Transmission of texts

The collections of Gaelic lays found in BDL and Duanaire Finn (DF) are a very fine tribute to the variety and vigour of the tradition at the end of the Middle Ages in both Scotland and Ireland.  BDL contains twenty-seven ballad texts and one fragmentary text; DF contains sixty-nine, with only four ballad texts being common to both.  The linguistic complexion of the poems in BDL suggests that the majority were probably composed, or received their current form, between 1400 and 1512, but DF has a sample which covers a longer time-span, from the twelfth century to the sixteenth, if we accept the datings of Professor Gerard Murphy.  Although BDL was compiled in the Loch Tay area of Perthshire, it shows that, even in the east of the Gaelic-speaking region of Scotland, there was a strong interest in the ballads.  Interest was no less lively in Ireland, as the compilation of Duanaire Finn in Ostend c. 1627 indicates.   The patron for whom it was written, Captain Sorley MacDonell, was a mercenary soldier serving in the Spanish army, who had a reputation for piracy in Ireland prior to his departure to the continent.   The DF scribe, Aodh Ó Dochartaigh, hailed from Inishowen in the north of Ireland, and he too may have had a military background. He appears to have received his material in instalments from fellow Irishmen who evidently travelled to the Continent with manuscripts of the lays tucked under their cloaks.  The evidence suggests that the BDL scribes also had access to manuscript texts of at least some of their poems.

There is much to indicate that the ballads were frequently preserved in writing in the classical period from the twelfth century onwards.  It would, however, be wrong to presume that the ballads were preserved solely in writing.  They were also an integral part of the wider oral culture of the Gaelic world, and were preserved orally in both Ireland and Scotland long after the classical written tradition had terminated.  It is highly likely that, even in the Middle Ages, the ballads were transmitted by word of mouth; a text such as Acallam na Senórach of c. 1175 introduces numerous poems with a rubric of the kind, 'And Oisín sang this lay', presuming a musical, oral context for the performance of the verse.  All along the way, the written and oral traditions must have interacted with one another, the oral versions moving into writing, and the written versions subsequently being carried into the oral stream.

The maintenance of the lays by oral transmission appears to have been more marked in Scotland than in Ireland, after the demise of the classical bardic schools.  Scotland did not have the tradition of minor scribes who operated in Ireland in the post-classical period, and who created the many small duanairí which survive in libraries.  In Scotland, as a result, there was a profusion of oral, rather than written, versions, and only occasionally was an attempt made to commit the lays to writing.  It was the rediscovery of these lays in oral transmission in the mid-eighteenth century, primarily by a class of litterateurs who wished to put them into print as a glorified and 'touched up' record of past heroic deeds, that led to the 'discovery' of the Celtic heritage of Britain and Ireland.  It was a 'discovery' that had both its positive and negative aspects.  On the negative side, it encouraged some degree of duplicity in expanding or 'improving' the versions, especially in the process of 'translation', as can be seen in the work of James Macpherson in the early 1760s. On the positive side, it helped to preserve Gaelic tradition by encouraging collection and publication of genuine material.  For example, a Perthshire minister, the Revd James McLagan, gathered many lays from oral transmission, and some of his texts were utilised in 1786, when the Perth bookseller, John Gillies, published a major collection of Gaelic verse which included twelve genuine lays, several 'semi-classical' imitations and a handful of spurious, 'Ossianic' prose-poems.  In Ireland, the tradition similarly reached print in the Reliques of Irish Poetry edited by Charlotte Brooke and published in Dublin in 1789.