A long time ago, when I had graduated with my first degree and had spent another year in Edinburgh working part time in an art gallery, and attempting to build a writing career, one of my previous professors asked me if I had ever considered researching place names. Although I hadn't, it was an interesting suggestion and there would have been the possibility of studying for a postgraduate Master's degree, which would have postponed the dreadful moment of deciding what on earth I wanted to do next. Other than write, of course. I had never really wanted to do anything but write.
I thought about it. My first degree in Mediaeval Studies had involved Old Norse, Old English and Middle English, so I had some idea of the history of languages, and how that history is fascinatingly embedded in place names.
I had also learned about mediaeval scholars debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, and that should have told me something. Shouldn't it?
As it happened, the decision was made for me, because another of my old heads of department made me an offer I would have been mad to refuse. Professor Stuart Piggott, one of Britain's best known archaeologists back then, (long before Indy glamourised the profession) invited me to a meeting. I'd done a couple of years of archaeology of the most basic kind before specialising in Mediaeval Studies so he knew who I was. He was - to the young me, anyway - scarily distinguished. He also had a stuffed owl, perched on the back of his chair, something that intrigued me so much that I would later include it in a novel. His friend and colleague, Scottish folklorist Stuart Sanderson, was running a postgraduate Master's course in Folk Life Studies at Leeds University. Funding would be available. Would I be interested? I hardly needed to think about it. I was fascinated by folklore, folksong and social history, all of which seemed to dovetail very nicely with my first degree, and I jumped at the chance.
Good choice.
That course, with the reading and research I did as part of it, has stood me in good stead throughout my whole writing life to date, whether I was working on radio and stage plays, historical fiction or non-fiction, all of which involved going back to what are known as 'primary sources' - as close to original texts, voices and accounts as you possibly can.
From time to time, however, I've tried to renew my interest in place names and their derivations. I even attended an academic conference about the subject, at which I discovered that it is possible to go mad with boredom. To face the possibility of falling asleep for a hundred years and hoping for a prince or chewing your own arm off in despair. Who knew? All it did was confirm that my choice of Master's all those years ago, had been the right one.
Now, I've been following the odd place name group online, but the madness risk still pertains. Place name scholars (mostly male) could give mediaeval theologians a run for their money, only this time it's in debating the minutiae of linguistics rather than angels on pin-heads.
Some time ago, I was commissioned by Birlinn to research and write a history of the Isle of Gigha: The Way It Was. Not a project to make you rich, said my editor, and how right he was. It was a labour of love though. Gigha had been a Gaelic speaking island and place names were vitally important in confirming which were the oldest sites, and how their traditional names illuminated their history. I needed help, and I wasn't getting it from the usual suspects. But I had a not-so-secret weapon. Our good friend, islander Willie McSporran, was a native Gaelic speaker who had worked on farms throughout the island during his long life and knew the landscape and its history as intimately as anyone could. During one or two magical afternoons, we sat together with a map and a recorder, and drank tea while he told me the place names of the island and their stories. The whys and wherefores. He gave me intimate and detailed landscape names of all kinds, describing their history. This was a 'primary source' par excellence, a folklorist's dream, and it was only age that prevented him from walking over these places with me, and telling me their names and tales in situ. But the large scale map was a good substitute.
When I was doing that folklore degree we were told never to discount traditional stories and beliefs, because they may well contain a germ of truth. We were taught about a site with a long local tradition of association with a 'golden man' where archaeologists eventually discovered a 'grave good' in the shape of a golden ceremonial cape. Perhaps even more engagingly, we were told of a folklorist collecting an old story of the 'lane that Mr Chaucer walked along while planning his book' - only to find that in all likelihood there was a six hundred year old association with Geoffrey Chaucer.
Now, pondering modern place name studies - 'toponymy' - I think it's the human, imaginative element that is sorely neglected. The oral history of these landscapes. Willie had used the names every day of his working life but more than that, he knew the stories associated with them, and the tales had their roots somewhere in the Norse and Celtic history of the island. Perhaps even in the pre-Celtic history of the place. So these weren't just linguistic 'artefacts' to be slotted into some likely grammatical schema. They were part of the ancient traditions associated with this complicated landscape.
Arguably, pinning names down to linguistic minutiae, but neglecting the tantalising possibility of narrative survivals over millennia of oral history, results in a weird imbalance. Try to be accurate by all means, but take human custom and belief, our love of story, into account as well. Dare to be enchanted.
And at all costs, avoid situations in which you're tempted to chew off your own arm.
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| Willie McSporran |
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