Away with the fairies: Gaelic music 'beyond the beyond'

‘TO the fairies we are the dead and they are the immortals.” That’s how the great late Gaelic scholar, John MacInnes described the relationship to me. But who believes in fairies? Well, who believes in angels? Millions of people. Millions of them. But the evidence for angels is no better than the evidence for fairies. We don’t have a photograph of an angel, we don’t have one bottled in a museum. There’s no evidence that would pass in a court of law. Yet, in that half-world between beliefs, imaginings, dreams and longings, such beings exist.

Are we the dreams and longings in their minds? Perhaps. In the stories, fairies and humans have fallen in love and borne children to each other, and Christianity depends upon an even more miraculous conception. The fairies are older than Christianity: but how old is our fairy music? As old as it is young and as young as it is old. We are the dead and they are the immortals. Are they fallen angels, evil spirits, tricksters, creatures of beauty, amoral, immoral, or simply ludicrous fantasy? For the fairy songs these questions are beside the point. The songs are their own evidence and their own proof. You cannot argue with the fact of them and if you don’t want to engage with them, well, the loss is yours.

Calum Ruadh bard of Skye described in song the fairy he was lucky enough to see, back in 1968. He was recorded singing his song, but on the recording his different ways of singing are superimposed upon each other as though his song had become confused in its passage from the dream of the beauty of the otherworld.

“I used to walk over there to that dyke in – watching Raasay – and the world could turn upside down for all that I cared. I was - I was at this – fairy in Raasay”.

It’s extraordinary, and to my mind, reaches out way beyond beyond. You can hear it on Scottish Tradition 7, Greentrax CDTRAX9007. Calum’s fairy has eyes as blue as blaeberries, cheeks like roses, skin like bog-cotton, hair like gold about her shoulders and her voice is as sweet as the song-thrush or a blackbird in spring.

An Old Gaelic poem from the 11th century reads thus: Ach, a luin, is buide duit Cáit ’sa muine i fuil do net, A díthrebaig nád clinn cloc, Is binn boc síthamail t’fet Blackbird, it is well for you wherever in the thicket be your nest, hermit that sounds no bell, sweet, soft, fairy-like is your note.

If you have Gaelic you will appreciate the beauty of the imitation of the sound of the bird and the relative crudity of the bell, for this is one of those little miracles of organised sound that characterise the earliest Gaelic poetry. But the fairies were not just sweet voices and sweet dreams, for they were used as scapegoats for the bad things that humans did, the humans accusing them of stealing children and women to cover up infanticide or rape and abduction. There is a famous Gaelic song of fairy abduction - The Sister’s Lament – in which a woman hears her sister singing from within the fairy house in the hill in which she has been imprisoned. Many of the sithean or fairy hills were in fact prehistoric burial mounds and were associated with music. Often fairy musicians would emerge and teach humans to play with supernatural skill.

Sometimes the humans could turn this gift on its head. In the great ballad of King Orfeo the human musician brings his own skills into the fairy mound, to reclaim his wife from the Fairy King. The story is ancient and international and symbolises the cycle of the seasons, spring returning with the return of Orfeo’s lost wife. A unique Scottish version from Unst, our most northerly island in Shetland, stirred even the most cautious of scholars, Bertrand Harris Bronson, to exclaim “That a tune should in the midst of the twentieth century be recovered for this whisper from the Middle Ages was as little to be expected as that we should hear the horns of elfland faintly blowing.”

Archie Fisher recorded it years ago with incomparable authority. It’s up there on YouTube and it’s magnificent. Just Google “Archie Fisher Orfeo”: it’s the original from FolkMusicRecords. The strange words of the refrain are in Norn - the old Nordic language last spoken on mainland Scotland in the eighteenth century. They say that “The wood is green early where the stag goes yearly” and they point to the return of spring and to the vigilance of the stag as an example to King Orfeo who has let his wife slip out of his hands while he was hunting. The ballad refers to the Notes of Noy and the Notes of Joy and the Good old Gabber Reel” - a parallel to the threefold Gaelic division of music into Sorrow, Sleep and Laughter. The big difference is not just that the King is King of the Fairies, rather than of Hell, but that at the conclusion King Orfeo wins his wife back in perpetuity, whereas in other versions she has to return to Hell, and that is the winter-time. Well, we still have our winters here, but we have learnt to love them along with the other seasons. To hell with Hell.

Calum Ruadh, bard of Skye

THAT Celtic and Nordic version of the ballad of King Orfeo harks back to ancient myths: but even more uncanny than the hall of the Fairy King are the halls of the high corries in the mountains. There you can hear what is known in Gaelic as the oiteag sluagh - the breeze of the host of the dead. The sound is of strange unexpected gusts of wind, and was known to the Romans, who wrote of its meaning in these islands. These gusts have been heard by shepherds and climbers – I’ve heard them myself – and they’re often inexplicable, sometimes sounding like breathing, other times like the cry of a child in pain. It’s an eerie experience, captured by Allan MacDonald in the timeless traditional song, Tha sior coineadh am Beinn Dóbhrain. Ben Doran is well-known for this phenomenon, but here it is more than a sound from the past, it is a kind of aisling or pre-vision of tragedy to come.

“The voice of my darling is on the misty mountain. There is constant crying on the mountain. Your blood is flowing on the mountain. Your flesh is torn on the misty mountain. The voice of my darling is on the mountain, the crying over there is unceasing.”

You can hear it, sung in Gaelic of course, on the wonderful CD Colla Mo Rùn Greentrax CDTRAX 217. But is the sound of that breeze the sound of the host of the dead or are they not also the ever-living? And what of those other creatures that are neither ghosts nor fairies?

We all know the Kelpies near the Falkirk Wheel – a homage to the wonderful old Clydesdales. But these aren’t just work horses, they are water-horses – the eich-uisge or kelpies of Gaelic, Scots and Norse tradition and, like the fairies, they too interbred with humans. In the Òran tàlaidh an each-uisge the water-horse has fathered a child on a human. When the woman discovers his true identity, she abandons them and the each-uisge is left to sing a lonely and beautiful lullaby to their son. You can hear it movingly sung by Margaret Stewart on the CD Colla Mo Rùn, Greentrax CDTRAX 217.

“Sleep my child, Fast of foot you are, Great as a horse you are, My darling son, Oh my lovely little horse. You are far from the township. You will be sought after. Fast of foot you are. Great as a horse you are.”

From Barra Head comes the story of a man who built his house on top of a fairy mound. Roderick MacDonald couldn’t sleep at nights for all the music making that was going on in the fairy world beneath him and had to dismantle as much of the house as he could and re-build it close by, but far enough away to get some peace at night. You might regard this story as pure invention born of the frequent assertion in fairy mythology that they love music, live in green mounds, and are more nocturnal than diurnal. The thing is that the man in question clearly regarded the matter from a more down-to-earth viewpoint, and the archaeology is there to back up the story – as Ray Burnett discovered when he visited the site checking up on a Sheffield University survey. There is a green mound which is in all probability a bronze-age round house. Such mounds are often called sithean or fairy hills. On top of this particular mound is the scant remains of a much more recent house, and to the side, a few paces away, is the more substantial ruin of the second house this man built. So what was the music the man was hearing? Real fairy music, or an echo from his own racial subconscious? Alexander Carmichael took down the words of a fairy lament which MacDonald is supposed to have heard from below his house. It was sung by a woman from Mingulay, but Carmichael never took down the tune although she “sang this very sweetly”. Ah, if only. It is in situations like this that musical literacy can be so important.

But what of a fairy tune itself? There is The Hjalta Dance – but that’s only half a tune. The legend is that the Hjalta stone circle on the island of Fetlar in Shetland consists of trowies (trolls) turned to stone. A fiddler came across the trolls dancing at night and they persuaded him to play for them. They danced in a circle with the fiddler and his wife in the middle, and the music so entranced them that they taught the fiddler some of their own music, and as the music became more and more abandoned they failed to realise that the sun was about to rise. As soon as it appeared all the trolls were turned to stone, so they never got to finish their tune and the fiddler only had the first half. The Shetland fiddler, Chris Stout, after recording The Hjalta Dance said “I have a notion that if you were to go and stand in the middle of the stones long enough, you might hear what the second half of the tune was, but all you got there was the first half.”

THEN there is Hu-ru-ru-bhi-hui-o which comes from Mingulay and was sung by a fairy to entice Finlay away from his human lover. That one ended badly. A water-horse emerged from a pool to chastise Finlay; Finlay’s human lover rushed to help him, but the water-horse strangled her and dragged Finlay into the well. The fairy scarpered. There’s a moral there somewhere … But far far beyond morality there is Port na bPúcai – The Tune of the Fairies, and it’s complete – well, as complete as any fairy tune. Port na bPúcai comes from the Blasket Islands in the remote south-west of Ireland. It was heard in the night in the form of strange sounds of animals or birds. It’s as haunting as it is lovely, as old as it is young, as young as it is old. You can hear it on the CD Fhuair mi pòg Greentrax CDTRAX 132. There are other versions, but this is the one I’d recommend. It’s Allan MacDonald’s and it’s not really of this world at all.

After all this you’ll be thinking I’m away with the fairies myself. You wouldn’t be far wrong.