem is often described as first ‘epic’ of vernacular Gaelic literature (Grant, p.262), and marks the importance of boats to Gaelic seafaring culture.

In such songs we have quite a complicated combination of myth and actuality; perhaps, through poetry, this is history raised to mythical status.

In late 19^th century Scotland however, and well into the 20^th century, there were clearly also historical traditions of fishing boat blessing and commemorative singing which show perhaps these older traditions adapting to particular modern circumstances.

Robert Mackay’s little 1943 book about Highland fishing villages remembers the stories told in the 19^th century about older ceremonies for “blessing of the nets” (Mackay, p.135), involving the fishing community round Embo.  Those mending and making nets for the new season would spread them on the shore, and ask for the blessing of Saint Finbarr, who was supposed to have first evangelised the area around Dornoch in ancient Pictish times. Mackay’s book reproduces an earlier account of this prayer, transmitted via two different ministerial accounts:

O’n ear at iar
Beannaicht an lin ion a par;
Beannaicht an long
Beannicheadh Dhia an t-Athair.
(Mackay, p.136)

The Gaelic here is rather garbled. but might broadly be translated as, “bless the net, thou (Fin)barr; Bless the boat, Bless thou it, God the Father”.

Not all voyages ended happily. In 1843, a boat called the “Linnet” from the area around Portmoak in Easter Ross was lost in the Moray Firth off Hilton of Cadboll, with five men drowned. A fragment of a song about this local tragedy was collected from a singer called Margaidh Mhoarair and it has been noted by Sèosamh Watson that the words seem to fit the Gaelic song Bhadhna Shrath Nabhair by Dùthaich MhicAoidh, plausibly passed from Strath Naver to Easter Ross by fishermen sailing around the north coast (Watson, p.32). Watson’s research found a printed copy of the song, written in Gaelic, from the “Northern Newspaper” offices of Inverness (newspaper offices often had the capacity to print small pamphlets and broadsheets of material of local interest, before they retrenched to more centralised hubs in the 21st century).  The drowned men are remembered one by one in successive verses, which transform an older kind of hero-song into local history and commemoration:

• Fionnalagh Thàlaich, dhuine shuaire .. (Fionnlagh Talaich, pleasant man ..)
• Iain Mhorair, thairis chaomh … (Iain Mhorair, beloved and gentle …)
• Domhnall Mhorair ‘n aodainn chiùin … (Domhnall Mhorair, tranquil of face …)
• Iain Tarail, ‘n gasan ùr … (Iain Tarail, that fresh shoot …)
• Aildh Mhorair, ‘n Meagan òg … (Ailigh Mhorair, the young branch …)

(Watson, p.40-41)

In all, the ‘Linnet’ poem has 56 verses, which echoes in a post-heroic age the older epic oral tradition, although iWatson notes that the meter and style more closely follow the models of metrical psalms and Gaelic hymns that would have been familiar in this part of the world.  For the whole poem in parallel Gaelic and English translation, see Appendix 1 of Watson’s book, Boats, Bibles and Boyans.

So – work songs, exile songs, heroic songs, blessings, and elegies: clearly boats inspired a lot of music.  As with all things oral, the layers of invention and tradition are a complex blend of old and new, but perhaps that’s what living traditions in practice mean?

If you want to explore field recordings of different kinds of boat song and think about these histories, we suggest you have a look at the Tobar an Dualchais archive, searching on keywords such as boat (Gaelic, bhata), or “iorraim”.

Songs e.g.

• Èileadh’s Na Hùraibh O Ho – SA1955.60.3 from Tobar An Dualchais
• In Praise of Islay – SA9185.58.B1g from Tobar an Dualchais archive – h

Further Reading

• Màiri Sìne Chaimbeul, ‘The Sea as an Emotional Landscape in Scottish Gaelic Song’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 22 (2002), pp.56-79
• Kevin James Grant, ‘Hebridean Gaels and the sea in the early 19^th century’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 147 (2018), pp.261-284, DOI: https://doi.org/10.9750/PSAS.147.1249
• Fiona MacLeod, “Iona”, in the Fortnightly review, May 1865-June 1934, 67(400), (1900), pp. 692-709.
• Robert John Mackay, Old Days in a Highland Fishing Village (Aberdeen, Press and Journal, 1943), 2^nd edition
• Thomas Pattison, The Gaelic Bards and Original Poems (Glasgow, Archibald Sinclair, 1890) NLS digitised copy of 2^nd edition – published posthumously, as Pattison died 1865.
• Frances Tolmie, Gun Sireadh, Gun Iarraidh ed. Campbell and Hamill (Acair, 2023)
• Seòsamh Watson, Boats, Bibles & Boyans: Gaelic Language and Lore in Easter Ross (Poole, Dorset: Advantage Plus Books, 2019)