He might have fought in the 1715 Jacobite Rising, but it is not certain.
He was, however, definitely involved in the '45, was present at the raising of the Jacobite standard at Glenfinnan and acted as Gaelic interpreter for Bonnie Prince Charlie.
A schoolmaster and catechist who was previously a Glasgow University drop-out and then a trainee lawyer, he went on the run after Culloden, hiding in caves and woods. He was in Edinburgh a few years later, where his celebrated poetry was published only to be burned by the public hangman. He was one of the greatest Gaelic poets of all time and a lexicographer to boot.
He has all the credentials to have been one of our great historical figures – and yet there are very many across Scotland who know nothing whatsoever about Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, "Alexander, the son of Master Alexander".
Publication of Alexander MacDonald, Bard Of The Gaelic Enlightenment or Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, Bàrd an t-Soillearachaidh Ghàidhealaich by the Islands Book Trust, which brings together 13 scholarly papers from a series of conferences which took place at Glenfinnan, Strontian and on the island of Canna – some of the poet's old stomping grounds – is therefore welcome.
"Master Alexander", the poet's father, was a native of South Uist but became the Episcopalian minister of the parish of Islandfinnan, which included Ardnamurchan, Sunart, Moidart, Arisaig and South Morar. As Gaelic scholar Ronald Black points out in one of his two contributions to the book, this was a huge area.
Black, formerly of the University of Edinburgh's Celtic department, takes the reader on an extraordinary and learned journey through the literary and physical landscape of MacDonald's life to establish where his subject was born – the problem being that the poet never said where he was born, only where he was raised. Black wants to know why.
Then there is religion. His story provides a welcome counter to the modern fallacy that presents the Scottish Episcopal Church as the English Church. Whatever the ethnic origins of those who sit in its pews today, it was a very Scottish church whose genealogy goes back to Columba's Iona. But MacDonald lived in a religiously difficult time. Son of the Episcopalian manse, he was to work as a Presbyterian schoolmaster and catechist, before converting to Roman Catholicism.
In his fascinating paper on the poet's religious landscape, John Watts, historian and member of the Catholic Heritage Commission, underlines that in the 18th century where you were mattered as much as who you were when it came to religious persuasion. He writes that while Scotland today is a pot pourri of faiths, many and blended, in the 18th-century Highlands there were effectively three – Presbyterian, Episcopalian and Roman Catholic – "each with their own territories, sometimes separated by a loch or a river."
Meanwhile Gaelic poet and novelist Angus Peter Campbell considers "Alasdair's Joyous Display of Verbal Magic" in a compelling intellectual, bilingual foray. Among those he recruits are John Donne and Sorley MacLean, Italian writer Italo Calvino and Russian poet and Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky.
Certainly MacDonald's work was not parochial. His collection of poems, The Resurrection Of The Ancient Scottish Tongue, was the first secular work to be printed in Gaelic. It begins with a poem in Latin which the Scottish Poetry Library sees as "a gesture which places his Gaelic poetry on an equal footing with contemporary literature in the other European vernaculars". And it stood the test of time. His longest poem – The Galley Of Clanranald – runs to more than 500 lines and dates to around 1750.
But Hugh MacDiarmid thought it worth producing a version in 1936, based on a prose translation.
The editors, the Eigg-based Camille Dressler and Dòmhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart of the University of Edinburgh and Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, have done a good job in addition to their own papers in the collection. Dr Michel Foxley, the former GP and councillor for the area Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair called home puts it well in his foreword: "Our children, obsessed with Japanese American fantasy figures, need to learn about Alasdair, the bold, dark Moidartman of the sharp words (as his wife called him) ... A heroic and tragic figure, he is certainly the most inspirational figure of the 18th-century Gàidhealtachd, truly the Man of a – thwarted – Gaelic Enlightenment."
Ed. Camille Dressler and Dòmhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart
The Islands Book Trust, £15
Alexander MacDonald: Bard of the Gaelic Enlightenment
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