John Francis Campbell (1821-1885)

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John Francis Campbell (1821-1885) Author(s): Francis Thompson Source: Folklore, Vol. 101, No. 1 (1990), pp. 88-96 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1259886 . Accessed: 16/06/2014 21:44 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Folklore Enterprises, Ltd. and Taylor & Francis, Ltd. are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Folklore. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 62.122.78.43 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 21:44:25 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Transcript of John Francis Campbell (1821-1885)

Page 1: John Francis Campbell (1821-1885)

John Francis Campbell (1821-1885)Author(s): Francis ThompsonSource: Folklore, Vol. 101, No. 1 (1990), pp. 88-96Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1259886 .

Accessed: 16/06/2014 21:44

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Folklore Enterprises, Ltd. and Taylor & Francis, Ltd. are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve andextend access to Folklore.

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Page 2: John Francis Campbell (1821-1885)

Folklore vol. 101:i, 1990 88

John Francis Campbell (1821-1885) FRANCIS THOMPSON

NO-ONE who has even a passing interest in the culture of the Celtic peoples can fail to be impressed by the massive amount of their history, tradition and folk knowledge which has survived into our present times. And when one considers that much of this Celtic past has been largely transmitted by oral means over many centuries, and against many odds, one cannot but wonder at the fortuitous manner in which the evidence of that past has been preserved for present-day Celts to be given an essential link with their roots.

Each Celtic nation (Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall and Mannin) has had its catalyst: a man who took it upon himself to go among his own people to record what they knew of themselves and their forebears, and then to set about organising what he had collected with all the scholarship he could muster. The Scots humanist, George Buchanan, is credited with having been the first to realise that all Celtic languages had a common origin. By his collection of placenames from all the Celtic-speaking territories, from Ireland to the Black Sea, he set Celtic scholarship on the right track. His work was published in Edinburgh in 1582 and it was a good beginning. But the real founder of modern Celtic scholarship was Edward Llhuyd, who travelled through all the countries of the 'Celtic fringe' and collected material, often in the nick of time, which he published in Oxford in 1707. Because of his interest he was arguably the main link between some of the last traditional custodians of mediaeval Celtic learning and lore and the scholars who followed him.

The Abbe Paul-Yves Pezron was rather less scientific in his approach to Celtic matters, but he did lay the foundation of the great eighteenth-century Celtic vogue. He has been called the 'inventor of the modern Celts, and thus of Celticism. His European outlook did much to break down the feeling of isolation among the Celtic peoples. The German philosopher Leibnitz followed on Pezron's researches to place Celtic within the framework of European languages. His work was to attract the attention of Johann Kaspar Zeuss, who turned from German history to Celtic philological studies. His great book Grammatica Celtica (1853) started off a line of distinguished European scholars who specialised in Celtic philology extending to the present day.

But the study of Celtic languages left the yolk of the Celtic egg largely untouched, and it was left to the Scot James Macpherson to hint that behind a language was another world which reflected the history of the very people who had preserved their unique identity in their traditions. Macpherson's work, supposedly based on 'Ossianic' compositions, set Europe ablaze with romanticism, an unwitting achievement which affected the literary output of Goethe, Vincenzo Monti, Lord Byron, Lamartine, and Chateaubriand. Even Napoleon was described by Anatole France as 'un reveur enivr6 d'Ossian'; a frequent criticism of Napoleon's speeches was that 'I1l ossianait'.

All this interest created by Macpherson still did little to draw attention to the commonalty of deltic folk, though in each of the Celtic countries there were men who were collecting songs, lore and traditions almost in a vacuum. What they collected had still to be found a niche in the framework of the folklore of the common peoples of the world.

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JOHN FRANCIS CAMPBELL (1821-1835) 89

So far as the Scottish Highlands are concerned, it fell to John Francis Campbell to wrench Gaelic tradition, and folktales in particular, out of obscurity into the gaze of a public which took its own time to realise the worth of what he had collected. But it was his approach to collecting Gaelic folktales which set the pace in the collection of Gaelic traditional material from those tradition-bearers who were increasingly becoming an endangered species.

J. F. Campbell' was born in 1821 into the family of the Campbells of Islay, well connected to Highland and Scottish aristocracy but not quite of it. Family fortunes failing, Campbell was left largely to his own devices to earn his living, though undoubtedly his connections with his cousin, George, eighth Duke of Argyll, one of the political and intellectual giants of the Victorian era, helped to ease his path through an extremely busy life.

While his family held their estates in Islay, they kept a close tie with their tenants, spending large amounts of money in improvements, establishing new townships and generally using their diminishing wealth for the common good. Campbell says of his early days on Islay:

As soon as I was out of the hands of nursemaids I was handed over to the care of a piper. His name was the same as mine, John Campbell, and from him I learned many useful arts. I learned to be hardy and healthy and I learned Gaelic; I learned to swim and take care of myself, and to talk to everybody who chose to talk to me. My kilted nurse and I were always walking about in foul weather or fair, and every man, woman, and child in the place had something to say to us. Thus I made early acquaintances with a blind fiddler who could recite stories. I worked with the carpenters; I played shinty with all the boys about the farm; and so I got to know a good deal about the ways of the Highlanders by growing up as a Highlander myself.2

This, then, was the upbringing of Campbell the catalyst, the man who took it upon himself to preserve the traditions of the Highlanders and who led the way in the systematic collection of folktales throughout the world. But it was an unusual upbringing, for in the early years of the nineteenth century there was a clear demarcation of lines between those who were owners of land and those who lived on that same land. Any son of a land-owning family in the Highlands seen to be consorting with the commonalty would have been severely reprimanded. Had that happened to Campbell, the loss to Gaelic tradition and oral literature would have been immense.

But Campbell's father was a thorough democrat and cared little for the deeply-entrenched social standard of his day. Because of their humanity, the Campbells of Islay were highly regarded, even after they were forced to sell their Islay estates in 1847 and leave the island. Some thirty years later, John Francis Campbell was the guest of honour at a dinner and gathering of Islay natives in Glasgow. In an address to him, the Islay folk extolled Campbell and his family in a manner which indicated the high esteem in which they were held; few,if any, other landowners in the Highlands were ever honoured in this way. The oration in fact indicated that Campbell possessed one essential ingredient as a collector of Gaelic stories and traditions among the Gaels: he was one of themselves.

Campbell's life was a busy one, as befitted a Victorian polymath. He was educated at Eton and Edinburgh University, where he was inspired to take up a lifelong interest in science, eventually concentrating on geology and meteorology. This latter interest culminated in his invention of a practical recorder of sunshine hours which was taken up by Greenwich Observatory and thereafter throughout the world. He was an inveterate

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traveller, making many journeys to Europe and Scandinavia in particular. These journeys he often made on his own, accompanied only by his notebooks and sketch books. The material he bequeathed to the Advocates Library in Edinburgh comprises a mass of journals, spanning a period of over four decades, volumes of letters and watercolours.

His public life included service as private secretary to the Duke of Argyll when the latter was a prominent figure in various governments. He was also secretary to various Royal Commissions and was a member of Queen Victoria's royal household as groom-in- waiting to the Queen. This public life brought him into contact with many of the eminent engineers, scientists and philosophers of his day. One of the contacts he made was Sir George Webb Dasent, a Civil Service Commissioner who did pioneering work in the translation into English of the Icelandic sagas. It was through Dasent's encouragement that Campbell started on the long trail of collecting Gaelic folktales, the fruit of which was the publication of four volumes of Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1860-1862).

These volumes, completed over a period of some three years, involved an enormous amount of work at a time when, as Secretary to the Royal Commission on Lighthouses, Campbell wrote that Commission's Report, itself comprising nearly 1000 pages of close print. The favourable reception given to Popular Tales encouraged Campbell to devote the rest of his life to collecting more material and to writing exclusively on Highland matters, with varying degrees of success. In 1872 he published at his own expense Leabhar na Feinne, a book of heroic Gaelic ballads based on manuscripts most of which were collecting dust in libraries in Edinburgh and elsewhere. Much to his disappointment the book fell flat on its face, though the scholarship shines through. Despite that reception, he carried on with his interests and acted as a kind of persuasive influence in some important fields of Highland and Gaelic activity. But his fame rests on his folktale collection.

Campbell's interest in Gaelic folklore and traditions began when he was in his early twenties. He wrote:

Dr. MacLeod of Campsie, whose name is well known, suggested to me, then a tall, lanky boy, the gathering of Highland lore. In 1847 I had begun to gather a few traditions and these I still have. In 1859, on the publication of Popular Tales from the Norse, the author of that excellent work, who has now come to rule over Civil Service erudition, suggested to me that I might do for Scotland which others had done elsewhere; and acting under this counsel, upon my own knowledge, I set to work in earnest in January 1859, to gather the popular tales of the West Highlands.

The 'one who had come to rule over Civil Service erudition' was Sir George Webb Dasent who, in 1840, was sent to do diplomatic work in Stockholm where he met Jacob Grimm. Grimm was a follower of the European school which believed that one could deduce the life, habits and character of a people from their laws, and in turn that the influence of these laws could be found in the popular sayings, old tales and traditional poems of the people. Both he and his brother, Wilhelm, collected the things people, said, the tales they told and the ballads they sang. One result of their work was published in 1812-15 as Kinder- und Hausmdrchen, the fairytales that won them world-wide fame. Two years later the Grimm brothers published Deutsche Sagen, which deals with the historical and local legends of the Teutonic peoples.3 Jacob Grimm made such an impact on Webb Dasent that the latter, in his turn, was encouraged to turn his attention to the study of Scandinavian language, history and traditions. In 1842 he published a translation of the Prose Edda and thereafter followed a series of books on Scandinavian topics. In 1861 he produced his famous translation of Burnt Njal.

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At that time Campbell was involved with government Royal Commissions and came into contact with Dasent. Campbell, who had made many journeys to Scandinavia and Iceland, was already familiar with the geology of the area as well as with the people. So he was fertile ground when Dasent sowed his seeds with such effect. Campbell, therefore, can trace his direct lineage, in folktale collecting, from Grimm through Dasent, to enter into the mainstream of European research and study.

From 1847 Campbell had been collecting songs and stories, and with his scientific mind used a system of classifying and numbering them. This experience was to be used when he began his major collecting activity. There was a problem, however. His work with the Lighthouse Commission demanded much of his time, and he realised that the only way he could make a start was to employ others to go round the Highlands and Islands collecting stories for him. And this he did. He contacted a few trusted men, gave them stocks of paper and some money to see them through their fares and living expenses. He also indicated that he was willing to pay for stories collected from the common folk, which elicited the response from some storytellers: 'Nach iongantach &'! (Is he not astonishing!).

Campbell's experience with the Lighthouse Commission was to come in handy for his Highland research. It was the purpose of the Commission to collect evidence from a vast number of sources. To call people to London to appear before the Commissioners would have been expensive. So Campbell devised a system of questionnaires, sent by post, which when returned were then analysed. This system he carried over to the material which was sent to him by his folktale collectors.

Once he received the stories, sent via James Robertson, Chamberlain at Inveraray Castle, Campbell would read them over and roughly translate them into English. Stories of particular interest he sent off to Hector MacLean, a schoolmaster at Ballygrant on Islay, who would translate them into English, correct the Gaelic, and forward them to Campbell's publisher in Edinburgh, for eventual appearance in both a Gaelic and an English version.

It was hard work, and slow work. Yet, considering that the four volumes of Popular Tales of the West Highlands were published within the space of two years, totalling nearly 2000 pages of print, they stand as an impressive record of commitment to the urgent preservation of the oral traditions which were fast disappearing from the Highlands by the middle of the nineteenth century. Indeed, many of the folk from whom Campbell and his collectors got their stories were well into old age, though their memories were as full of their valuable contents as they were in their younger days. Their knowledge was caught in the nick of time. Had the business of collecting been left even for a couple of more decades, much would have been lost for all time.

Campbell was sensible enough, indeed humble enough, to seek the experience of Dasent for advice on the method of presentation of the stories. He realised that the stories had to be published as rough diamonds if their character was to be preserved. In a letter to Campbell (January 1859), Dasent says: 'Many thanks for the Gaelic tales. It is quite plain from these that a good deal is to be done before they die out. I hope the instinct of race will be strong enough to make some good Celt devote himself to gathering them before it is too late', and he suggested that Campbell use his influence to make sure that this did not happen. In reply, Campbell said:

... I know lots of West Highlanders and I may be able to get together a goodly lot of traditions... I think I have sufficient honesty to give them as I get them. I know spoken Gaelic well enough

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to convert it into written English and I should rather like to save from perdition whatever may be valuable in a language which is hardly known to the learned and which must soon lapse away. Perhaps you will lend me a helping hand if I did get to work in earnest.

Dasent was more than pleased that Campbell had decided to do the gathering work himself (February 1859):

. . As I have now made up my mind that a good deal is to be done in the way of Popular Tales in the Highlands, I write you these few lines of advice which I hope you will find time to read, as I trust you will take them in good part.

First and foremost, every old woman of whatever rank must be allowed to tell her story in her own way and in her own words. It will be time enough to supply unifying links when-as there no doubt will be-several varieties of the same story have been found. 2nd. They must never be allowed to put you off, as I have found they try to do-with some set phrases as 'this is nonsense or wrong' or 'I can't tell you what follows, it's silly'; for they are no judges either of what is nonsense or silly or wrong; in short 'they don't know what's for their own good' like the old woman whom the Smith burnt in the Norse tale. 3rd. Tales must be kept as much as possible from local tradition ... The tale flies, the social tradition walks. One is like a flash of lightning, everywhere at once, all over, like one of your lights beaming from a certain distance round a particular spot. Some of those you remember are local traditions; as that connected with a bridge in Islay. The one you told me . . . is a pure tale. It belongs to no place and is true of all time and regions ... If possible, the Celtic must be distinguished from the Teutonic ones. This requires some experience in which if mine is of any worth, it is heartily at your service.

Campbell went to work with a will and began to organise his collectors. His first contact was James Robertson, Factor to the Duke of Argyll at Inveraray Castle (25 January 1859):

I know you are a good Highlander and I hope you will lend me (another of the race) a helping hand. I want as many Gaelic stories as I can collect and if you can get a good lot I may publish them. I don't so much want stories about historical characters though I shall be glad enough to get them, but I want the regular nursery tales that a nurse would tell a child. The sayings and doings of ravens, foxes, bears, wolves and lions. I have heard tales of all of them in my youth though I cannot recall them now-wise saws about the weather or the seasons-anything that sounds like metre in the original-anything strange or supernatural, bird notes such as 'Gorach, gorach, says the hoodie crow'

In short anything that is in Gaelic and would be classed as trash by the wise. If you will send me both Gaelic and English so much the better. If you have no stories yourself there may be some cailleach (old woman) about who has and you will oblige me by sucking her brains.

Another contact was Hector Urquhart, a gamekeeper at Ardkinglass, Argyll, who did translation work and editing for Campbell. But the two main instruments on whom Campbell relied were John Dewar and Hector MacLean.

John Dewar first appears in Campbell's papers in October 1859, in a letter accompanying the Gaelic text of Tales of the Gael on the Wintry Nights, sent as an example of his own work, and offering to collect more tales. Campbell was overjoyed and lost no time in engaging Dewar, who was seconded from his employment on the Argyll estate to go on the track of the great tales of the Highlands.

He is a precise accurate old man with a wonderful memory and small imagination. A popular tale in his hands becomes more like fact than fiction, and poetry turns to prose.

Though advanced in age, Dewar took to his new task like a youngster. He solved the problem of collecting the stories he heard by listening to the sennachies, carrying them

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all in his head until he got to the quiet of his home and then writing everything down, supplemented by his own notes, taken down with his own system of shorthand. Until recently, there were some places in the Highlands which retained memories of how Dewar used to take down the words of a story 'just as quick as they were spoken'. In this way Dewar was able to collect a remarkable number of stories in an equally remarkable short space of time.

After Campbell had published his Popular Tales of the West Highlands, Dewar was kept on by the Duke of Argyll, until his death in 1872, in collecting stories. The substance of his collecting career is now contained in the Dewar Manuscripts preserved at Inveraray Castle, some of which appeared in The Dewar Manuscripts, edited by the late Rev. John McKechnie in 1964. The remainder still awaits publication.

Hector MacLean, Campbell's second main collector, was typical of the well-educated intellectual Highlanders who found themselves locked away in obscurity, teaching children in MacLean's case, in a school in Ballygrant in Islay. He was to become Campbell's mainstay in collecting, translating and editing the stories collected. In March 1859 MacLean wrote in response to a letter from Campbell:

I will do all I can to procure any tales that may yet be extant of an original character and will have the greatest pleasure in forwarding any such that may possess intrinsic merit. They are now fast dying out and it is surprising how few can repeat any, and many of those repeated are nothing but English translations. When a boy I could repeat several myself but, strange, I cannot bring any to my recollection, though I remember quite well the books I read at the same time. As for the people here, without exception, native or not, I know that nothing would delight them more than do anything to please you, and if the warm attachments of a people be gratifying to you, you are perfectly sure of those of the people here.

MacLean was asked by Campbell if he would travel about the Highlands to collect stories and he agreed:

Your proposal with respect to collecting the tales is fully agreeable to me as a turn through the Highlands would be pleasant recreation for myself at the same time I served your purpose. For remuneration further than would be requisite for expenses I would not ask any, as the jaunt would benefit my health and would be a desirable change for a short time from my present monotonous life.

Hector MacLean took to the task of collecting the stories with great gusto, though he often complained of being 'much troubled with headaches'. The letters he sent to Campbell, relating his journeys and the folk he met, are full of fascinating details:

(September 1860): Coming across the Sound of Barra to Barra I read Conall to men and women in the boat who were delighted with it and declared there was not a word wanting. They give it as their opinion that it was fully better in the book than it was generally recited ['Conall' was one of the stories just published by Campbell]. I read it to Alexander MacNeill himself [the original reciter] the next day after my arrival at Castlebay and excepting a few words not very important it was all there ... MacNeill's memory is so good ... The night before last I read all his tales at his own house and he is satisfied that no incidents are missing. We had a crowded house, but he was for keeping the juvenile portion of the community out as he thought they would not keep quiet. I advised him to let them all in, that I would rather have them ... They behaved very decently and listened with great attention. Not a syllable was to be heard, not the least noise made and I had no interruption but on the contrary the pleasures of having all eyes intent upon me . . . I wish I had such attentive and obedient pupils at home.

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Hector MacLean gives us a glimpse of the kind of people he met on his travels, who were the tradition-bearers of their time:

Castlebay September 1860: I was over at Mingulay last week and saw Roderick MacNeill who is so celebrated among the people here as a storyteller that I have written several of his tales which appear to me remarkable for vivid and pointed dialogue. He is an animated and spirited old man and though crippled to a certain extent by rheumatism his vivacity is not the least impaired. Seventy-four and not a trace of dotage. He hobbles about the place bareheaded and barefooted and is said not to have worn shoes for the last fifty years. He tells his tales with extraordinary effect being a capital natural elocutionist using pauses, emphasis, gesture and inflection of the voice to express passion, sentiment and character fully as well as though he had been trained by some of the best actors of the day. His Gaelic is excellent but his style is of the plain simple kind. He has obviously an aversion to anything obscure or mystical and gives a clearness and reality to anything to the greatest extravagance ... He has many tales borrowed from other sources than Highland but he gives them all in a Highland form.

What finally appeared in the four volumes of Popular Tales of the West Highlands was in fact only a fraction of the 860 stories collected by Campbell, Dewar and MacLean. The remainder are yet to be published, nearly 130 years after they were collected. Indeed, more might have been gathered had not Campbell cried a halt because the material threatened to become a mountain. Fortunately, however, as already mentioned, John Dewar continued to be a collector of tales, the very description which was recorded on his death certificate-quite unique for the time.

After the monumental Popular Tales had been published, Campbell himself went on collecting and he, too, recorded his meetings with storytellers still living. At Castlebay (1870):

I spent the whole of a very fine day with three old men. One would have sufficed for a week. They flooded me with knowledge and I flooded them with drink and added coin. We were mutually pleased. [The next day:] I got a cart and took my oldest man, 89, five miles home and gave him five shillings for walking that distance. I got in the ferry boat and landed six miles off at Pollachar in South Uist where Carmichael [Alexander Carmichael of Carmina Gadelica] and a gig came to meet me and carry me to his house. But for my promise to meet him I would have stuck to my old man for several days longer. I cannot convey to anybody who has not experienced the extraordinary mass of stuff which is stored up in these old Highland minds. Men who cannot read a single letter or understand a word of any language but Gaelic, ragged old paupers men might pass off as drivelling idiots begin and sing long ballads which I know to be more than 300 years old, and when they have done they begin another and so for hours they go on as if they were clocks. When they have spun Ossianic poetry out they begin upon songs and then they begin upon stories. One story goes rambling on for a couple of hours and then it is not half done.

[Friday 29th September 1870] We walked three miles to the Inn and there I spent the whole day with two old men of whom one is the best Ossianic man I have found. I had now pumped ten men all of whom are crammed full of knowledge and Fenian lore. The last swore that he could keep me going for a full month, and I believe that he could.

In his long introduction to his Popular Tales, Campbell gives many insights into his approach to 'storyology' as he called it: the collection of folktales. Arising from his intense activity from 1859 to 1862, he was able to describe the genesis of his interest in the oral traditions of the Highlands, its development and his arrival at a rationale which he was willing enough to alter as he continued his collecting activities. When Campbell began

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to collect the folktales, the idea of oral tradition as a worthwhile field for scholarly investigation was still in embryo. The term 'folk-lore' itself had been coined by Thoms as recently as 1846. Campbell thus was on the scene of folktale scholarship at a very early stage. But what made him different from his contemporary folktale collectors in other countries was that he brought to bear on the subject the discipline of a legally and scientifically trained mind, wide reading and a travelling background which literally encompassed the whole world. Added to that his knowledge of eleven languages and a smattering of another fifteen tongues Campbell was thus almost unique in the field. He once recorded that on a visit to Nishninovgorod, at the time of the great Fair, he recounted some Highland folktales in faulty Russian which won him popular acclaim.

Five years after Campbell's death in 1885 a new edition of Popular Tales of the West Highlands was published under the auspices of the Glasgow Islay Association. Issued in parts, from 1890 to 1893, the work was instrumental in introducing a new generation of Gaels to their traditional heritage. It also introduced Campbell's name to a growing band of British folklorists, by whom he was regarded as one of the foremost pioneers in the collection of traditions and folktales.

Alfred Nutt, a London publisher and folklorist, wrote in Folk-Lore:

The unrivalled combination of knowledge, critical power, and instinctive racial sympathy which gave to its owner his unique position in the study of folk-lore can hardly be expected from any other man ... Some of the readers of Folk-Lore may, it is hoped, be able to do the work I have sketched in the foregoing pages, the work of rendering accessible to fellow-students the rich stores of folk-fancy, and of learning, so full of life and penetration, as almost to deserve the name of genius, at present hidden away in the M.S.S. of Campbell of Islay.4

Alfred Nutt had, in fact, started work on the classification of Campbell's collections, both published and unpublished, which was eventually to be incorporated in the monumental work of Stith Thompson and Antti Aarne in classifying the elements of traditional tales from all over the world.

One of Campbell's great disappointments was the refusal of publishers to see into print his book Oral Mythology, of which Alfred Nutt had this to say: '. . . it contains a great deal of interesting matter, and should be studied by anyone proposing to write a general treatise upon folk-lore. It is much to be regretted that Messrs Smith, Elder & Co should not have seen their way to publish it in 1870 as it would have materially hastened the progress of research." Readers may be reminded here that our own Folklore Society was founded in 1878 and it is a matter for speculation whether the Society might have grown faster had Campbell's Oral Mythology been in the hands of those whose interest was just beginning to be whetted in folklore.

A great debt is owed by present-day Celts to John Francis Campbell who refused to allow his privileged education to turn his heart, head and mind away from the past of his Highland upbringing and ancestry. It takes a great and humble mind to cultivate a neglected field so that what lies buried might grow into the pride of race he himself felt honoured to carry all through his active life. His example encouraged others to take their share of the ploughing of the Celtic field so that their efforts, too, might show to the world that the peoples of the Celtic fringes of Europe have an ancient and honourable lineage worthy of respect and international understanding.

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NOTES

1. This Paper is based on a full-length biography of J. F. Campbell which I completed in 1985 (still unpublished). While the paper highlights Campbell's work as a collector of folktales, the biography deals not only with his collecting activities but also with his interest in collecting Gaelic heroic verse (viz. Leabhar na Feinne, London 1872). An inveterate traveller in Europe, America and the Middle East, he made a close study of the many similarities in folk beliefs which made him one of the first to assert that these beliefs had a common origin in basic human experiences.

2. All quotations, unless otherwise attributed, are derived from the corpus of John Francis Campbell's journals, letters and published works, now deposited in the National Library of Scotland (Adv. 50-1-1 to 51-2-7). A further five volumes of letters written by Campbell between 1857 and 1881 are deposited in the John Rylands Library, Manchester.

3. The Grimms' fairytales have been repeatedly translated, the most recent scholarly rendering being that by Jack Zipes, The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (Toronto and New York, 1982). Their Sagen have been neglected; the only English translation is that by Donald Ward, The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm (New York and London, 1981).

4. A. Nutt, 'M. Sdbillot's Scheme for the Collection and Classification of Folk-Lore,' Folk- Lore Record 3 (1887).

5. Ibid.

RELATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

ANON: 'Angus Duncan Hector MacLean' (1818-1893), An Gaidheal, January 1964. DASENT, G. W.: Popular Tales from the Norse (Edinburgh 1859). DELARGY, J. H.: 'Three Men of Islay' Scottish Studies, Vol. 4, 1960. DORSON, R. M.: The British Folklorists (London, 1969). FOLKLORE SOCIETY: Folktale Committee 'Folk-tale Analysis' Folklore Journal, Vol. 1, 1883. MACHECHNIE, J. (ed.): The Dewar Manuscripts (Glasgow 1964). MICHAELIS-JENA, R.: The Brothers Grimm (London 1979). NUTT, A.: 'M. Sebillot's Scheme for the Collection and Classification of Folklore', Folklore Record,

Vol. 3, Part 2.

J. F. CAMPBELL: Popular Tales of the West Highlands, Vols. 1-4 (Edinburgh 1860-62; New Corrected Edition: Paisley

1890; Reprint of Paisley Edition by Wildwood Press, 1983-84). On Current British Mythology and Oral Tradition (Pamphlet, London 1870). The Celtic Dragon Myth (ed. George Henderson): Glasgow 1911; reprinted California 1981.

RELATED MATERIAL

JACKSON, K. H.: 'Campbell of Islay' Celtica Catalogue No. 6 (National Library of Scotland 1967). MACDONALD, D. A.: Paper on John Francis Campbell's Life and Interests, read at the Annual

Conference of the Society for Folk Life Studies in 1965. MACKAY, J. G. (Ed.): More West Highland Tales, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh 1940), Volume 2 (Edinburgh

1960). NUTT, A.: 'The Campbell of Islay MSS at the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh' Folk-Lore, Vol. 1,

1890.

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