Wet thatch and Gaelic women poets

Wet thatch and Gaelic women poets

I am reading a book called ‘B’ait leo bean’, by Mairin nic Eoin (1998), so it is “aspects of gender ideology in the [Irish] Gaelic literary tradition”, but in Irish. (Gender is “inscne”.) This is not my field of knowledge, I am finding the Irish very difficult but it is also a good learning experience, so I want to persist. You don't find much writing which explores social divisions in the Gaelic world, as opposed to a kind of conservative blurred memory in which there were no conflicts and everyone could afford to pay their rent.
Nuala ni Dhomhnaill wrote that essay (1994) where she remembers being told often as a child “Three things you don’t want in a village: wet thatchers, close sowing, and a female poet”. The wet thatch is one put up badly so that it leaks, the wheat seeds have to be several inches apart or they will stifle each other and you won’t get any grain. As for the female poet, what problems could she cause? That was interesting but I have not been able to find any trace of this proverb anywhere else. I think the problem with female poets was that they had the ability to curse people and this left a bad memory. It is my guess that this anxiety stems from the ban-fhili’s power of curing (or admonishing and commanding?) and that the role of Gaelic poets was not simply to create poems to entertain and to please. I think this partly because of the Scottish analogies. But actually male poets could curse people (and humiliate them) so the issue isn’t cursing, in fact, but the fact that male poets had very strong alliances with the church and with (male) heads of land-owning families and this gave them status.
I forgot to record that this "cursing by proverb" didn't stop ni Dhomhnaill.

I saw a story somewhere about female poets in Scotland being buried face down so they couldn't come back to life; a quick Google search turns up this version of it: “Even as late as the end of the 17th and early 18th C, tradition records that at least two female Gaelic poetesses, Mairghread nighean Lachlainn, (of Mull) and Mairi nighean Alasdair Ruaidh, (associated mainly with the MacLeods) when they died were said to have been buried face down due to having composed in metres that were the prerogative of the male poets.” (The source proposed is O’Baoill C, Mairghread nighean Lachlainn Song–maker of Mull, (2009, 20). I think the paraphrase has added the idea that it was using the wrong metres which brought the danger, I think this is a 21st century interpolation. I doubt O'Baoill said that.) Surely it was the ability to curse people which people were afraid of.
The website of Historic Environment Scotland has this about Mairi nic Leoid (circa 1615- circa 1707): “NicLeòid began composing while working as a nurse for the MacLeod Chief of Dunvegan in Skye but she was exiled to the Isle of Scarba because of her art. It is believed that the Chief banished her when she wrote a song that praised one of his relatives too highly. She was eventually allowed to return but on the condition that she stop writing songs."
The surname includes daughter of and is a female version of the name “Macleod”. Further: “NicLeòid is buried in St Clements church in Rodel, Harris, the village where she was born. She is thought to have been buried face down in the south transept of the church.”
(It is of interest that nic corresponds to nighean and in Irish is just ní, or Nic in front of vowels. The reconstructed Old Gaelic form is inigena, which is attested in an Ogham inscription and looks a lot more like Continental Celtic relations.) The form “nic Leoid” is standardised, but she was evidently referred to in daily speech as “Mairi nighean Alasdair Ruaidh”. Carmichael Watson's edition of her songs (the first ever to be printed) gives three versions from folklore of why she was exiled and adds a fourth which is his own speculation. The folklore is rich and we should doubt that she was literally buried face down: I guess that this was a standard tale about female poets and that as she was a female poet who had many stories told about her this one got attached along with the rest. However, we don’t know of any tales of male poets being buried face down!
Watson says “a third [version[] is that of Miss Tolmie, who suggested that it was due to fear that her over-praise of the young children of the house would bring ill-luck upon them.” He records “She directed that she should be placed face downward in the grave—" beul nam breug a chur foidhpe "; her burial-place is still known in the south transept of Tùr Chliamain, St. Clement's church in Rodel.” The phrase means “the mouth of the lies [to be] put underneath”, which could refer to flattery and over-praise. Again, the story is memorable but may not actually be true. (Variant “[Gus] beul na brèige a chumail dùinte”.)

Anne Frater did a doctorate on (Scottish) Gaelic women poets, and her essay on Mairi Nic Leoid is on-line. “Both Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh and her fellow poetess Mairearad nighean Lachlainn from Mull are said to be buried in a manner, which, in Norse times, was reserved for those believed to have been witches. Why they should have been treated in this way, when the only traditions that have come down to us about them concern their songmaking, is a mystery. Perhaps they were considered to have infringed on the domain of the bards, especially by daring, as women, to compose panegyric verse.” The story must be confined to those two poets, or Frater would have mentioned other instances of it.

In Nic Eoin’s excellent book we find matter on cursing or at least mocking. The role of cainteoir, apparently always female, is described in the Irish law codes always in negative terms. It is a role which the law does not institute or approve – we are likely to think that has a reality external to the law. Of course the idea of connecting a role in 8th C society with a proverb heard, reprovingly, in the 1940s, is rife with problems. The problem I have is that Nic Eoin records a marginal, even accursed, place being given to women poets (of the cainteor type) in the Irish law codes and this seems to connect to the “buried upside down” ruling. But the codes belong to the 8th C AD, in the text we have, and are probably older. It is very problematic to see an attitude, and correlated artistic activity, continuing for such a stretch of time. I badly need more evidence. It is fairly clear that cainteor, “woman satirist”, although literally identical with the word cainteoir “chatterbox”, is functionally a different word. It presumably comes from the “can” root, meaning “speak”. “Satirist” is a standard translation but pretty misleading, functions like cursing, humiliating, the evil eye, tell you more about the reputation of these women. (There is also a form ban-chainte.) It is frustrating that we don’t have any record of the verse they composed (or at any rate Nic Eoin does not mention it). Moreover, they were just one of a group of defined classes of poet who were disapproved of by the law.

A cainteoir deployed specialised language to fulfil functions other than that of creating beautiful verse for entertainment. If we had their verse in written form it might be hard for us to consume or even to interpret. I am also guessing that, however prominent their function of cursing, admonishing, or prohibition, this was just part of their range and might be only a consequence of a social status and associated power which they enjoyed. Verse form may have been a way of clothing significant speech– we are more interested in what that significance was than in the verbal form.
The role of priests is often to admonish, to prohibit, to condemn, and even to satirise. Surely the medieval sermon absorbed all the contents of satire as it was known in Classical times. Admonishing is just an aspect of social power. The cainteoir may have a pre-Christian origin and may have had access to supernatural forces in some form (associated with asarlaíocht, sorcery). We might think about translating the word as witch rather than satirist. A cainteoir might also have strong knowledge, eloquence, and even supernatural power – not just glittering malice.

I was expecting to find a discussion of the ‘wet thatch’ proverb cited by Ni Dhomhnaill in Nic Eoin’s book, but it is not mentioned at all. Certainly Nic Eoin is describing the ideology of gender in Gaelic literature, not in society as a whole. She does list a group of anti-female proverbs from Irish collections. I have been unable to find a context for the ‘wet thatch’ proverb.

John MacInnes (quoted by Frater) has another explanation which is bizarre and does not seem to fit well with 17th C conditions. He recalls that both poets mentioned are said to have had a female companion who accompanied them, and devised (wordless) choruses for the songs and set them to tunes. MacInnes suggests that this other women was a double, or fetch, and that they engaged in trances where the double was sent out to sea or elsewhere while the real person was unconscious, entranced. This may be part of the “face down” story without actually being true of the historical people to whom the stories got attached. (It also belongs with an RL Stevenson story called “Thrawn Janet”, which you will remember, I expect.) I like the idea that the double did not have articulate speech and so only composed the refrains, “ho ro hug o” and so on.
Nic Eoin does not quote any verse composed by (or, possibly composed by) a cainteoir. This is disappointing but it may confront us with necessary thoughts about the limited nature of the written record. This was certainly associated, very often, with monasteries, the church, and with the courts of lords and petty kings. Those were strongly male environments. We have seen that the law-codes represented a point of view which was different from what society as a whole thought, and which reproved certain professions which were apparently quite thriving. We have excellent evidence for bards passing tests, writing poetry of incredible technical difficulty and being patronised by kings and nobles. That is not to say that people who did not receive that formal training did not compose poetry – for other social purposes and in simpler, “folk”, verbal form. The point may have been that they did not compose panegyric, but other genres of poetry. The function of praise is symmetrical to the function of scolding or satire. In fact they are part of a single function, of assigning status and merit, and there is a single scale on which individuals are rated as good and bad. It is hard to imagine a person who could do honour but who could not dishonour. The symmetry breaks down when the scolding part includes cursing and laying spells on people. Obviously there is more money in writing praise poems; praise poets could become part of princely courts and their poems were able to be transcribed and collected and preserved by the families of the princes and lords. The scolding poems didn’t have the same propaganda value or the same chance of surviving in a recopied manuscript until modern times. Maybe the manuscript record, vast as it is, has specific points of view, as do the law codes and the Church.

There is a very interesting folk-tale about the Cliar Sheanchain, discussed by John Shaw. This describes an era when the Cliar (Seanchan was a 7th century Irish poet but bands of wandering poets were called Seanchan's in memory of him, Sheanchain in the genitive) used to visit land-owners, benefiting from the Gaelic laws of hospitality, and ate him out of house and home. A large and hungry band of these individuals descended upon a certain MacDonald of Clanranald one day (perhaps in the 16th century?) and demanded a feast of beef every night. Expelling them would have breached a quite fundamental law of Highland behaviour. “In any case Clanranald sent out an invitation to every bard and rhymer and lampooner on his lands, and even those on the adjoining bounds who were counted to be exceedingly sharp tongued, but nevertheless their cutting speech was only as the blow of a hammer on cold iron compared to the Cliar Sheanchain. By then they had been in Nunton for nearly a year and Clanranald was fully weary of them; they had humiliated and disgraced him, eaten and drunk up his store, his reputation was in danger, his stock diminished in the fields.” A female poet of the laird’s household caught the Cliar at a sensitive moment and composed a devastating short poem which wrapped up numerous true facts about their visit and ridiculed them in the most merciless way. A law for poets was that if they were humiliated without having the ability to reply wittily they had to leave. So that is what they did and the last food reserves of the laird were spared. What strikes me is the cursing and humiliatory aspect of the female poet’s utterance. Someone with such powers could well be a candidate for a face-down burial. What is also interesting is that the story shows a cainteoir in a favourable light, so in the way in which they would have considered themselves. To be exact the victor in the story I have just quoted is not a female poet, but the editor remarks of a whole group of such tales “Here, and in a number of other versions, it is made explicit that the poets were defecating al fresco when approached. The appearance of a woman–usually a poetess–as verbal challenger in the scenario seems to be geographically widespread and thus unlikely to be a recent innovation. In a variant recorded in 1968 from the renowned Tiree reciter, Donald Sinclair (Domhnall Chaluim Bain), the company is confronted by a woman whom he identifies as An Aigeannach, the eighteenth-century poetess, Mary MacDonald from Mull,[.]” The paper is titled ‘what Alexander Carmichael did not print”, referring to the folklorist of that name. John Shaw cites two versions of this story in which the victor is Mairi nighean Alistair Ruaidh.
The Cliar were wandering poets and the word is similar to the Welsh clerwr, a minor poet, and clera, go on a poetic tour. The word is agreed to be from a Latin word, which would be cleric or clerk in English. Perhaps literate individuals were simply called clerks in early Gaelic society.

It is fair to mention that Shaw, after collecting so many Scottish Gaelic versions of this story about the expulsion of poet-vagrants, traces the whole story back to a written Irish story, of which the first record is circa 1638. I am interested in the temporal spread (so from a manuscript in 1638 to a recital in 1968) and the story is likely to be older than the oldest (surviving) written record.
A web page on Lilias Adie, d. 1704, of Fife, says “Her intertidal grave is the only known one in Scotland of an accused witch – most were burned.” She died before coming to trial. So it doesn't look as if there are physical examples of witches being buried face down. Actually we know that Adie was buried under a huge stone but not what her burial position was. To state the obvious, convicted witches were burnt and not buried at all.
I should clarify that Nic Eoin does mention sagas in which poems by women characters feature. They are referred to as banfhaidhe, “female poets” not cainteoir. Faidh is cognate with the word vates which appears in Latin poetry and is a high grade of poet. The sagas are set in a fictional time, of late paganism, so that St Patrick can appear as a character in some. We have poems by Feidhealm in The Tain and others in texts known as Immacallam in druad Brain ocus inna banfhaitho Febuil and Tochmarc Treblainne. The verse which Nic Eoin quotes is remarkably archaic, very stiff and ornate.