Image: Da Mihi Manum, from Twelve English and Twelve Irish Airs for the German Flute, Violin or Harpsichord, Vol 2 by Mr Burk Thumoth (London: J Simpson, 1746) Glen 231 NLS) – nb NOT arranged for a harp … because, fashions change (see previous post).
So, which Rory Dall? Because, there are two famous harpists called Rory Dall, or Blind Rory.
One Rory – the older one – is Irish. Ruaridhri or Rory Dall Ó Catháin was supposedly born in the mid 16th century in Antrim in Ulster, to a family with connections to the O’Neils. When the Irish wars impacted the family, he supposedly fled to Scotland where – according to legend – he was initially given a scant welcome by Lady Eglinton at the gate of her Ayrshire castle. Once the Scots realised his pedigree and talent, he was supposedly welcomed there and everywhere, included by King James VI. The stories are strong … but the documentary evidence is scant.
The other Rory is Scottish. Ruaridh Dall Mac Mhuirich or Morison was definitely born around 1656 in Lewis. When illness (variously measles or smallpox depending on the source you read) rendered him blind, the family plans that he should become a minister of the Kirk needed to be reconsidered, and instead he was sent to Ireland to learn harping. His father commented wryly that it had cost more to train a harpist than a minister of the kirk. However, he made good, becoming – in 1681 – harper to Iain Breac MacLeod, head of the MacLeod clan of Dunvegan, Skye, where he served as both harper and clan poet or bard (two roles that in older times might have been held by different people). When Iain Breac died and his son for reasons of health and possibly preference proved unable to continue to maintain a resident harpist in Skye, Rory Dall moved initially to Glenelg, from there travelling from time to time to appear in various Highland aristocratic houses. However, at the end of his days, he returned to Dunvegan, where he was buried in the winter of 1712-13, poignantly just before the first Jacobite rising. His death, therefore, has sometimes been felt to mark the end point of a particular kind of Highland culture, although harping may have already been in decline, suffering from changing fashions and the increasing rarity of skilled practitioners, teachers and makers. The outline of this man’s biography is summarised in Collinson’s Traditional and National Music of Scotland pp.235-237, which also goes on to mention the Macleans of Coll as employing a harper into the same period of the early 18th century. The songs are more comprehensively covered in William Matheson (ed.) The Blind Harper (1970).
Francis Collinson suggested in 1966 that much of the music attributed to the Scottish Rory Dall Morrison might have been by the earlier, less well documented, Rory Dall Ó Catháin (Collinson, p.239). Keith Sanger’s investigations into this legendary Irish figure has concluded that there is very little evidence that this man existed, and much to suggest that around this figure there coaelesced many stories of itinerant Irish harpers and their music.
In his latest article, Sanger homes in on a piece of music written supposedly to mark the reconciliation between the Irish Rory and the Lady Eglington, commemorated in a tune called Tabhair Damh do Làmh, or, Give Me Your Hand, or (in Latin), Da Mihi Manum. Thanks to the popularity of this tune, the stories relate, Dall was welcomed into the court of King James VI – evidently before the departure of the court in 1603.
Sanger finds no evidence for the circulation of either Rory Dall Ó Catháin or this tune, Da Mihi Manum, in the court of James VI. The earliest record of the tune – and the story – appears in the memoires of Irish harpist Arthur O’Neill (d.1816), whose oral stories of Irish harping were collected by Edward Bunting in1808 and became the foundation of subsequent romantic-era biographies of Rory Dall Ó Catháin. Edward Bunting was an Irish musician with a nationalist interest in making transcriptions of harp music; the early 19th century is not a period when this was a politically neutral interest. Even without political advocacy to potentially slant the narrative, the tools available to field workers at the time made it hard to record oral traditional reliably. Bunting’s musical notations, Sanger points out, regularised what he heard into more conventional European tonal music, missing the modal inflections of the originals. Nevertheless, Bunting’s enthusiastic advocacy for Irish history and music made his work important for its revival in the 19th century, and the alignment of harp playing with Irish national identity politics. Whatever the truth of the matter, almost certainly, O’Neill’s stories – and Bunting’s transcriptions of them – made a more coherent history from an otherwise fragmentary account.
Those involved in Irish political advocacy in the 19th century were typically keen to develop an alternative Celtic history of the British isles which suggested Irish roots to much of what might be considered Scottish Gaelic culture. Samuel Ferguson (1810-1886), for example, an Irish lawyer and writer, followed up on Bunting’s suggestive work on the Irish Rory Dall, suggesting that the famous Queen Mary harp had – before it belonged to Mary – once been owned by Rory Dall (Sanger, p.4), a legend also encountered by Johnson and Boswell on their famous tour of the Highlands. No evidence exists for this personal association.
Having found little hard evidence for the Irish Rory himself, Sanger turns to the music attributed to Rory Dall, addressing Collinson’s claim that many tunes associated with Rory Dall Morison of Lewis were actually by the Irish Rory Dall.
A tune called ‘Rory Dall’s Port’ is recorded from the Straloch Manuscript, which was compiled in the later 1620s. This date is evidently before the Scottish Rory Dall was born: so, is this tune by the Irish Rory Dall? A major problem is that the actual Straloch manuscript only exists in a 19th century transcription, made in 1839 by G F Graham before the manuscript went to auction, was bought by an unknown buyer, and was lost to history. However, a list made by Graham of the tunes did not include this tune, and an earlier 1823 list published in The Gentleman’s Magazine also does not include this tune (Sanger, p.6-7). So, the evidence is absent for this tune definitively being listed with this name in the early 17th century source.
Sanger goes on to look at another tune – ‘Da Mihi Manum’, the tune associated with the legend of the Irish Rory and Lady Eglinton. This tune first appears (Sanger, p.7) in the Wemyss Manuscript of 1644 – again, before the Scottish Rory was born. Slightly later, it resurfaces in the Balcarres manuscript of c1700-182. However, here, the name does not associate the tune with the man, and in both cases these manuscripts are Fife sources, not west-coast Ayrshire sources. In print, this tune can also be found in Oswald’s mid-18th century Caledonian Pocket Companion, another collector with Fife birthplace and early career roots. In 1724, it finally also appeared a long way west of Fife, in A Collection of The Most Celebrated Irish Tunes published in Dublin by John and William Neal (the image shown at the head of this post) – arranged for the then-fashionable flute and harpsichord. More Irish versions follow from this. Sanger suggests that the most likely way that this tune travelled from Fife to Ireland was via professional musicians – he suggests the Italian Lorenzo Bochi – who had contacts both with the Wemyss family. Bochi might have been a conduit, but really, there is no clear pathway.
Heading to the Ayrshire family sources, Sanger examined papers from the Eglington estate and found there no mention of any “Rory Dall”, nor of the ‘Da Mihi Manum’ tune, nor of either the man or the tune in the albeit incomplete records of the court of James VI. The latter do, however, mention an Irish harper called William McEgan performing for the King in 1581 (Sanger, p.11). This, the central emotional core story of the Irish Dall legend, is attractive but currently impossible to prove.
Sanger’s research has been corroborated by Irish research happening around the same time. Áine Henegan’s 2022 article tracks the “Da Mihi Manum” tune through a range of early sources, through the 19th century and Bunting’s Irish curation, into the 20th century Irish folk revival, when it became axiomatically ‘Irish’ thanks to popular recordings by Séan Ò Riada and others in the 1960s. . The word ‘arcanum’ reflects the author’s awareness that this tune, well known in Irish folk circles under the name ‘Tabhair dom do lámh’, has a more complex history than the Irish folk musicians might have assumed. Henegan tracks the tune under the ‘mihi manum’ title in various Scottish sources, starting with the Wemyss Manuscript (1640s) and Balcarres Manuscript (1690s), before it passed into Scottish print in the 18th century in collections such as Oswald’s Caledonian Pocket Companion (vol 8). The Irish versions start to appear later than these Scottish manuscript sources. The first – the Collection of the Most Celebrated Irish Tunes (1724) is associated, she confirms, with the Dublin concert involving Lorenzo Bocchi, an Italian cellist visiting from Edinburgh, who possibly/probably learned it while in Scotland. The evidence is therefore strong that this tune originated in Scotland. The article includes a useful table comparing variant versions of the tune in different sources, and concludes that these variants probably reflect oral patterns of transmission through the early period. The analysis in this article supports the argument that the tune – whoever first ‘made it’ – can probably be understood as Scottish before it became Irish, and that any evidence for Rory Dall’s involvement is merely anecdotal.
The next post we’ll do is on evidence of stringed instruments even earlier than the clarsach, encountered in prehistoric Skye. Here at least the material evidence is clear – even if the personalities are entirely lost.
Further Reading
- Frances Collinson, The Traditional and National Music of Scotland (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966)
- William Matheson (ed.), The Blind Harper (An Clarsair Dall): The Songs of Roderick Morison and his Music (Scottish Gaelic Texts Series) (Scottish Academic Press, 1970)
- Áine Henegan, ‘”Da Mihi Manum”: An Irish Arcanum’, in Trends in World Music Analysis: New Directions in World Music Analysis (London: Routledge, 2022), pp.213-237. DOI:10.4324/9781003033080-12
- Keith Sanger, “Da Mihi Manum (Give Me Your Hand); But Whose Hand Was It’? in Harp Perspectives (Cruit Eireann/Harp Irland, February 2025)
- Da Mihi Manum – recording on Vincente Harpantiqua channel, accessed 31 March 25