SCOTTISH HISTORY

The topics in this section explain the history of Scotland, especially the Highlands, from a Gaelic point of view.

It is a truism that history is written by the winners. The "standard" histories of Scotland have been written by Anglophones using documents written by previous generations of English-speakers, and thus these histories still reflect long-standing anti-Gaelic prejudices. Most travelers from England and Lowland Scotland could only see the Highlanders as poor, barbaric, backwards, and ignorant. Gaelic-speakers have long been aware of these prejudices. A historian of the Clan Donald wrote in about 1628:

These partial pickers of Scotish chronology and history never spoke a favourable word of the Highlanders, much less of the Islanders and Macdonalds, whose great power and fortune the rest of the nobility envied ... Although the Macdonalds might be as guilty as any others, yet they never could expect common justice to be done them by a Lowland writer.

Recovering the legacy of the Scottish Highlanders requires listening to the voices of the people themselves, often lost and crowded out by their English-speaking neighbors. When we do, a very different picture emerges. Alasdair MacLean Sinclair, an outstanding Gaelic scholar born in Nova Scotia, argued in 1889 that only by recourse to Gaelic materials can we overcome the stereotypes and prejudices emanating from outside Highland culture:

Where are we to learn what the manners and customs of the old Highlanders were? We are a thousand times more dependent upon old Gaelic poems than the Irish. The true history of the Highlanders is to be found in their poems and nowhere else. The world at large may not care very much how our forefathers looked at things and how they lived; but surely men with Highland blood in their veins should take some interest in these things. The Scottish Highlanders were not savages but noble-hearted and intelligent men.