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This book is a fascinating collection of new studies by leading scholars on central aspects of the languages, literatures, place-names, culture and history of the Isles of Islay and Jura and along the western seaboard of Argyll. It includes major re-assessments of the nineteenth-century Islay poet William Livingston, and an analysis of the Scots found in the poems of Tarbert poet George Campbell Hay. It describes the Gaelic of Jura and Islay as well as the patterns of place-names. In view of the proximity of these regions to Ulster, there are several fresh accounts of historical, cultural and genealogical exchange and crossover. The book ends with a new appreciation of Orwell's time on Jura.
Challenging the traditional assumptions about the nature of Viking settlements in the Inner Hebrides, this book aims to stimulate the debate on what happened in Islay 1,200 years ago, when Viking settlers from Norway clashed with the indigenous Scots of Dal Riada. The Hebridean island of Islay is well known for its whisky, its wildlife, and its association with the MacDonald Lords of the Isles. There would seem to be little reason to dwell on its fate at the hands of the marauding Northmen during the Viking Age. Despite a pivotal location on the sea road from Norway to Ireland, there are no convincing records of the Vikings ever having been there. In recent years, historians have been keen to marginalize the island's Viking experience, choosing instead to focus on the enduring stability of native Celtic culture, and tracing the island's modern Gaelic traditions back in an unbroken chain to the dawn of the Christian era. With no written accounts to go by, the real story of Islay's Viking Age has to be read from another type of course material: the silent witness of the names and local places. The Vikings in Islay presents a detailed historical-philological survey and systematic review of approximately 240 of the island's farm and nature names. The conclusions drawn turn traditional assumptions on their head. The romance of Islay's names, it seems, masks a harrowing tale of invasion, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing.
This is the history of Islay up to the present day with a particular focus on the people of the island. Islay was originally part of Dal Riata, the early kingdom of the Scots, but was then colonized by Scandinavian settlers in the ninth century. It was also the home of the MacDonalds, who established the Lordship of the Isles during the Medieval Period and who mounted a challenge to the Stewart dynasty for control of Scotland. It also looks at the lesser folk, especially during the time of the Campbell lairds, from the early 17th century onwards. Archaeology combined with documentary research has helped to build up a picture of how the people of Islay lived, the way the land was farmed and the development of local industries, including the distilling of whisky.
In The Lordship of the Isles, twelve specialists offer new insights on the rise and fall of the MacDonalds of Islay and the greatest Gaelic lordship of later medieval Scotland. Portrayed most often as either the independently-minded last great patrons of Scottish Gaelic culture or as dangerous rivals to the Stewart kings for mastery of Scotland, this collection navigates through such opposed perspectives to re-examine the politics, culture, society and connections of Highland and Hebridean Scotland from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. It delivers a compelling account of a land and people caught literally and figuratively between two worlds, those of the Atlantic and mainland Scotland, and of Gaelic and Anglophone culture. Contributors are David Caldwell, Sonja Cameron, Alastair Campbell, Alison Cathcart, Colin Martin, Tom McNeill, Lachlan Nicholson, Richard Oram, Michael Penman, Alasdair Ross, Geoffrey Stell and Sarah Thomas.