A NEW Scots language podcast has been released to coincide with the Scottish International Storytelling Festival (SISF).
Lure O The Leid will feature stories told by some of Scotland’s best Scots-speaking storytellers telling tales in their own dialects, with voices from Orkney to the Borders being represented on the podcast.
The episodes were recorded during the lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 and have been released by TRACS (Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland), in partnership with the Scottish Storytelling Forum.
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The first season of Lure O The Leid will run for seven episodes, with a different storyteller featured in each episode; including Tom Muir, Jess Smith and James Spence.
Episode one features Jackie Ross, a storyteller from the north-east of Scotland, with two supernatural tales of the Deeside, told in her native Doric.
Other stories in the podcast series include Fife storyteller Sheila Kinninmonth, sharing two of her favourite stories, The Guidwife O Auchtermuchty and Three Heids In A Well.
Orcadian storyteller Tom Muir tells a ghost story from Sandwick in Orkney in the series’ third episode.
And the final episode of the seven-part podcast series features storyteller and bard Paraig MacNeil, who shares the story and ballad of Heather Jock, a well-known rogue who became synonymous with the word “thief’ in and around Stirlingshire and Perthshire.
The podcast joins a number of events celebrating the different languages of Scotland at the 2022 Scottish International Storytelling Festival, which runs until October 31.
Lure O The Leid storytellers Tom Muir and Jackie Ross will both perform at the festival in Edinburgh, and in their local regions of Orkney and Aberdeenshire respectively.
Other Scots events at the festival include a double bill of Norse-Scots celebrations.
On Sunday, a performance of SISF festival director Donald Smith’s new publication Saut An Bluid: A Scotsaga will be followed by The Story of Auslag: A Saga From Unst, presented by Scots Language Speaker of the Year, Marjolein Robertson, from Shetland.
And on Wednesday, young artists Ailsa Dixon and Neil Sutcliffe shine a light on Scots words, expressions and sayings, exploring how they relate to modern culture with their event, Wir Leid: Scots For A New Generation, sharing folktales in Scots and Doric, integrated with a conversation about how they interact with the language in their own lives and with that of their peers.
Scots is one of five different languages given a hearing at this year’s festival alongside English.
Other events will feature Gaelic and British Sign Language (BSL), and the languages of the festival’s international guests Julie Pellissier-Lush (Mi’kmaq, the recognised first language of Nova Scotia) and Zalka Csenge Virag (Hungarian).
The full programme of events at the Scottish International Storytelling Festival can be found online at www.sisf.org.uk.
The first episode of Lure O The Leid is available to subscribe to now via Anchor FM and Spotify.
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