PDF Popular Tales of the West Highlands Download
- Author: John Francis Campbell
- Publisher: Edinburgh : Edmonston and Douglas
- ISBN:
- Category : Celts
- Languages : en
- Pages : 506
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This second volume of Tales of the West Highlands contains thirty ursgeuln, or tales, fifty riddles plus a few extra stories. As always, these are tales and stories in which something 'Fairy' or magical occurs, something extraordinary --fairies, giants, dwarfs, princes, princesses, kings and queens, speaking animals and the remarkable stupidity of some of the characters. But these aren't just a collection of amusing and entertaining stories. Just 20 years after the Elementary Education Act of 1870 these are the tales that were still being used in those far- flung reaches of the Highlands to teach the young the lessons of life. Also included are Seanachas--those old Highland stories which in their telling resemble no others, whose origins are lost in the mists of the Highlands, if not the midst of time. So take some time out and travel back to a period before television and radio, a time when tales were passed on orally-- at the drying kilns, at the communal well or in homes, where families would gather around a crackling and spitting hearth and granddad or grandma or uncle or auntie would delight and captivate the gathering with stories passed on to them from their parents and grandparents from time immemorial. A proportion of the profit from the sale of this book will be donated towards the education of the underprivileged in Scotland.
The Celts are commonly considered to be one of the great peoples of Europe, with continuous racial, cultural and linguistic genealogy from the Iron Age to the modern-day 'Celtic fringe'. This book shows, in contrast, that the Celts, as they have been known and understood over two thousand years, are simply the 'other' of the dominant cultural and political traditions of Europe. It is this continuous 'otherness' which lends them apparent continuity and substance.
First Published in 1996. Feelings about the repopulation of remote rural areas are nowadays expressed in rather alarming terms, so that in the word of a Skye land-owner: 'the filling of empty glens with people, regardless of origin, is dangerous...because it can destroy the ancient culture which is so precious'. Yet it is remarkable that the depopulation which characterized the previous centuries was greeted with virtually the same reaction. The repopulation of rural Scotland, which since the beginning of the century, has been wished for as the solution to the great problem of rural depopulation, has provoked an ambiguous response. This book describes the local experience of recent population changes and addresses the 'problem' of repopulation. It analyses the paradoxes, ironies and ambiguities that form a complex structure of feelings, much of which is only partially evident at any one time.