DASG Blog

Ceilidh

This week's word is cèilidh - a particularly pertinent one as we approach the festive season.
 
Although nowadays most folk, myself included, would primarily associate a cèilidh with events featuring a lot of music and varying degrees of dance and drink, it's a word which has historically had a range of meanings and connotations.
 
An example of this can be seen from a DASG blog posted several years ago where we learn about the cèilidh cheàrdaich: a South Uist phrase used to describe a gathering of people locked inside together by inclement weather.
 
In the 19th and 20th centuries the taigh-cèilidh, or cèilidh house, was the main part of a crofting township where the oral traditions and cultural heritage of Gaelic communities were transmitted between the generations. An account of these cèilidh houses is found in the song 'The Poet's House' which the South Uist Donald John MacDonald bard composed in memory of his neighbour John Campbell of Lochboisdale. In the following verse the author depicts the cèilidh house and the function it served in the communities of the Outer Hebrides in the first half of the 20th century:
 
So many stories and songs
Did youth listen to from age
On the hearth-side of your door
With the peat-fire ablaze;
Fine lads at your ceilidh
Whom your love's sight caressed,
It was mostly peat-fire flame
That brought them home to rest.
 
But despite the warmth and conviviality found this verse, in many other districts there was a more difficult relationship between the cèilidh house traditions and the surrounding community. This was a result of the tensions which existed between the secular world of the cèilidh house and the religious world of the churches. In his poem 'The Scarecrow', Derick Thomson used his titular image as an allegory for the conflict between the secular festivities of the cèilidh and the religious world which dominated life outside it:
 
That night
the scarecrow came into the ceilidh-house:
a tall thin black-haired man
wearing black clothes.
He sat on the bench and the cards fell from our hands.
One man was telling a folktale about Conall Gulban
and the words froze on his lips.
A woman was sitting on a stool,
singing songs, and he took the goodness out of the music.
 
However, the use of 'cèilidh' which gave me the idea for this blogpost was one which I encountered several weeks ago as part of the work several of us at DASG are currently doing on a collection of papers belonging to Ronald Black. These papers, of which there are several thousand, are the result of the work which Professor Black did in the 1970s researching medieval and early modern Gaelic manuscripts to collect terminology for the Historical Dictionary of Scottish Gaelic. Among these manuscripts was The Little Book of Clanranald. This contains an early 18th century composition by Niall MacMhuirich, written in honour of Ranald, the chief of Clanranald. Writing in Classical Gaelic, MacMhuirich exhorts Ranald to follow a Godly path in the lines "Go thou onward in the track of the child.../In submitting to the will of glorious heaven". In the original Gaelic text the term used by MacMhuirich for this encounter with "the will of glorious heaven" is ceilidh, and from that Ronald Black inferred a definition of cèilidh which he described as being akin to a "'sojourn' - i.e. Christ's on earth".
 
We see here, therefore, a spiritual implication of cèilidh which complements the more secular understanding we have of the word in the present day. The contrast between these two definitions could also be said to encapsulate the two sides of the Christmas season: the holy event on the one side, the festive celebration on the other.