Warriors of the Word: The World of the Scottish Highlanders

by Michael Newton

Words have always held great power in the Gaelic traditions of the Scottish Highlands: bardic poems bought immortality for their subjects; satires threatened to ruin reputations and cause physical injury; clan sagas recounted family origins and struggles for power; incantations invoked blessings and curses. Even in the present, Gaels strive to counteract centuries of misrepresentation of the Highlands as a backwater of barbarism without a valid story of its own to tell.

Warriors of the Word offers a broad overview of Scottish Highland culture and history, bringing together rare and previously untranslated primary texts from scattered and obscure sources. Poetry, songs, tales, and proverbs, supplemented by the accounts of insiders and travelers, illuminate traditional ways of life, exploring such topics as folklore, music, dance, literature, social organization, supernatural beliefs, human ecology, ethnic identity, and the role of language. This range of materials allows Scottish Gaeldom to be described on its own terms and to demonstrate its vitality and wealth of renewable cultural resources. This is an essential compendium for scholars, students, and all enthusiasts of Scottish culture.

Genres: History, Scotland, Nonfiction, British Literature

424 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2009

Reviews

[Karen Brooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully crafted, impeccably researched, always fascinating and sometimes heart-breaking.

[Zach Church · Rating 4 out of 5]

A unique and interesting cultural history, one that eschews trite narratives and anecdotes in favor of scholarly analysis supported by texts, many of which appear to be inaccessible without a knowledge of Gaelic.

This takes a while to get going - you may need to power through the first chapter 'Themes in Scottish History' which necessarily lays down background but does so in a fairly dry, textbook-like way.

From there, though, this is consistently interesting and there is some beautiful poetry along the way. My favorite chapters were the last three:

Belief Systems and Cosmology - Loved learning about the Cailleach, "an archaic female figure associated with the landscape, wild nature, elemental forces, and geotectonic powers."

Song, Music, and Dance - Hilarious ongoing theme of complaining about how everything we think of when we think Scottish music is so modern. Bagpipes? Basically brand new. Fiddle? "What is this, Top 40?" Opens with basically a Pitchfork essay on "folk" music.

Human Ecology - Some really devastating writing on the fragility of language, and how it is essential to supporting a culture. The prognosis is not good: "If the current state of the planet is a reflection of the stewardship of those supposedly superior races, that is condemnation enough. Although the meek may yet inherit the earth, the assertive have already squandered much of that inheritance during a minuscule blip of the history of humankind."

[Russell R · Rating 5 out of 5]

a holy book