ABSTRACT
It requires no more than a glance at the songs of Scotland to be aware at once of a major cleavage—the division caused by Scotland’s two languages, Lowland Scots and Gaelic. In theory a non-musical division, in practice this cleavage has the effect of dividing the song melodies of Scotland into two separate streams largely independent of each other. The Book of Femaig, a manuscript collection of Gaelic poems made about the year 1688, ascribed to Duncan Macrae of Inverinate, is said to contain songs sung to Lowland tunes, which Professor William J. Watson thinks might have been introduced into the Gaelic areas by drovers and by Highland soldiers who took part in Montrose’s campaigns and subsequent wars in England and Scotland. A Gaelic colleague points out to the writer that the term Ossianic ballad is of Lowland Scots usage probably arising out of the ‘Ossian’ of Macpherson.
