We are creatures of stories.
A Review by Kenny Taylor
Button Bog – Voices and Treasures from a Traveller’s Kist
Jess Smith
Tippermuir Books (2025) £11.99
Beàrnaraigh na Hearadh: ‘Tis Fifty Years Since’
Susanne Barding
The Islands Book Trust (2023 print, now e-book) £17.95
Water Song – Poems and translations
Michael Stephenson
Mariscat Press (2024) £7.50
We are creatures of stories. For most of human existence, those tales would be told in person – around a fire; at or in beds; while walking and talking; over drinks. Conveying stories in other ways is a fairly recent phenomenon, notwithstanding some ancient scrolls and chiselled scripts. Both the number of stories and the ways of telling have burgeoned, first through the power of print and now through a plethora of visual, audible and readable media.
Yet the power of oral storytelling, conveyed by an adept storyteller, still holds magic for young and old. I recall how my own children sat with rapt attention while Janet MacInness shared tales in Tore Hall; how the late, far-famed Duncan Williamson held us spellbound in Cromarty; how Lizzie McDougall still entrances audiences at Belladrum and beyond across the Highlands; and how Gordon MacLellan is adept at unleashing imaginations of youngsters and adults to share their own stories aloud.
Members of Scotland’s Traveller communities have always been important bearers of oral story inheritance, but in recent decades their role has been crucial in keeping old stories and songs alive through times when many of these had fallen out of use and fashion for other people. Jess Smith is part of the Traveller tradition. As a child, she journeyed with her family throughout Scotland in an old single-decker Bedford bus. Childhood experiences were the basis of her trilogy: Jessie’s Journey, Tales from the Tent and Tears for a Tinker.
She’s published both fiction and non-fiction while ‘off the road’ since then, but as she says in the introduction to Button Bog, has always wondered about the distinctiveness of Travelling people and the roots of their stories. “While in search of the elusive wanderers of the past I collected volumes of books, documents and wrote down personal stories which I referred to as my ‘Kist of Voices’: a wonderful wealth of tales, storytellers and poets.”
So this book is the result of Jess opening that kist to share some its stories, reminiscences, poems and observations. For the reader, this mix of story and fact, comments and more makes it feel that you’re sitting with the storyteller – one minute engrossed in the unfolding of a tale, the next hearing an aside about an historical event or getting a comment about a different story that’s about to come next. That’s part of the book’s charm, since it’s not constructed as a string of narrated stories, but more as a melding of many different elements chosen from the writer’s life and knowledge of Scotland.
Other storytellers will value the range of tales told here, just as general readers will enjoy ‘hearing’ them in their mind’s ears. I certainly did, while also aware that the book highlights some of the contrasts between stories composed and conveyed in non-oral traditions from those meant to be heard aloud. There’s a tendency to melodrama in some of the book’s stories, for example, such as thunderstorms or other wild weather accompanying tragic events. This works if you hear the words as if spoken.
Perth-based Tippermuir and Paul S Philippou are to be congratulated on adding another characterful book to their already diverse stable of titles, as is Jess for opening her kist and letting others have a keek at the riches within.
Given the Faroese flavour of some of the work in this issue, it feels appropriate to draw attention to a substantial book published nearly two years ago and another just released by the same author – Susanne Barding - that link the Faroes and the Outer Hebrides. Both are published by Urras Leabhraichean nan Eilean - The Islands Book Trust and available for purchase as e-books. I haven’t yet seen the newest of these What’s your name – A comparative study of personal names and naming in the Outer Hebrides and the Faroe Islands – but look forward to making its acquaintance soon.
The Islands Book Trust is a charity that works to extend appreciation of the history of Scottish islands in their wider context through talks, conferences, visits, publications, education and research. It’s based at Balallan on the Isle of Lewis and managed by a board of trustees chaired by the founder, John Randall. Last year, it organised 13 events, including a two-day conference in Tiree and published five new books and four quarterly newsletters: an impressive tally for a charity with just one full-time equivalent as staff, in addition to volunteer input. As I write, it’s about to host an international conference in Stornoway, bringing together speakers from the Nordic world to discuss the sustainability of rural communities in North Atlantic islands such as the Outer Hebrides, North Isles, Faroes and Iceland.
First published in a substantial print volume a couple of years ago and now as an e-book, ‘Beàrnaraigh na Hearadh: ‘Tis Fifty Years Since’is a major work of community history, documenting through interviews, photographs and the author’s own observations and research how the crofting community on Berneray, in the Sound of Harris, functioned in the early 1970s. As a young anthropologist, Susanne Barding both lived on the island at that time, and self-evidently from the text, loved it. Having long resided since then on the Faroes, she returned to Berneray for the first time in 50 years for the book launch, which was followed by an island ceilidh.
Decades back, Susanne’s time on the island was full of challenges, not least as an incoming urbanite who now had to cope with what she calls a ‘high-context’ community, where everyone knows everyone else’s lives and backgrounds. “I learned very soon,” she writes, “that all you say and do is remembered and that there is a strong chance that you will be confronted with it at a later date.” She was also immersed in what – at that time – was a community where everyone spoke Gaelic. Luckily, everyone made allowances for her and adapted to English when she was present.
In his foreword, John Randall gives a neat summary of how the book records in meticulous detail how the crofting community functioned at the time of Susanne’s research: “for example, the use of the inbye land and common grazings, the seasonal movement of livestock to and from offshore islands, fishing, peat cutting, domestic life, Gaelic traditions, the church and the role of men and women, young and old, in their interactions, personal challenges and social life.”
At just over 600 pages, the original is a weighty tome, but it can be sampled as an e-book with pleasure in any of its parts to enjoy what are often first-hand accounts of Berneray life half a century or more ago. As a reference for information about that place and community it will likely be unsurpassed for many more decades to come.
In that way, it joins some of the other classic works by ‘foreigners’ who came to the Outer Hebrides, relished the people, scenes and culture here and documented aspects of those with respect and sensitivity, sometimes – with hindsight – just before some of these faded. I’m thinking of Margaret Fay Shaw from the Alleghenies and her song collecting adding so much to the Gaelic canon and much more. Then the German, Werner Kissling, on Eriskay in 1934, creating the first-ever film to use the Gaelic language as well as taking many still photographs. Of New-York-born Paul Strand on the Uists, creating the world-class photographs used in Tìr a’ Mhurain. And the English apple-grower, Robert Atkinson – best known for his superb book Island Going about journeying to pursue Leach’s petrels on North Rona and other Hebridean outliers – who also photographed everyday aspects of life and transport on Lewis and Harris in the 1930s and 1940s. These photographs are now archived in the National Library of Scotland thanks to the efforts of Stuart Murray to visit and correspond with Atkinson in later life and preserve this further aspect of his work.
Susanne Barding writes that her many years in Faroese society have taught her that a local anecdote requires…”the precise recounting of time, place and persons to serve its purpose. Otherwise it loses its social value.” Most of the people she knew on Berneray are no longer with us, she says, but: “They will always be alive to me, as they were then, and by the same token I have subsequently heard that for them, I am forever young.” Thanks to her work and writing, the wider world can now share in some of that invigorating thought and benefit from what will be an enduring legacy from those days on the island at the Atlantic edge of the Sound of Harris.
At first glance, it could seem surprising that ancient Chinese texts could influence contemporary writers. But look closely at the imagery and economy of words in some old Chinese poems in translation and the abiding appeal becomes more obvious. Then there’s the added frisson of feeling a connection with writers across centuries – millennia even. In those ways, it’s no coincidence that some recent masters of a ‘less is more’ approach to poetry, among the Norwegian apple-grower poet, Olav Hauge, have been fascinated by old Chinese lyrics.
In Scotland, we’re fortunate to have a writer – Brian Holton – who is adept at translating direct from ancient Chinese poetry sources into Scots. Look at the review and extracts from his Hard Roads and Cauld Hairst Winds, featured in Northwords Now 42, for examples. Some others render translations into Scots to good effect. Bathgate-based Michael Stephenson is one such writer. His second pamphlet Water Song is a mix of his own poems and versions of ancient Chinese ones. These include a couple by Du Fu, perhaps the best-loved poet of the Tang dynasty, at the peak of his powers nearly 1,300 years ago. Stanzas such as these from ‘Leaving the City’ hold power in their imagery and an unsettling topicality:
A see forrit an faur. Lang shaddaes rax oot/ fae eastlin hills. Ower yonder mines, smoke rises.
Armies are oan the mairch in my hameland,/an here tae, drums thrab. War’s at ilka gate.
The influence of such work on Michael Stephenson’s own poetry is evident in both th brevity and clarity of line and image, such as in ‘My Mother’:
Some nights, she pours a gin/and runs her finger round the tumbler’s rim/until a note begins to ring.
Here’s to you, Mum./Some glass shatters at a certain pitch/and some glass sings.
And here’s to you, Michael, as you make words ancient or new sing.
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