About this Event
Speaker: Dr Martin MacGregor, Lecturer at The University of Glasgow
In the era before 1700, the number of items in Gaelic in the National Records of Scotland (NRS) is miniscule compared to those in Scotland’s other written languages. There are many more pre-1700 Gaelic manuscripts in the National Library of Scotland, but a point of contact with the scenario in the NRS is that these are not overtly legal or governmental texts, relating instead largely to literature, theology and medicine.
This talk will engage with possible explanations for the lack of pre-1700 Gaelic items in the NRS. But its main aim is to highlight and discuss the texts which do exist, easy to overlook but worthy of attention both for their rarity and their intrinsic interest. The four texts are: the 1408 Islay charter; a letter written by Sir James MacDonald of Dunivaig (Islay) in 1604; a contract for the fosterage of Tormod, third son of Sir Ruairidh Mòr MacLeod of Dunvegan in 1613, and an elegy composed for Donnnchadh Dubh (Black Duncan) Campbell of Glenorchy on his death in 1631, probably by the professional poet Niall MacEwen.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
HM General Register House, 2 Princes Street, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00