Anonymous (Scottish Gaelic)

The prayers, blessings, songs and charms gathered here come from the Gaelic-speaking Highlands and Hebrides, where they were recited from memory by crofters, fishermen, shepherds and women at the quern and the loom. They belong to no single author: the same invocations turn up in different islands in different versions, and they blend Christian devotion with older customs of the hearth, the byre, the sea and the seasons.

They were written down between 1855 and 1899 by Alexander Carmichael, an excise officer and folklorist, and published with his English translations as Carmina Gadelica (Ortha nan Gaidheal), volume I, in 1900. The poems here are Carmichael’s English versions of the 121 pieces in that volume, which he arranged under the headings Invocations, Seasons and Labour, with the Gaelic title of each given in its note. His prose headnotes, notes, and the short inset fragments in small type are left out.