The Women of Islay and Issues of Gender in the Core Fairy Tale Repertoires of Scotland and Appalachia

Abstract

An underappreciated aspect of John Francis Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands is the richness of its representation of the women storytellers of Islay. Although female narrators recorded outside of Islay account for less than four percent of Campbell’s published texts, women contributed more than half of the published Islay tales. This repertoire represents an otherwise hidden domestic tradition with strong links to women’s narrative traditions documented in the Scottish Lowlands in the nineteenth century and the Appalachian Mountains in the twentieth. Both Campbell and his star fieldworker Hector MacLean were Islay natives with lifelong ties to the narrators. This familiarity allowed the two men not only to record the women’s tales, but also to describe performance contexts and to show how one island community shaped a repertoire that is both distinctively Gaelic and demonstrably continuous with the female repertoires of Scots-speaking Lowlanders and English-speaking North Americans.