[Editor’s Note: This article was previously published and is now available for a free download in S/HE: An International Journal of Goddess Studies in Volume 1 Number 1. Do not cite this article in its present form. Citation must come from the published version in S/HE: An International Journal of Goddess Studies (https://sheijgs.space/).”]
In oral tradition from Scotland’s two oldest indigenous languages, Gaelic and Scots, there are references to powerful supernatural female figures who in pre-Christian times may well have been perceived of as goddesses. While we can never reconstruct the specificities of belief patterns of the pre-literate past, the attributes of this being, the Cailleach in Gaelic, and the Carlin in Scots, can be understood as deriving from an indigenous mythology centered on a supernatural female figure. This evidence exists within literary records, often deriving from oral traditions, recorded oral tradition, contemporary oral tradition, place-names and perhaps most interestingly, in the landscape itself. Such material comes from all over Scotland and exists in both of Scotland’s surviving indigenous languages Gaelic and Scots. In this brief overview of the evidence, we will look at material from both linguistic traditions, in which the supernatural figure of the Cailleach in Gaelic and the Carlin in Scots, feature as both landscape creator and weather-worker. In a forthcoming work, Scotland’s Sacred Landscape, due to be published by Luath Press in 2022, I shall present more evidence and, given the extent of the material hope, beyond that, to create a more definitive collection of the material in either book or on-line database form. It should be noted that in Scottish culture, unlike among our cultural cousins in both Ireland and Scandinavia there are no extant records of any kind of pantheon of gods and goddesses from early literary sources. This is part of a general scarcity of early literary sources in Scotland which has been attributed to ongoing destructive invasions from respectively Northumbria, Scandinavia and, on many occasions, England, combined with an unfortunate outbreak of church-directed vandalism during the initial period of the Scottish Reformation in the latter years of the sixteenth century. In the forthcoming work I will consider parallel evidence from particular sites in both Ireland and Scandinavia which could be used to posit a similar underlying feminine-centered belief system in both areas to the one I suggest was extant in Scotland’s far past. In Scotland we have a single reference from Bishop Carsewell in the sixteenth century to the popularity of tales of the Irish Tuatha de Danaan, but within our oral tradition I have found no evidence that this material was ever widespread here.[1] This is particularly striking when we realise that Scotland, like Ireland, has a great many localised tales of Fionn MacCumhaill and the Fianna. That this is down to the close relationship between Irish and Scottish Gaelic is unarguable, but it is all too often forgotten, or ignored, that both countries were heavily settled by Scandinavian incomers from the eighth century onwards. A perhaps forgivable but unfortunately Romanticised attitude towards material deriving from the Celtic languages has tended to overshadow this historical reality. The extent to which the pantheons of Gods in both Ireland and Scandinavia may in fact have been essentially literary creations by classically and biblically focused monks is one that remains unresolved. As McCone put it,
…monastic propagandists and genealogists were ruthless reshapers of the past in the interests of the present, studies of early Irish sagas show…them to be deliberate literary compositions primarily geared to contemporary concerns rather than mere antiquarian assemblages, however archaic or traditional the elements so manipulated.[2]
Given that any underlying feminine-focused beliefs and traditions similar to the Scottish evidence would have been anathema to the essentially gynaephobic worldview of the monkish scribes and those directing them, it is little wonder that references to any such beliefs are almost entirely absent from surviving records. The possibility of the over-masculinising of supposedly indigenous belief in both Ireland and Scandinavia, in both of which literacy was the exclusive domain of Christian monks in the period when the source materials for the respective pantheons were first written down, is not one that should be avoided. Such material may well have been created in Scotland, but if so, none has survived.
However we do have some later literary references, which suggest that the idea of the supernatural, landscape-creating, weather-working female had deep roots in indigenous culture.
The Gyre Carlin appears in poetical works in the Scots language from the sixteenth century, where her role as a landscape maker and shaper is presented in burlesque form – in the poem “The Gyre Carlin”[3] she “luts fart” North Berwick Law (one of the Paps of the Lothians) and in the “Maner of the Crying of Ane Play” (the Manner of the Crying of a Play) she “pishes the watters of the Forth.” [4] The survival of these works is due in great part to them having been known at the Royal court showing that such material had a strong hold on even the supposedly upper levels of Scottish society.[5] It was noted by several early visitors to Scotland that not only did the King of Scots share a language, Scots, and thus a culture, with the population of central Scotland, but that he was approachable in a way that was not the norm in the rest of Europe. One of the poets at the court of James IV was William Dunbar (c.1460-c.1530). In a remarkable analysis of William Dunbar’s poem, “The Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo” (the Two Married Women and the Widow) the Australian poet A. D. Hope suggested that the poem was derived from what he saw as a “fairy cult” extant in Scotland at the time of the poem’s composition.[6] The poem is essentially a discussion between two young married women and a widow about the relationship between the sexes and in their attitudes they clearly show that they are of independent mind. Hope sees this as deriving from the idea of powerful women which he thought had been preserved within the “fairy cult”, in which women were in no way subservient to men.[7] The poet David Lyndsay who was active at the court of James V, explicitly mentions the Gyre Carlin in a poem addressed to the king in 1528.[8] The burlesque representation of the Carlin depends on the contemporary awareness of traditions of her being a giant and explicitly involved in instances of landscape creation. The role of the Cailleach as a weather-worker is echoed in “The Maner of the Crying of Ane Play”where it says:
“In Irland quhen scho blewe behynd,
At Noroway costis scho rasit the wynd” [9]
[In Ireland when she blew behind
In Norway she raised the wind]
The burlesque tone and underlying pun here serve to let us see the original ideas that are being mocked. That such extant literary material can be dated relatively precisely throws in to focus that oral tradition allows of no such certainty, but we can be relatively confident that this literary material is proof of the continuance of such tradition. However, despite increasing literacy from the Reformation period in Scotland onwards, the passing on of local lore has never ceased. I believe this is precisely because the stories of the Cailleach and Carlin have been securely attached to specific locales in the landscape, and the landscape retains many features despite changes in land use, and building development, partially because such locales are of significant size. I recently came across snippet of local lore on Speyside which relates directly to the role of the Cailleach as weather-worker, though she was presented, on the slopes of Cnoc a Cailleach on Speyside, as a witch, and its antiquity may be considerable. I shall return to this tale.
(Read the whole article here.)
[1] J. Dewar, “ Bishop Carswell and his Times” Celtic Magazine Vol VII. (June 1882) Vol VII, 452.
[2] K. McCone, Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature (Kildare: An Sagart, 1990), ix.
[3] Bannatyne, Bannatyne Manuscript Vol.3 (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1928), 35.
[4] W.A. Craigie ed., Asloan Manuscript Vol.2 (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1925), 151.
[5] J.E.H. Williams, “ James V, David Lyndsay, and the Bannatyne Manuscript Poem of the Gyre Carling,” Studies in Scottish Literature Vol. 26 No. 1. (1991), 165-8.
[6] A.D. Hope, A Midsummer’s Eve Dream (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1972), 71.
[7] Ibid., 129.
[8] D. Lyndsay, The Works of Sir David Lindsay Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1931-36), 4-5.
[9] Craigie, Asloan Manuscript, 151.
Stuart McHardy
Dundee-born McHardy spent much of his childhood in the Angus glens, graduated from Edinburgh University and has variously been a musician, a journalist, an author and broadcaster, a lecturer, a storyteller and a poet. He has travelled for both pleasure and professional reasons in various parts of the globe and was a founder member and one-time President of the Pictish Arts Society as well as being the original Director of the Scots Language Centre in Perth. He has been a Teaching Fellow at Edinburgh University’s Centre for Open Learning for the past three decades. Now living on the Lothian Riviera he is married to the beautiful Sandra, has one son Roderick and two bonnie grand-daughters Ishbel and Flora.