Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales from Burns to Buchan (Penguin Classics) (26 page)

she was. Even if she had had the inclination to look into the small dim mirror in the house she had little time. Only in the coming of young men about the place might she have known she was comely to look at. They had brought gifts, as wooers; but never could she give answering love, and by and by they had grown discouraged – who could blame them? – and had found other girls as beautiful and not so strange. For she had strange ways. She would leave tasks in the midst and run off over the moors to the lochan. She began to say she had a lover, a husband, a home in its depths.

At last only one brother remained, and a hard life he had of it trying to keep the croft with her fitful aid. He took a dislike to the place. He had a sweetheart whose family moved to the east, where farming was more rewarding. He could go there, and take his sister with him.

But when he told her of the plan, Oonagh would not hear of leaving. How could she leave her home, the trysting place, where alone she had hope of being with her lover? And perhaps in his heart her brother was not sorry to escape.

‘She has lived ever since, as you see, alone.’ My mother rose to go, but I held her back.

‘He never came again then, her lover?’

She paused, as if reluctant to continue the story, but at last she said, ‘Yes, he did come. That was the funny thing, he did come back to her.’ One day a
carriage and pair
was observed coming up the Brae, along the main road past Druim, to Loch Laide. It stopped where some men were working at the side of the road. A gentleman got out, dressed I suppose in old-world style, twin gold chains reposing on his stomach, one for his watch, one for his sovereign case. To the surprise of the men he put his question in Gaelic. ‘Was there a family living yet in the moorland croft behind the Leitir? And a girl called Oonagh, was she married yet?’ The older among them knew who he was then, and I have no doubt they left the ditch uncleared to go and spread the news. The time was come at last. That poor solitary woman, whom some shunned as unlucky because lovelorn, would get her due
reward at last. There was no mistaking the eagerness on the stranger’s face.

I cried out, ‘Then why – ?’

My mother seemed to shiver. He returned in less than an hour. This time he did not speak, but went away as fast as he could. The account of their meeting came from a child who, curious, ran over the heather and got near enough to witness the manner of it. Oonagh came to the door to receive her caller, then stopped short at seeing a stranger. He held his hands out. ‘Do you not remember me? I have come back as I said I would.’ She stared at him bewildered, making no move towards him, no sign of recognition. ‘I have never loved anyone as I could have loved you. I am home now. I will make up to you for all the years I have left you forsaken.’

‘Then why? Did he not live long after coming?’

‘He lived all right. He is still alive, alive and prospering. He is in business in the town. It was Oonagh who would not… It was as if she had never seen him before. She would not let him touch her. She said the only man she loved was in the lochan. I tell you only what you know.

‘From that the story has grown that she is in love with the spirit of the lochan, or even that the
eachd uisge
, about which your father will tell you there is no such thing, has put a spell upon her. It is only now and again the idea takes hold of her. She is quiet and has done no one any harm. All the same, Ellen, if you go to her place you must not go out on the moors with her.’

I needed no forbidding. I was a timid child. I doubt if I went to the tiny croft ever again. And she never asked me. Whenever we met, at school-house service or on the Druim road, she would smile from her wrinkled sunburnt face, if she were not contentedly puffing at her clay pipe. That was all.

But sometimes, when I heard the creaking sound of a cart upon a rocky road, I would be visited by a perverse longing to go with her again to her lochan and see that ecstasy I might not share.

Once there was an Uistman who was travelling home, at the time when the passage wasn’t as easy as it is today. In those days travellers used to come by the Isle of Skye, crossing the sea from Dunvegan to Lochmaddy. This man had been away working at the harvest on the mainland. He was walking through Skye on his way home, and at nightfall he came to a house, and thought he would stay there till morning, as he had a long way to go. He went in, and I’m sure he was made welcome by the man of the house, who asked him if he had any tales or stories. The Uistman replied that he had never known any.

‘It’s very strange you can’t tell a story,’ said his host. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard plenty.’

‘I can’t remember one,’ said the Uistman.

His host himself was telling stories all night, to pass the night, until it was time to go to bed. When they went to bed, the Uistman was given the closet inside the front door to sleep in. What was there hanging in the closet but the carcass of a sheep! The Uistman hadn’t been long in bed when he heard the door being opened, and two men came in and took away the sheep.

The Uistman said to himself that it would be very unfortunate for him to let those fellows take the sheep away, for the people of the house would think that he had taken it himself. He went after the thieves, and he had gone some way after them when one of them noticed him, and said to the other: ‘Look at that fellow coming after us to betray us; let’s go back and catch him and do away with him.’

They turned back, and the Uistman made off as fast as he could to try to get back to the house. But they got between him
and the house. The Uistman kept going, until he heard the sound of a big river; then he made for the river. In his panic he went into the river, and the stream took him away. He was likely to be drowned. But he got a hold of a branch of a tree that was growing on the bank of the river, and clung on to it. He was too frightened to move; he heard the two men going back and forth along the banks of the river, throwing stones wherever the trees cast their shade; and the stones were going past him.

He remained there until dawn. It was a frosty night, and when he tried to get out of the river, he couldn’t do it. He tried to shout, but he couldn’t shout either. At last he managed to utter one shout, and made a leap; and he woke up, and found himself on the floor beside the bed, holding on to the bedclothes with both hands. His host had been casting spells on him during the night! In the morning when they were at breakfast, his host said:

‘Well, I’m sure that wherever you are tonight, you’ll have a story to tell, though you hadn’t one last night.’

That’s what happened to the man who couldn’t tell a story; everyone should be able to tell a tale or a story to help pass the night!

There was a shepherd once who went out to the hill to look after his sheep. It was misty and cold, and he had much trouble to find them. At last he had them all but one; and after much searching he found that one too in a
peat-hag
, half drowned; so he took off his plaid, and bent down and took hold of the sheep’s tail, and he pulled! The sheep was heavy with water, and he could not lift her, so he took off his coat and he
pulled
! But it was too much for him, so he spit on his hands, and took a good hold of the tail and he PULLED! And the tail broke! And if it had not been for that this tale would have been a great deal longer.

As stated in the note on story attributions (at the end of the Introduction), many of the stories listed on the Contents page are ultimately anonymous. But with the exception of only two texts, all show the name of an author under the title. The two listed as being anonymous are two Border ballads, ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ and ‘Tam Lin’. The version of ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ used in this book is taken from Sir Walter Scott’s
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
(1802) and ‘Tam Lin’ is from
The Scots Musical Museum
(1797), as communicated by Robert Burns. Both texts, even in those days, were of considerable antiquity. And having several points in common, it is possible that both of these ballads derive from the same source.

Many versions of these stories were collected in the nineteenth century. Although the ballad details are unique to Scotland, the motif of capturing a person by the use of supernatural powers is found throughout European folklore. The main distinction of Thomas the Rhymer is his gift of prophecy (from the Queen of the Fairies), evident also in the twentieth-century version collected in South Uist by Margaret Fay Shaw. He was also unable to tell a lie. One theory traces the story back to the thirteenth century, and to the life of Thomas of Ercildoune (
c
. ?1220–?1297, also called Thomas Learmount and ‘True Thomas’). The village of Ercildoune is today called Earlston, a small market town in Berwickshire. The historical personage called Thomas of Ercildoune is said to have had the gift of prophecy, and to have predicted the death of King Alexander III (in 1286) and the battle of Bannockburn (in 1314). A romance of ‘True Thomas’ and his ‘ladye gaye’ dates to the fifteenth century.

A son of the manse, John Buchan was a Borderer by extraction and inclination: most of his childhood summer holidays were spent there. He attended Hutcheson’s Grammar School in Glasgow, followed by Glasgow and Oxford Universities. It was at Oxford that he first became acquainted with the public school set, whose ethos is depicted in so much of his fiction. Thereafter he pursued a public career as barrister, publisher, journalist, civil servant (as an intelligence officer he was a Director of Information during and after the First World War), Conservative Member of Parliament for the Scottish universities (1927–35), and Governor-General of Canada (1935–40).

As a writer, Buchan was influenced by the craft and style of Robert Louis Stevenson. His adventure novels, especially
The Thirty-Nine Steps
(1915),
Greenmantle
(1916) and
Mr Standfast
(1919), are in the mould of Stevenson’s
Kidnapped
, and achieved similar wide popular acclaim. Buchan called them his ‘shockers’, regarding them as the product of the private imaginative or fantasy world into which he liked to escape. But he also – and simultaneously – wrote history, the major project being
Nelson’s History of the War
(1915–19), in twenty-four volumes. There were also books of poetry (
Poems Scots and English
, 1917), biography (of Montrose, Cromwell and Sir Walter Scott), and several books of short stories. His fairy tale ‘The Magic Walking-stick’ appeared in an anthology for younger readers, edited by Lady Asquith, entitled
Sails of Gold
(1927).

The poet’s father was William Burnes (1721–84), a tenant farmer and gardener at Alloway, just south of the town of Ayr, in Ayrshire. William had been reasonably well educated in general knowledge and scripture, and he tried to ensure that his children also had this advantage. So, although we still tend to remember his son Robert Burns as ‘the ploughman poet’, Robert grew up to be a keen reader, cultivated and literate not just in English-language book culture but also in the vernacular culture of the Scots language. He probably owed his interest in the latter to Betty Davidson, a widowed relative who lived with the Burns family and was fond of entertaining the children with ‘the largest collection in the county of tales and songs concerning devils, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles,
deadlights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, inchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery…’ (
The Letters of Robert Burns
, 2nd edn, edited by J. De Lancey Ferguson and G. Ross Roy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985, p. 135).

Thus it is not surprising that the adult poet wanted to give something back, and took a more than amateur interest in the collection of oral texts, especially songs and popular poetry, making large contributions to the early volumes of James Johnson’s six-volume
Scots Musical Museum
(1787–1803), George Thomson’s six-volume
Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs
(1793–1841), and volume 2 of Charles Grose’s illustrated
Antiquities of Scotland
(1791). ‘Tam o’ Shanter: A Tale’ appeared in this last volume, alongside an account and picture of the half-ruined Alloway Kirk, where the poet’s father lies buried in the churchyard. The poem had first appeared in print a few months earlier, in the
Edinburgh Magazine.

Burns is known the world over as Scotland’s greatest poet; and ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, his only narrative poem, is widely regarded as one of Scotland’s greatest folk tales. The story is based on a local Ayrshire tale. In it, Farmer Tam is riding home after a night’s heavy drinking in Ayr, and accidentally disturbs a witches’ ceilidh in Alloway Kirk, just outside the town and near the cottage where Burns had grown up. A coven of witches then chase him for his life, as he flees their wrath on his good mare Meg towards the brig o’ Doon. Tam knew (as everyone did in those days) that he had to put a running stream between himself and the witches in order to escape their clutches safely. Alloway Kirk had only ceased to be used for public worship in 1756 – less than forty years before the poem was written – but it was soon in a ruinous state and offered an ideally spooky background for a supernatural tale.

J. F. Campbell was born and raised on the Hebridean island of Islay and, as the eldest son of the laird, he would normally have succeeded his father in the lairdship. But the family had incurred such large debts in the course of undertaking substantial land improvements across the island that they had to sell it. However, even though Islay had passed out of his family’s possession, John Francis was always to be known as Campbell of Islay. Educated at Eton and Edinburgh University, Campbell became a lawyer and secretary to his cousin George, 8th Duke of Argyll, as well as to the Lighthouse Commission and the Coal
Commission in Scotland. He had all of the natural scientific curiosity of a Victorian polymath, and was a keen inventor, geologist and naturalist; one of his inventions was an instrument for measuring the power of the sun’s rays.