Divided Gaels: Gaelic Cultural Identities in Scotland and Ireland, c.1200-c.1650 (review)

Drawing upon his doctoral thesis, McLeod interrogates the well-established view that in the later middle ages Gaelic Scotland and Gaelic Ireland were in some sense a unity: a fully-integrated culture-province to some; a polity, or potential Gaelic kingdom to Steven Ellis; or a colonial compound, with Ireland the cultural master and Scotland the ser vant or poor relation, àla Trevor-Roper. He does so by investigating how Gaelic Scots perceived the Gaelic Irish, and vice versa. This can only be done, he suggests (p. 7), by investigating 'the products of learned and aristocratic culture', specifically classical Gaelic panegyric composed by professional poets. One conclusion is that Ireland was culturally dominant, but McLeod suggests that this did not foster a colonial order, with both parties accepting it as the norm. He also concludes that 'pan-Gaeldom' was severely compromised by a 'national' dynamic: 'this national distinction was the most important and fundamental division within the Gaelic world of the late Middle Ages' (p. 220), and renders the Ellis model untenable.

Rough calculations based on data gathered by McLeod suggest that the secular component of classical Gaelic panegyric upon which he focuses consists of no more than 60 surviving poems on the Scottish side and perhaps 500 on the Irish side, between 1200 and 1600. This imbalance may itself reflect the fact that, in its language and frames of reference, classical poetry was born and bred in Ireland, and thus, as McLeod acknowledges (p. 142), 'at heart, something other than indigenous to Gaelic Scotland'. To compose such poetry was to look at the world through a telescope branded 'made in Ireland', irrespective of where the act of composition took place. Irish cultural dominance is thus inherent in McLeod's choice of source, and the validity of his conclusion on this score must be evaluated in this light.

McLeod's analysis of the poetry in chapter 3, the kernel of the book, demonstrates that the Irish poets saw Gaelic Scotland as peripheral and insignificant, and Gaelic Scots as anomalous exiles in a strange land who would be better advised to return to mother Ireland. For the Scottish poets, Ireland was always present, clearly in focus, and revered. These lopsided though complementary perceptions contribute substantially to the overall conclusions about the limitations and ambiguities of pan-Gaelic unity. Again, the crucial question which goes unaddressed is whether these perceptions are a fair reflection of what Scottish and Irish Gaels actually believed about each other, and not simply the natural fruits of the Hibernocentric nature of the genre, as imbibed and articulated by the poets. Likewise, the corollary of the predominance of Ireland in the Scottish poetry is what McLeod calls its 'under-imagining of Scotland', especially Lowland Scotland. This is consistent with his earlier assertion (p. 29) that late medieval Scotland was 'a newly divided society, an effectively partitioned "Gaelic" and "de-Gaelicized" Scotland'. Yet the possibility that Scotland's relatively low profile was again genre-driven is not considered, while, in the wake of arguments about under-imagining and partition, the ultimate conclusion that Gaelic Scotland was beholden to a national dynamic seems illogical and unsupported. One concept relevant to discussion of such a dynamic is the traditional MacDonald claim to 'a house and a half of Scotland', and it is instructive that, since it barely registers in extant classical poetry, it is first mentioned two pages short of the conclusion, although it was surely current in the late medieval era.

At issue, then, is the danger of asking too much of a single source. McLeod rightly emphasises classical poetry's inherent biases towards the social elite and the western Gàidhealtchd, especially Argyll and the Isles, but his conclusions are couched in terms of an undifferentiated and monolithic Gaelic Scotland. Other sources which shed light on the 'Gaelic world' in this era certainly exist, and could have formed...