DASG Blog

Manadh

Gaels were and some still are fond of superstitions (geusagan), which has been written about in a previous blog, as the Gaels have many customs about this world and the other world. The word manadh means a vision or sight of an event, something which is going to happen in the future, be it an hour to a century. This ability was very well-known and recorded with people such as Nostrodamus from France and The Brahan Seer who perhaps belong to the parish of Uig, Isle of Lewis.
Listening to the folklore recordings from Harris and South Uist we have done a wee bit of research and recording already on manadh and ath-fradharc. Ath-fradhairc is very similar to the phenomenon of “second sight” but manadh has many different meanings respectively: in the Western Isles it means a prophecy and a second sight in the same way, but in Islay, Jura and Colonsay it means a ghost, apparition or an uncouth or evil spirit.
 
We have many other words for manadh or ath-fradhairc; taibhs was recorded in the Isle of Skye and taibhsearachd in Tiree. “tuaileas an ath-fradharc” was recorded in Uig, but perhaps it was second-sight of something innapropriate or salicious!
 
There were some Gaels who wished to rid themselves of knowledge or gift and one could do this with a nasg, or one could have done this with prayer and paying alms.
 
There are many stories about manaidhean, here are two of them:
 
There is a story that takes place close to Benbecula on the Isle of Rona, where a team of women and men were gathering seaweed but on their way out to the island a woman fell in the water and drowned. The team searched for her but were unable to find her corpse or any trace of her. A night or two after that the drowned woman came to a friend in a manadh telling her to go to Lòn Cait (Pool of the Cat) on the island. The woman awoke instantly and told her husband that they should return to Lòn Cait, and after a little debating, they went and found her corpse lying in the pool.
 
There is another one of a manadh in Manish, Harris: up to the 1900s there wasn’t a nurse or a midwife on the east coast of Harris. Before this time they would have helped each other, and when the people of Manish were building a house some of the people would see a manadh of a woman in work-clothes or a uniform outside the house, although they didn’t know why. Many months afterwards, when the house was built a nurse came from the mainland to live there and she was the one in the manadh or vision that people had saw. The nurse was there for thirty years after that.
 
If you have any stories, information and new, similar words of your own let us know on facebook and twitter.
 
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