The Ceilidh Story - there are many ways to come to an understanding of ourselves and the Tales are just one -  a powerful one

My favourite Cèilidh place in Łomża. Ognisko prepared for my 50th birthday. The photo was taken by me after the meeting.

 

I would like to write today about the beautiful Scottish tradition of Ceilidh. This tradition is well known all over the world. It has got different names but people are the same everywhere. We need to meet, be together and exchange stories. The stories and the Tales weave us together. They give the listeners a sense of who they are and where they come from. 

According to Celtic tradition the old people had a way of coming together. These meetings were called  Cèilidh (pron: "Kay-lee") and were a kind of social gathering  to talk, eat, dance and tell the stories of course.  They used to collect, young and old, around the hearth of one of the villagers. The oldest, or the Seanachaidh (storyteller) if present, started to tell the Tales he had learned from the elders. 

Let's listen to the traditional Cèilidh Story. That is also the title of the tale which I found in the book "Argyll Folk Tales" written by Bob Pegg.

A Cèilidh Story

On the southwest coast of Mull there was a place where people gathered to tell stories. They sat around the fire and the oldest began with his story, followed by the others in turn. The rule they had – their ‘law’ – was that everyone there, with no exception, should contribute a tale. On one occasion a young man from another district was present at the session. He didn’t know the house rules and, when it came to his turn, he had no story to tell. 

The old man suggested that the young lad should go outside to put some straw in a hole in the wall, as it was letting in the wind. The lad stepped out into the dusk, glad to be away from the prickly atmosphere inside. There was indeed a strong wind and, when he looked out to the sea, he saw that a ship was being driven dangerously close to the rocks. The boy ran down to the shore and found a small boat. He pushed it out, and began to row towards the ship in distress, but the gale caught hold of his little vessel and dragged him out to the sea, past Colonsay, Jura and Islay, and over to the north coast of Ireland. 

The young man was cast up in the mouth of a creek, near to a cottage that was on a hill above the shore. When he enquired at the cottage, he found an old woman and a young girl living there. The old woman’s husband, the father of the girl, had died a few weeks before. He had been a fisherman, and now his boat was idle. The lad from Mull got on well with the old woman, and particularly well with the girl. He knew how to fish too, and so it seemed sensible for him to stay there, marry the daughter, and take over the management of the boat.

He did as he decided. The young couple made a good partnership, and it wasn’t so long before their first child was born. Quite quickly they had three more children, and the house became filled with the sounds of a happy family, working and playing and eating together. Then one evening the Mull man was out fishing when a great storm rose up, and his boat was blown back over the sea, past Islay, Jura, and Colonsay, to the very place in Mull that he had left all those years before. 

To his great astonishment, when he climbed the hill, there was still the gathering above the beach. When he came back, the same band of men and boys, sitting in just the same places, and none of them looking a year, or even a day older. The oldest man asked where he had been, and the young man told about the storm, the voyage to Ireland, his wife and four children. 

‘Well, at last you have a story to tell,’ said the man. The others started to laugh, but the old man hushed them, saying that the lad had been under a spell, and that his experiences had all been a vision conjured up by magic. That may have been true, but it didn’t stop him mourning the wife and children who were as real to him as if they’d been flesh and blood. People say that the old man was a master of the black art, and was himself responsible for the young man’s vision, but that surely is an old wives’ tale.