MIDI intro: Burns, arr. Stephen Clarke, "The Highland Laddie", from James Johnson, Scots Musical Museum, Vol.1 (Edinburgh: Johnson, 1787), continuo realisation © Steve Sweeney Turner, 1999. Click here to repeat. (4K - requires MIDI, Java or Media Player compatability)
		J. Michael Brown, "Cam' Ye By Atholl?" frontispiece illustration for ed. John Greig's Scots Minstrelsie: A National Monument of Scottish Song, Vol.3 (Edinburgh: T.C. & E.C. Jack, nd., 1890s).

"...the impressiveness of the unknown..."

We, the last men on earth, the last of the free, have been shielded till today by the very remoteness and the seclusion for which we are famed. We have enjoyed the impressiveness of the unknown. But today the boundary of Britain is exposed; beyond us lies no nation, nothing but waves and rocks and the Romans... They are unique in being as violently tempted to attack the poor as the wealthy. Robbery, butchery, rapine, with false names they call Empire; and they make a wilderness and call it peace... You see, we have no fertile lands, no mines, no harbors, which we might be spared to work. Courage and martial spirit we have, but the master does not relish them in the subject. Even our remoteness and seclusion, while they protect, expose us to suspicion. Let us, then, uncorrupted, unconquered as we are, ready to fight for freedom but never to repent failure, prove at the first clash of arms what heroes Caledonia has been holding in reserve.

Thus the Roman historian Tacitus, in his Agricola, famously - yet only ostensibly - reporting a speech made in AD 84 by Calgacus, the Caledonian leader against the Romans at the battle of Mons Graupius, presumed to be somewhere in the Grampian mountain region. Here, the themes are distinctly Tacitean - the heroic nobility of a barbarian leader complaining of Roman imperious injustice and making an impassioned plea for national liberty.[2]And as Tacitus says, this speech was "received with enthusiasm, expressed, as barbarians express it, by shouting, singing and confused applause."[3] In all of this, we have the first detailed account of metropolitan attitudes towards the inhabitants of what we now call the Scottish Highlands.

In this sense, Calgacus represents the first historical Highlander, even if he was a Pict rather than a Gàidheal. Moreover, we have here the thematic core which is present in representations of Highlanders to this day: they are remote from civilisation, poor, warlike, loud, chaotic, and yet... strangely uncorrupted, a remnant of humanity in its originary, Natural form, untainted by the decadence of Modernity. Further, there is a certain mysterious exoticism implied in Tacitus’ phrasing of the "impressiveness of the unknown" which the Highlander enjoys. Yet this exoticism also has its negative face in that the supposed remoteness and isolation[4] of the Highlands: "while they protect, [they also] expose us to suspicion."

It is this paradoxical combination of admiration and suspicion which characterises the Roman attitude towards the ethnically Other in general, and the British and Gaulish Celts in particular, who are imaged as at once barbarous and noble - the aboriginal Noble Savages of Europe. This, of course, recalls the Classical Greek etymology of barbaros, a word often used to signify the Celtic barbarians of the Gaulish pagus, the mysterious pastoral lands beyond metropolitan civilisation whose ways are outmoded, childish, primitive, incomprehensible, ridiculous, dangerous (and whose name gives the root of French pays and English peasant). Yet the barbarous pagans who reside in the pastoral pagus are simultaneously enticing and disturbing for the civilised metropolitans. It is in this context that we can read Tacitus’ phrasing of "the impressiveness of the unknown" with regard to the pagus of Caledonia, a pastoral scene nonetheless both barbaric and noble. And as we will see, the significance of Tacitus’ passage on Calgacus is in its establishment of the primary textual tropes which were, for the next two millennia, applied to the figure of the Highlander.

But such attitudes are hardly confined to those hailing from beyond the borders of what we now call "Scotland". Indeed, while Scotland came into being partly through the legacy of the Roman building of Hadrian’s Wall, bifurcating Celtic Britain into a pacified South and a barbarian North, so too the concept of the Highlands arises partially as a result of the Romans’ further building of the Antonine Wall, to create a semi-pacified buffer-zone in the Scottish Lowlands. Indeed, just as the Antonine Wall runs from the Clyde to the Forth, so too would this become the border between the Gàidhealach kingdom of Alba, and the Lowland kingdoms of Y Strad Glud (Strathclyde) and Bernicia/Northumbria, speaking Welsh and Anglian respectively by the C8th (Bernicia/Northumbria being know to their pre-Anglian, Brythonic inhabitants as Brynaich in North-East England and Gododdin in South East Scotland). Of course, Alba soon expanded into the Lowland kingdoms, creating more-or-less modern Scotland as we know it by the turn of the millennium, yet the Gàidhlig-speaking hierarchy was also soon to fall in its turn to the Anglian-speaking region of the Southeast. From that point on, the Scottish Gàidheal occupies an increasingly marginal position within Scotland itself, such that even the Renaissance poets of the Scottish Lowlands perceive the Gàidheal as a foreigner, rather than as the cultural root of the kingdom. In the early moments of the Renaissance, Lowland writers conceived of the Gàidhlig language as "Scottis", while their own was "Inglis". However, an increasingly anti-Gàidhlig sentiment was rising in the Lowlands, and by the end of the C15th, we find "Scottis" applied to the Germanic language of the South, while the Celtic language of the North suddenly and dramatically becomes "Erse" or "Ersche" - in other words, Irish - a strange tongue from an alien culture with no place in the new concept of the Scots-speaking nation.[5]

For poets such as William Dunbar, Gàidhlig bards were to be held in utter contempt, as his famous poem, "The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie" demonstrates in the form of a flytand (satirical poetic contest) between the poet and one Kennedy, an "Iersch brybour baird" ("Irish thieving bard"). Here, after incisive lines addressing Kennedy as "cuntbitten" and "crawdoun" (venereal and cowardly), Dunbar puts the boot in on Gàidhlig itself:

For Dunbar generally, the Highlander is utterly coterminous with the barbarian, if not the fully pagan. In an infamous passage from his "Dance of the Sevin Deidly Sinnis", Dunbar represents a bacchanalian scene with the Devil (‘Mahoun’ in the Metropolitan Scots of the C16th) sending a fiend to find one MacFadzean in the Highlands to bring his "Irishmen" down to Hell and play a Highland pavan. However, the Highlanders prove so loud and vulgar that not even the Devil himself can stand their musical revelry, and so he banishes them to the deepest pits of Hell for eternity:

Just as Tacitus refers to the clamorous "shouting, singing and confused applause" of Calgacus’ Caledonian army, so too Dunbar, some one and a half millennia later, figures the music of the Gàidheal within an infernal scene of noise, chaos, and violence which even deafens the Devil. However, the significant difference is that Dunbar identifies himself as Scots, being a Lowlander, while the Highlander is a dangerous, unruly foreigner within the otherwise civilised polis of Scottish society. For Dunbar, the Highlanders are true barbarians from the Northern pagus, but with the added problematic of being considered foreigners within their own country.
 

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Enlightenment Pastoral

It is also significant that in Dunbar’s poem the Highland barbarian is located firmly within the bacchanalian scene of music and dance. This, too, becomes a crucial trope within the figure of the Highlander, and by the C18th, images of Highland dance and revelry are a prominent aspect of Gàidhealach representation, as in David Allan’s two images of "A Highland Wedding" and "The Highland Dance" respectively:

Pastoral Revelry: David Allan, "A Highland Wedding" late C18th.

Niel Gow and the Bacchanalian Highland Scene: David Allan, "The Highland Dance", c.1780

In this widespread genre of representation, the rustic peasants of the Highlands are seen to engage in the traditional pastoral bacchanal in which music, dance, drunken abandon, and sexual licentiousness are the core tropes. The prominent musical instruments are the fiddle and the bagpipe, and the scene is almost always framed within woodland, the horizon of which is intersected by a range of mountains. As with these two water-colours by Allan, the musicians are normatively placed to one side, while the centre of the frame is occupied by a young heterosexual couple in a moderately sober courtship dance while wilder, more overtly bacchic figures occupy the middle-ground.

However, such Dionysian scenes are not the limit of Enlightenment Pastoral’s approach to the Gàidheal, as can be seen in the title-page of Simon Fraser’sAirs and Melodies Peculiar to the Highlands of Scotland and the Isles.

Niel Gow and The Pastoral Gàidhealach Muse:
Title-page detail, Simon Fraser, The Airs and Melodies Peculiar to the Highlands of Scotland and the Isles (Edinburgh: Fraser, 1816)

Here we have a direct link with Allan’s "Highland Dance" in that the prominent Perthshire fiddler Niel Gow appears in similar pose (also highly reminiscent of Raeburn’s famous 1793 portrait of Gow). However, on Fraser’s title-page, Gow is taken outwith the Dionysian scene and transplanted into more Apollonian surroundings. Here, the Gàidhealach Muse crowns both him and an archetypal blind harper with laurel wreaths beneath a craggy rock on a lochside, while ostensibly traditional Highland pursuits such as cow-milking, deer-hunting and rowing out to Fingal’s Cave go on in the background. But with this reference to the Muse, perhaps more than to the Dionysian dance, we are once more firmly within a Hellenic sphere of reference. As with Tacitus’ description of the Caledonians, so too we find the dual tropes of uncouthness and nobility threading through the centre of Niel Gow’s image as the cornerstone of Highland musicality. Whether performing the bacchanal amongst sylvan glens for the intoxicated satyrs in the C18th, or performing without an audience (other than the Muse herself) and thus performing a music for its own sake in the C19th, Gow is clearly set both within a Hellenic frame, and as a Rousseauesque Noble Savage.
 

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"In Highland wrath..."

Turning now to various genres of Lowland song, let us trace through one specific Dionysian theme, considering its intersection with representations of the Highlander, and the Hellenic investments of Enlightenment and Romantic Pastoral.

It has often been noted that, following the aftermath of the final Jacobite Rebellion of 1745-46, Highland culture (or at least, one reading of it) enjoyed an immense popularity in the Lowlands in stark contrast to the metropolitan allegiance with the Hanoverian side during the Rebellion. The pacification of the Jacobite elements within Highland society had been a swift and brutal form of ethnic cleansing culminating in the Clearances which lasted well into the C19th (and, some would argue, until the present day in the sphere of economic disenfranchisement). At the very least, it was the case that by the end of the C18th, there was little political will left to support the idea of a further Rising. At the same time, the example of the French Revolution and the American War of Independence offered new, Republican models for political opposition to the Union with England. And into the space between the Royalist and the Republican, the Jacobite and the Jacobin, steps one songwriter by the name of Robert Burns.

Burns’ songs are no doubt largely responsible for the cultural rehabilitation, in Romantic terms, of the Jacobite narrative, replete as it is with heroism, pathos, and untimely tragedy. But it is also significant that its emergence in Lowland culture as a Romantic force was simultaneous to the utter depletion of its political threat to the UK establishment. By the time that Burns came to Romanticise Jacobite history, its potential nationalism could be assimilated into a mere sense of sub-State national pride, rather than an overt challenge to the status quo in practical terms of direct action. Here was a heroic past indeed, but one which was very much past in the face of the Unionist realities of the time. At times such as the late C18th in Scotland, cultural nostalgia comes with a low political price.

By the time of the Victorian era, we even find the Germanic English monarch popularising the Romantic figuration of Scotland precisely by hooking into the myths of the defeated Stuart line and its assumedly absolute identification with Gàidhealach culture:

Empress and Horse ‘Amused’ by a Ghillie:
George Washington Wilson, “John Brown and Queen Victoria”, 1863.

Not least in this respect was Victoria's patronage of various figures within the Scottish musical scene, from her appointment of several musicians as Pipers to the Queen (including the historiographically notorious Angus McKay), to her acceptance of innumerable dedications to her - ("by gracious permission", naturally - of collections of Scottish National Song, such as John Greig's Scots Minstrelsie:

Facsimile of a letter from Victoria (at Balmoral, of course)
to John Greig accepting his dedication to her of his
Scots Minstrelsie: A National Monument of Scottish Song, Vol.2

Equally, a major factor in the post-1746 pacification of Gàidhealach culture was the utilisation of the male Highland workforce within the British Imperial army. In this context, the myth of the Highland warrior was developed to its highest degree, at once strengthening and containing a sense of traditional identity which would otherwise threaten to shake the establishment. Central to this whole process of mythologisation, of course, was the figure of the regimental piper:

The Wild-Eyed Heir to Calgacus’ "courage and martial spirit":
Lockhart Bogle, Piper Kenneth MacKay of the 79th Cameron Highlanders at the Battle of Waterloo, 1815 (detail).

As one journalistic writer commented in The British Minstrel, an occasional miscellany of music and commentary:

Offensively essentialising as such an image may be, it is nonetheless - surely - preferable to the other recurrent figure of the Gàidheal within Victorian society as the grotesque peasant from the backward Caledonian pagus: which always implies either violence, drunkenness, or, if one is particularly fortunate, mere rustic stupidity:

Jockular C19th Postcard

As we will see, the title of this postcard is specifically intended as a parody of the Lowland Scots genre of songs which deal with the cultural Otherness of the Gàidheal - a genre which begins to fully flourish in the C18th and is first recorded and ideologically manipulated by songwriters such as Burns and Tannahill, and their predecessors Ramsay and Fergusson.

So, returning to the C18th and Burns in particular, much of his work in popularising the figure of the Highlander in songwriting stems from his fieldwork as a collector, and here, we find a range of traditional songs collected by Burns which come with a ready-made topology of Highland mythos. One such traditional song was "Duncan Davison", and two versions which passed through Burns’ hands make interesting comparison. Both are to the tune of the same name, and differ basically in lyrical content. Burns’ version of the tune was published in Vol.2 of James Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum (1788) with figured Baroque continuo by the Edinburgh organist, Stephen Clarke. In this version, the tune is in D Major, and Clarke’s figuration follows a simple I-IV-V-I format, with no implication of the notorious Gàidhealach double-tonic. The tune comes in two common time strains of four bars each:

"Original" Baroque Version of "Duncan Davison"
Burns arr. Clarke, in James Johnson, Scots Musical Museum, Vol.2 (Edinburgh: Johnson, 1788)
Click here for a MIDI trio rendition
(2K - requires MIDI, Java or Media Player compatability)

However, moving away from the music and towards the question of lyrics takes us into slightly more complex terrain. The first version we will consider lyrically is not that in SMM. Although that was the first version which was published under Burns’ name, it in fact derives from an earlier version with bawdy lyrics which derives from the traditional repertoire. The traditional version which Burns transcribed was published posthumously in 1800, in the collection which came to be known as The Merry Muses of Caledonia, being a collection of traditional, modified, and original bawdy songs published without music, and derived from a Burns manuscript known to have existed at least as early as 1793.

This traditional, "Folk" version has the Duncan Davison of the title as a Highlander who, interestingly, is paid by one Meg for his sexual services. Being a Highlander, of course - a mysterious ethnic other - Duncan is not only an exotic figure, but also a highly erotic one. As he inserts his "highland pintle" into Meg’s "rough muff", Meg delights in discovering Duncan’s prowess to consist of "tway handfu’". Equally, Duncan’s virility is such that, by the end of the encounter, Meg’s "hurdies dreep":

In all of this, it is important to remember that, unlike many more contemporary sexual songs, the sexual politics of the situation involve the female figure in the position of control, procuring the services of a male who, if not a habitual prostitute, at least prostitutes himself on this occasion.

However, in terms of the ethnic politics of the song, it is clear that, as both Highlander and prostitute, the inference is that the Gàidhealach body can be bought by the Lowlander - something which should be borne in mind, given the fact that many Highland Gàidheals were indeed sold into slavery in the early British colonies. Further, this provides a clear link with the mythologies surrounding the figure of the Black African, who, like the Gàidheal, is excessively associated with bacchanalian powers, whether musical or sexual. In both cases, the ethnic Other is treated as exotic, erotic, enticing and yet potentially dangerous due to their inherent barbarity and unpredictability. Further, the metropolitan response to this situation is one of enslavement - either literally or figuratively.

However, before reading this ostensibly innocent piece of bawdry too intensely and in isolation from the great corpus of other texts and histories which would support such a reading, let us merely consider the revised version which Burns published first for the musical delight of the Scottish middle classes:

In the published version, Burns turns the traditional sexual relationship of the song on its head - here, it is Duncan who pursues Meg, with chaste thoughts of building a future together in love, despite Meg’s initial coy resistance. Quite some distance from the Meg of the original who pays an exotic whore for purely carnal sex. Further, it is surely also significant that Burns’ sanitised version for the Edinburgh middle classes edits out Duncan’s status as a Highlander, with all that that traditionally implies in the bawdy folksongs of the time.

Nonetheless, the traces of the traditional erotically explicit genres are carried over in many of their sanitised and sentimentalised versions. This can easily be seen in tracing through the various manifestations of the trope of the plaid, the traditional single-sheet tartan attire of the Highlander, wrapped round the torso and draped around the waist (giving rise to its more "practical" manifestation as the kilt in the C19th). As William Donaldson has pointed out in The Jacobite Song: Political Myth and National Identity, the figure of "The Laddie wi’ the Tartan Plaidie" has overtly sexual significance, not least in the numerous songs which involve some Lowland lass bored with the civilised ways of the South succumbing to a lusty Highlander who rows (rolls) her in his plaid.[9] In such bawdy songs, the endless refrain is that of "Bonny Laddie, Highland Laddie" - the otherwise innocent word bonny here carrying very overt and widely understood connotations not merely of physical beauty, but of sexual power also.

However, for Burns, as for others, the Hieland Lassie could also signify the possibility of the Lowland male’s return to a more Natural, primitive sexuality, as can be seen from "Nae Gentle Dames", written for George Thomson’s Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs, and arranged by the Czech composer Kozeluch:[10]

Highland Pastoral Version of "The Deuks Dang O’er my Daddie"
Burns arr. Kozeluch, "Nae Gentle Dames"
George Thomson, Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs, Vol.1ii (London: Thomson, 1798)
Click here for a MIDI piano rendition
(4K - requires MIDI, Java or Media Player compatability)

Here, the singer, while expressing appreciation of the civilised ladies of the metropolitan Lowlands, nevertheless points to their modern artificiality, and contrasts this with the pastoral lustiness of his beloved "highland lassie O". Here, as in many other encoded erotic pieces within these genres, the entire Scottish landscape comes into metaphorical play to signify sexuality, particularly those features which are named even by Lowlanders with Gàidhlig-derived terms (such as glen or brae), or those which have specifically Scots appellations (such a muir or burn). For example, even in Burns’ sanitised version of "Duncan Davison", the most sexually tense passage occurs in relation to a description of the pastoral landscape and its Natural intensity:

- only for Duncan’s lechery as they recline by the burnside to be thwarted as Meg "set the wheel between" them. Nevertheless, charged with a lust intensified by the pastoral scene, "Duncan swoor a haly aith / That Meg would be a bride the morn".

Engraving, "Corn Rigs Are Bonnie"
ed. James Currie, The Complete Works of Robert Burns (Halifax: Milner & Sowerby, 1866)

In "Nae Gentle Dames", the specificity and orthography of the crypto-Gàidhlig landscape come into play again. While Burns allows the English word vallies in stanza 2 (for rhythmic reasons), he specifically chooses the word glen for the repeated chorus, thus giving the Gàidhlig/Scots term fuller emphasis than the English. Further, the chorus in full is:

Here, despite the publication being aimed not only at the domestic, but also the Continental audience, the sexual innuendo of Gàidhlig/Scots pastoral orthography is clear - there is no doubt what is meant by the "glen sae bushy" or the "plain sae rashy" in/on which, the singer will "set me down wi’ right good will".

Famously, Kozeluch, the arranger of this section (Vol.1, set ii) of the Thomson/Burns Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs initially complained to Thomson that the first manuscript of the Scots tunes which had been sent to him were full of basic copyist’s errors. Thomson was at this point sending the tunes to Kozeluch via a colleague called Straton, who commented that, on receiving a second manuscript practically identical to the first:

However, the specifically apologetic language which Straton uses to relate Kozeluch’s incomprehension of Scottish modality is highly significant, and it is at this nodal point in our textual fabric that we can connect the ideological constructs which we have already considered directly into specifically musical-structural issues. Barbarity, it seems, is not merely a question of Tacitean disapproval of the inhabitants of the Caledonian pagus - it is not even a question of the moral conduct of those inhabitants as displayed in Burnsian bawdry. Barbarity is also a question of musical style. Yet this question of style is intimately linked to those broader issues of morality, politics, and cultural practise in general.

Not least in all of this is the previously noted figure of the Dionysian within representations of the Highlander. Like Dionysos, the "Bonny Laddie, Hieland Laddie", and the "Bonny Lassie, Hieland Lassie", are figures who come from an adjacent yet alien territory into the heart of the civilised metropolis, bringing with them a dissonant, intoxicating music which destroys the sexual and political morality of the establishment.
 

This Paper was Originally Presented to Music & Nationalism, The Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, September 1998

References

[1] Tacitus, The Life of Gnaeus Julius Agricola (http://129.186.40.170/THOMAS/netscape/agricola.htm), Chapters 30 & 31.

[2] These tropes also appear in Tacitus’ “report” of the speech by another British Celtic freedom-fighter, Caratacus, on his capture and display in Rome (Annals, Book XII).

[3]Agricola, Chapter 33.

[4] Remote from whom?  Isolated from what?

[5] It is at this time, too, that the Gàidhlig concept of the sasunnach (“saxon”) comes into play as a bitter appellation for the usurping rulers in the Lowlands, making no distinction between them and the English themselves, despite the Lowlanders’ new-found identity as “Scottis” rather than “Inglis”.

[6] William Dunbar, “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie”, in ed. Mackenzie, The Poems of William Dunbar (Edinburgh: Mercat, 1990).

[7] William Dunbar, “The Sevin Deidly Sinnis”, in ed. Mackenzie, ibid.

[8] Anon., “The Bagpipe”, in The British Minstrel and Musical and Literary Miscellany, Vol.2 (Glasgow: Hamilton, 1847), p.70.

[9] William Donaldson, The Jacobite Song: Political Myth and National Identity (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988).

[10] In considering this piece, however, it is also worth noting that the tune is “The Deuks Dang O’er My Daddy”, and this appears in Vol.4 of The Scots Musical Museum in a slightly bawdy (albeit domestic) setting, with no overt reference to either pastoral landscape or Highland sexuality as such.

[11] Letter from Straton to Thomson, 28-10-1797, quoted in J. Cuthbert Hadden, George Thomson, The Friend of Burns: His Life and Correspondence (London: Nimmo, 1898), pp.298-299.
 

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Copyright © Steve Sweeney-Turner, 1998
This edition copyright © Celtic Cultural Studies, 1999
ISSN 1468-6074