Preface

This volume is based on a doctoral thesis which was presented to, and accepted by, the University of Glasgow in 1982.  The thesis occupied much of my spare time from 1973 to the date of its submission, and it was supervised by Professor Derick S. Thomson, whose lectures on the Gaelic ballads inspired me to undertake it. The complexity of the subject was immense, and at times dispiriting.  It was not until my arrival in Edinburgh in 1979 that I was able to bring a measure of order to the mass of material which I had assembled. The new Celtic establishment which had emerged in Edinburgh in 1979, following the appointment of Professor William Gillies to the Chair of Celtic, encouraged the completion of languishing research projects, and I am most grateful for the stimulus and encouragement of those years.  I look back with no small degree of nostalgia to the days of the ‘Edinburgh Triumvirate’ in the Department of Celtic, and I wish to record my immense (and ongoing) debt to Professor Gillies and to Mr Ronald Black.

The completion of the thesis was, however, the ‘easy’ part.   After 1982 I faced the challenge of converting my old-fashioned typescript, which had been produced with a specially adapted typewriter, into a compact, publishable edition.   The 1980s were filled with other projects, including the large-scale revision of the Gaelic Bible, published in 1992.  It was therefore not until my arrival at the University of Aberdeen as Professor of Celtic in 1993 that I began to reflect seriously on the best methods of tackling a publishable edition of the work.  By then word-processing packages, in their infancy in the 1970s and still rather inadequate in the 1980s, had been improved beyond measure.  My work on the Gaelic Bible opened new technological vistas.  As scanners had been developed by the early 1990s, scanning of text was now possible, and my Notes were scanned on to disk in 1994 by the heroic and undaunted Bill Simpson of the School of Modern Languages at Aberdeen.  During a sabbatical year which was made possible by the University of Aberdeen in 1996-97, I edited the entire body of Notes using a fairly basic word-processing package, and I also condensed the Introduction and preliminary discussion of the thesis.  I wish to record my deep gratitude to the University of Aberdeen for allowing me to pursue Gaelic scholarship undisturbed for what was, in academic terms, the best year of my life.

Much progress was made in 1996-97.  However, there remained the immense challenge of presenting the texts themselves in the best possible format.   Through the good offices of Dr Richard A.V. Cox, who was then Secretary of the Scottish Gaelic Texts Society, I was able to secure the services of an expert in modern word-processing and typesetting, Dr Nancy R. McGuire, a graduate (three times over) of the Department of Celtic at Aberdeen.  Nancy tackled the texts with incomparable skill and patience, using endless ingenuity to find the right symbols to convey the scribal complexions and complexities of the texts.  With immense devotion, she laid out the texts as they now appear, and I owe her what is without question the greatest of all my debts.  Without her this edition would never – indeed, could never –  have been published, nor could it have been presented on this website. 

It is also fair to say that, without the modern miracles of Microsoft Word, which the world owes to Bill Gates, the thesis would have remained on the shelf of Glasgow University Library.  Other groups, beyond Microsoft, produced packages to complement and empower the new technology, and I have been indebted to some of these.  Among the fonts which were essential to the preparation of the book was SILDoulosIPA, which was developed by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, the linguistic and scholarly arm of Wycliffe Bible Translators.  It gives me particular pleasure to acknowledge my debt to them.

As word-processing improved, it became necessary to upgrade earlier versions of the Notes and the Introduction.  In upgrading the Notes, I again called upon the services of Dr McGuire, who provided initial editorial input and helped to convert the ‘awful material’ to Word format.

In producing the Introduction and the Bibliography, I was assisted by my wife, Dr Rachel Meek, who has lived with this thesis, and with the production of the book, for as long as I have.  Indeed, without her training in palaeography, I could not have embarked on the project.   Palaeography, and particularly secretary hand with its many forms, contractions and abbreviations, were unknown to me before I undertook the thesis, but with the benefit of Rachel’s knowledge (obtained in the Univesity of London with those past masters of the discipline, Professor Julian Brown and John Dodgson) I was able to proceed stage by stage.   Her kindly critical eye has been cast over the work as a whole. Without her constant support I would almost certainly have abandoned the project long since.  She endured the tapping of my typewriter during the final stages of the thesis, and she has since had to suffer my bursts of enthusiasm and my occasional triumphs, but also my irritation, despair, and frustration as ‘my friends in Fortingall’ defied me to the last.

Notwithstanding such defiance, ‘my friends in Fortingall’ are due my deepest gratitude.   Through the efforts of the Dean of Lismore and his companions in the compilation of their brilliantly enigmatic book, I was set the greatest intellectual challenge of my life.  But it was also one of the most rewarding, as some of the treasures of the Scots-Gaelic-Irish-Latin-Highland-Lowland world of the late Middle Ages emerged before my eyes.   It is a world which subverts all the popular stereotypes and easy assumptions of our narrow, compartmentalised age, and I hope that the readers of this volume will appreciate even a few of the glories of unrestricted cultural interaction, as recorded by ‘my friends in Fortingall’ all those centuries ago.   Little did they think that, five centuries later, we would still be wrestling to understand their legacy.  Even this stage of the present edition is ‘provisional’.

There are other debts which are acknowledged in later pages of this book.  However, I would wish to record the salutary effect of the stimulus and careful reading provided by Ms Lorna Pike, a former Editor of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue and now Project Co-ordinator of Faclair na Gàidhlig, when she requested to read a draft of this book as it lay forlorn on my shelf during a severe and prolonged bout of professorial amnesia.  Her enthusiasm encouraged me to move towards an ultimate conclusion, since she confessed that she had found it ‘very interesting’.   I will be delighted – and surprised – if others should utter the same sentiments.  

Colleagues in Ireland, as well as Scotland, have also encouraged me to continue, not least by asking me to lecture on the theme of the book.  In particular, I am grateful to Professor Cathal Ó Háinle of the School of Irish, Trinity College, Dublin, and Professor Ruairí Ó hUiginn of St Patrick’s College, Maynooth.  They will, I trust, be pleased to see the end of a painfully long, Ossianic night:  Is fada anocht a nOil Finn.

Donald E. Meek
February 2011

Postscript

Unfortunately, the ‘long Ossianic night’ which appeared to be ending in 2011 continued for even longer than expected. Before the website could be made available to a general readership, it became largely inaccessible through changes which were made by the original domain-provider, and was in danger of being lost. Thanks to the keen interest and warm support of Professor Rob Ó Maolálaigh, however, the venture was rescued in 2024 by transferring the website to the safe keeping of the Digital Archive of Scottish Gaelic (DASG) at the University of Glasgow, with the agreement of the Scottish Gaelic Texts Society (SGTS). Thereby it became part of a wider ongoing project within DASG, centred on the Book of the Dean of Lismore. DASG’s Systems Developer, Stevie Barrett, then took charge of the revision of my texts, and inserted my many emendations with immense patience, skill and good humour. I owe Rob and Stevie an incalculable debt of gratitude for their great kindness and practical oversight.

Readers should note, however, that the website remains ‘a work in progress’, with the prospect of further updating and enhancement.

DEM
Summer 2026

The Digitisation of the Book of the Dean of Lismore

A new project to digitise the Book of the Dean of Lismore (BDL) was established by Professor Rob Ó Maolalaigh in consultation with Professor William Gillies in March 2020 as part of the DASG (Digital Archive of Scottish Gaelic / Dàta airson Stòras na Gàidhlig) project at the University of Glasgow. The project effectively began on 19 March, the day before the first COVID lockdown was announced by the UK Government, when Dr Ulrike Hogg, Curator for Gaelic, Medieval, Early Modern and Music Manuscripts at the National Library of Scotland, provided DASG with high-resolution images of the Rev. Walter MacLeod’s transcript of BDL (NLS ms Adv.72.3.12).

The first phase of the project aimed to provide a digital transcription of MacLeod’s nineteenth-century near-exact transcript of 310 pages made in 1893 when the Dean’s original manuscript was more legible than it is now. This phase of the project was based on a proposal made by Professor William Gillies, dated 21 October 2017, ‘to create a consistent and legible version of BDL’s text’ and ‘to enable searches and the creation of analytic tools to help “decode” BDL’. The aim of Professor Gillies’s proposal was ‘to widen the circle of those who can work meaningfully on BDL, including lexicographers and linguists, and to expedite its analysis’. Professor Gillies was appointed as expert consultant with Drs Sìm Innes and Joanna Kopaczyk (now Professor Kopaczyk-McPherson) as project advisers. Dr Jade Scott was appointed as Research Assistant to digitally transcribe and mark-up MacLeod’s text. The first phase was completed in September 2020.

The second phase of the project, which moved beyond Professor Gillies’s 2017 proposal, set out to provide a digital marked-up transcription of the Dean’s manuscript itself, once again with Professor Gillies as expert consultant, Dr Jade Scott as Research Assistant and Professor Ó Maolalaigh as project director and manager. This phase began in October 2020 and was completed in March 2021.

The third phase of the project began in January 2024. This phase involved several discrete elements: (a) the planning and construction of a new online BDL database by Professor Ó Maolalaigh and Stephen Barrett, Systems Developer at DASG; (b) seeking copyright clearance from editors and publishers of BDL texts (Ó Maolalaigh); (c) the compilation of a new first-line register and bibliography of previously published BDL Gaelic poems (Ó Maolalaigh); (d) data entry of BDL texts and translations from reliable editions. The latter was undertaken by Dr David Mandić as Research Assistant under the auspices of DASG with text capture undertaken by Garry Cooke as DASG Corpus Assistant. The new database captured in separate fields: diplomatic transcriptions of each line of the manuscript based on Phase 2 of the project; a ‘classical’ transliteration of each line as presented by previous editors; a translation of each line as provided by editors; ‘vernacular’ transliterations of each line which seek to reflect the vernacular forms of Gaelic represented by the Middle Scots orthography of the manuscript (Mandić, Gillies, Ó Maolalaigh); and notes and comments on each of the fields as required. Links to manuscript images on ISOS (Irish Script on Screen) were also added to the database. The bulk of this phase of the project was completed in May 2024 although work continues intermittently on ‘vernacular’ transliterations, and minor tweaks have been added to the database over the intervening two years. The third phase resulted for the first time in the history of BDL studies in a fully searchable database of the whole manuscript including its characters and wordforms as well as all previously reliably edited editions and translations of BDL Gaelic texts, which accounts for almost 50% of Gaelic texts in BDL. The final fourth phase of the project will involve the creation of a front-end search facility and interface to the database, which will be made available via the DASG website. It is hoped that the completed project will facilitate greater engagement with and elucidation of BDL for researchers and members of the public, while handing the scholarly baton from Professors Gillies and Meek over to the next generation of scholars.

Meantime, following the completion of his Glasgow PhD in 1982, Professor Donald Meek was working on his own initiative to develop a digital format for presenting the complex material in his thesis, as he explains in his Preface to this volume. In May and June 2024 Professor Ó Maolalaigh proposed to Professor Meek and the Scottish Gaelic Texts Society respectively that DASG could host his edition of BDL Ossianic lays. This revised edition was completed and published on the DASG website in July 2026 in time for its official relaunch at the Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig conference at the University of Glasgow, 14–16 July 2026.

Rob Ó Maolalaigh
July 2026