Review by Paul Robinson
Atlantic Books Today, Spring 2007
The Blue Mountains and Other Gaelic Stories from Cape Breton
By John Shaw
McGill-Queen's University Press, 224 pages
The Blue Mountains is a bilingual - English and Gaelic - anthology of 30 stories collected by respected Celtic scholar John Shaw from seventeen Cape Breton storytellers. That's one way of looking at it: a book primarily of interest to the ethnologist or the academic researching a paper for a learned journal. But The Blue Mountains deserves a better fate.
This is bedrock Cape Breton material. If we want to know how we got from there - the era of my South Bar grandmother and even earlier - to here - an Inverness Premier more comfortable at a ceilidh than a cabinet meeting - we can try the following approach for our reading pleasure.
Start at the back of the book with the "reciters." These are (regrettably, this should soon read "were," as the passage of time has taken its toll), invaluable purveyors of Gaelic oral tradition who recited for John Shaw and made the collection possible. Among the 17, the late Joe Neil MacNeil is possibly the best known. Nearly 20 years ago, he graced memorable multi-lingual (Gaelic, Mi'Kmaq, French and English) storytelling night in Halifax. Dan Angus Beaton and Dougie "The Gill" MacDougall are also here. As we absorb the salient details of the warehouse of knowledge these people represent, we take note of their communities. They are the community voices of a Cape Breton, an eastern Nova Scotia, that is now mostly memory.
Imagine you are a guest on All Hallow's Eve at a Gaelic storytelling in a candle-lit shieling on the ground of the Highland Village at Iona, Cape Breton. The stories are being told in their original language, and you, like me, do not understand a word of it. But you catch the rhythm and, more importantly, the sense of the unexpected, the evident detail in something mysterious that causes those around you to suck in their breath and, invariably, to collapse into laughter when the punch line is delivered. Soon enough your neighbour whispers a translation, but even without it, there is something compelling in just listening and feeling the beat of language.
Now, you are ready to dip into the 30 stories, but first a word to the cautious. If you think the adventures of Harry Potter are over the edge, you are in for a surprise. Beginning at the back of the book sets the stage and provides it own mood. Then, move among the pages rather than starting on page one and reading in sequence, story after story. You can get bogged down, so use the variety of the stories to keep the mind lively. If that doesn't work, there is always a nip of whisky to provide its own sparkle. There are seven groups of stories to keep your imagination working overtime. You could choose from the "Tall Tales," then a "Historical Legend," and conclude your first session with a longer selection, Red Conall of the Tricks, taken from the "International" section. You will soon get the hang of stories that end abruptly with the unexpected, those that go on and on until you begin to wonder where the end is, those that captivate with the magic of a trickster, and - are you ready for this? - those that deal with the tantalizing temptations of the flesh.
Finally, I must acknowledge my appreciation of the publisher, McGill-Queen's University Press, both for this and an earlier work. In 1987 John Shaw provided a signal service in helping preserve the Gaelic voice in our region by editing and translating Joe Neil MacNeil's Tales Until Dawn: The World of a Cape Breton Story-Teller. Without the contributions of both editor and publisher, Nova Scotia's story would be even more incomplete.
