Customer Reviews

Folklore of the Scottish Highlands

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Anne Ross gives a wonderful introduction to the lore of the Scottish Highlands and the Isles. She covers Clan lore, Second Sight and the Seer, Witchcraft both black and white, Folk cures, meaning of omens and social customs. The covers the festivals dates through the year and gives you a nifty list of Folk Museums, with drawings and maps to aid the readers unfamiliar with Scotland. Gaelic speaking, Celtic scholar and archaeologists, she brings her knowledge to bear on looking at death rights, and try to remove the veneer of Christianity and look at the origins in Pagan customs that date back to the dawn of time.

Its a small book only 170 pages, but she does a wonderful job bringing this part of All Things Scottish into the spotlight.

Highly Recommended.

Dr. Anne Ross is a distinguished archaeologist in the field of ancient Celtic remains. She also appreciates the important role of folklore in preserving and transmitting a culture's traditions. Drawing on her knowledge of ancient Celtic civilization and her researches into the more modern ways of Highland Scots, she presents customs that were part of Highland life for centuries. Ross handles her material with both love for her subject and a scholar's objectivity. Her unique insights make this book well worth searching for.

Like a beautiful fruit, what lies beneath the peel is most revealing and rewarding. And, no one has done a better job of revealing old Scottish customs and traditions than the native Gaelic speaking Celtic Scholar and Archeologist, Anne Ross.

Dr. Ross takes an in-depth look at the beliefs and customs of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, stemming from pre-Christian customs and surviving for centuries through oral tradition, Christianized hymns and incantations, and folklore.

This text covers the mysticism of Scottish clan lore and it's importance in Scottish society, the Seers and second sight, witchcraft and magic, cures, omens, taboos, social customs, reverence toward life/death, calendar festivals and other daily practices and rites, all stemming from the Scottish Highlands and Islands.

One thing to remember about this book is that many of the sources are Christian in nature and that influence is readily seen in Scottish tradition and folklore, but the author peels away many of the Christian customs to reveal a system of beliefs and practices most commonly associated with the pre-Christian (Pagan) era.

The depths which she reveals in Scottish traditions are quite amazing, and her analysis makes this a thoroughly interesting book, from cover to cover.

Anne Ross, in the tradition of F. Marian McNeill, has done a superb job in recording the core facets of Scottish Highland beliefs and customs. Covering such topics as the mystical elements surrounding Scottish clan lore, seers and the second sight, witchcraft (with the a thorough scholarly distinction made between white and black magic in Scottish tradition), cures/omens/taboos and social customs, as well as a wonderful exploration of Highland "death teachings" and cosmologies, The Folklore of the Scottish Highlands is one of those texts that will forever be looked back to. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

This book provides a general overview and synthesis of various topics in Highland folklore. The book covers ideas on witchcraft, death omens, second sight, the pagan survivals in festivals, etc. Each chapter brings together tales from other sources, the author's own experiences, and some discussion of related topics.

While the book is short, it provides a synthesis not found in mere collections of superstitions and folk-practices, and Dr Ross brings to the work her expertise in the study of pre-Christian Britain and Scotland. The analysis helps to provide a great deal of depth that might otherwise be missing.

Highly recommended.

A brief but inclusive text, Folklore of the Scottish Highlands provides exactly that: and overview of clan lore, information on second sight, witchcraft, social customs, life and death, and seasonal cycles all as they related to the customs and folklore of the Scottish Highlands. For those that have done other research on traditional Celtic/Scottish culture and religions, much of Ross's text will be familiar as her sources include Carmichael and Campbell, two of the most important authors in the field. Ross does, however, narrow down the field of study to just the highlands, making this a useful resource for the reader interested in localized information. Her information on seasonal religious practices is particularly useful.

The book's first section, "Clan Lore," is specific to the Scottish Highlands and unlike anything I've seen in books on this and similar topics. Ross connects fairly ancient practices to fairly modern practices, in part through the clan system. She also discusses the primary attributions and functions of the clan, and how these attributions interact with religion and folklore. This section will be particularly useful to the reader interested in narrowing his research to a more specific location. It does, however, cross over some traditional boundaries in time and practice, and so it needs to be read carefully and with a grain of salt.

Much of the rest of the book will be familiar to those that have read Campbell and Carmichael, and Ross fails to add much in the way of new or insightful commentary. She does, however, restrict her purview to the highlands, again making the book useful to the reader who wishes to localize his study. The section on witchcraft, while definitely folklore inspired/corrupted by Christianity, is more complete than corresponding sections in similar texts. Ross also include a handful of illustrations of varying usefulness that are scattered throughout the text.

As mentioned, the section of seasonal and religious practices is defiantly the most useful and complete of the book. Unlike many authors in the same field, Ross does a more than adequate job of summarizing various sources and practices into a coherent text on each of the subjects she talks about. This will help the reader put other research into context and gain a greater understanding on seasonal/religious practices in Scotland as a whole. All in all, I do recommend this book, but not very highly. It is an interesting and fast read with a few useful sections, but on the whole it lacks the depth, analysis, and new content of similar books by authors in the field. It's a good book to borrow or to wait to buy, and I would recommend other books and authors ahead of it.

This is an excellent book, especially if you are writing a book set in the Highlands and need cultural information that is often left out of history books. It was very interesting and enjoyable to read (not stuffy). The most informative book on customs/culture of the Highlands I've found.