Scotland
in the
heat
SR’s remarkable growth as an independent magazine is based largely on word of mouth. Here are examples of our journalism:
* SR played a leading role in the successful campaign to save St Margaret of Scotland Hospice
* SR campaigned for greater transparency in Scottish public life and won a landmark judgement from the Scottish information commissioner which has led to a transformation in the information available about executive salaries and pensions in public bodies
* Having discovered elderly people still living in a near-derelict block of flats in Glasgow, sometimes without a water supply, SR campaigned to have them decently re-housed. With the help of Scotland’s housing minister, Alex Neil, we succeeded
* SR continues to campaign – so far without success – to broaden the range of appointments to national organisations beyond a self-perpetuating elite
The Cafe
Unlike many publications SR doesn’t have an online comment facility – we prefer a more considered approach. The Cafe is our readers’ forum. If you would like to contribute to it, please email islay@scottishreview.net
Today’s banner
Early Spring flowers
in Angus
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
There is no such
thing as a Scottish
ethnic identity
Dennis Smith
I must admit to owning a kilt that I wear for dancing and special occasions. I also have Highland ancestors. But I have never thought of myself as a Celt. Most of my traceable ancestors were crofters – or maybe peasants – in Aberdeenshire and Banffshire, the kind of people that William Alexander and Lewis Grassic Gibbon wrote about. (After decades of tutting disapproval my old school eventually got round to recognising Gibbon as its most distinguished former pupil.)
So I get slightly twitchy at seeing Scotland lumped together with Wales and Ireland as part of a Celtic periphery. When William McIlvanney famously described the Scots as a mongrel people he was hardly breaking new ground. Sometime around 1380 the chronicler John of Fordun wrote that ‘the manners and customs of the Scots vary with the diversity of their speech. For two languages are spoken among them, the Scottish [Gaelic] and the Teutonic [English/Scots]’.
The origins and identity of Scotland’s first inhabitants are lost in the mists of time and archaeological debate. But there are traces of cultural, linguistic and ethnic diversity from early on. Greek and Latin sources offer us a few tribal names of varying authenticity; then we have a mix of Picts, Britons, Scots and Angles, followed by Norse/Normans, Flemings, Irish, Italians, Poles and many more. The first three (like the Irish) may be classed as Celts (though some scholars might disagree). But the rest certainly can’t. ‘Celtic’ simply fails to capture the diversity of the Scots.
I want to draw a radical conclusion from this: there is no such thing as a Scottish ethnic identity (far less a racial one). Authorities disagree about what ethnicity means. It can include relations by marriage as well as blood, and it can be patrilineal, matrilineal or both. So it varies widely from culture to culture. But the central idea is shared descent from a common ancestor. And we can be certain that there is no ancestor common to all and only Scots.
This idea would once have been anathema. Medieval Scots insisted on their shared ethnicity, manifested in an unbroken line of kings dating back to biblical times. Just as Aeneas escaped the sack of Troy and fled west to found Rome, so the pharaoh’s daughter Scota migrated west and north to marry Gathelus (the Gael) and found Scotland. This story was crucial. It proved that the Scots were, and always had been, independent of English kingship (and also accommodated awkward evidence about the Scots having actually migrated from Ireland). This foundation myth remained central to Scottish history and political theory till the 18th century when it was comprehensively dismantled by scholars like Thomas Innes.
Scottish folklore has not been tainted by association with Nazism and the Celtic Scots are popularly perceived as victims, pushed to the fringes of Europe and then dispersed across the globe through the Highland Clearances.
