Donald Archie MacDonald, 1929-1999

Donald Archie MacDonald was born in North Uist in the Outer Hebrides on 8 September 1929. He got his early schooling in Paible School and then went on to Portree High School in Skye, where he excelled in academic achievement until he gained a place at the University of Edinburgh in 1948. His university life was dogged by illness but he took two honours degrees, one in English Language in 1953 and one in Celtic in 1955, having won several prizes and scholarships on the way.

His first employment was in Register House in Edinburgh, and then with the National Library of Scotland in the manuscripts section. Then he joined the staff of the School of Scottish Studies in July 1962 as a research fellow, and he was where he had for some time wanted to be. His main interest there was to harvest the rich fields of oral tradition, and his fieldwork took him to Sutherland and Ross-shire, Barra and Islay, and one memorable trip to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. The greatest amount of his work was done in North and South Uist, however, and for some years his holidays were spent recording in his native island. (The question of sacrificing his free time would not arise, as he loved the work so much.) Altogether he filled about eight hundred tapes with worthwhile material, mainly Gaelic, and it is a pleasure still to hear his gentle voice encouraging a singer such as Kate MacDonald if she happened to forget the words of a song, or his chuckle if another song gave a hint of naughtiness of any kind. In the 1980s, members of the School were involved in the planning and administration of an annual conference of tradition-bearers, Comhdhail nan Seanchaidh, instigated and hosted by Sir Iain Noble of Fearann Eilean Iarmain in Skye. There Donald's gift for endearing himself to young and old, male or female, was easy to observe.

I never heard him sing, and he maintained that he was not able to, but he had a remarkable ear, which could quickly recognise differences in melodies. He also had a phenomenal memory for words of songs and of excerpts from tales. His chief area of expertise, and the subject he taught when the School became a teaching department, was oral narrative. He was an authority on the life of John Francis Campbell of Islay, the renowned collector who published West Highland Tales. His chapter on "Collecting Oral Literature" in Richard M. Dorson's Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction, published in 1972, is still extensively used as a classic guide to the principles of collecting in Scotland.

In 1966 he initiated the setting up of a special study archive for oral narrative, and that remains one of the important facilities which the School has to offer to postgraduate students and other scholars.

With Dr Alan Bruford, Donald Archie MacDonald collaborated for many years in the editorship of the magazine Tocher. He wrote numerous articles for Scottish Studies, on folk tales and other matters. The subject of a book which he was planning, Donald Alasdair Johnson of South Uist, aroused a special interest in visual memory. I had the privilege of assisting with the songs belonging to a most intriguing historical account of an elopement from the Balranald estate in Uist. This had happened almost within living memory but had taken on some mythical accretions. Donald's researches into it, including newspaper reports of a court case arising from the event, were published in the Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, volumes LVI and LVII (1988-92). His first publication in book form was a collection of stories and songs which Donald himself had recorded from Peter Morrison of North Uist, called Ugam agus Bhuam (1977). A small booklet of translations into English and an audio-cassette accompanied this book. The partnership of Bruford and MacDonald was again effective in the production of Scottish Traditional Tales, which appeared in 1994. There are numerous other evidences of his labours in such as the School's Scottish Tradition published series of cassettes and CDs, in video recordings now in the School and in memories of public lectures, especially a series done in Prince Edward Island in 1988 and when he was the Rhind Lecturer for the Society of Antiquaries in Edinburgh in 1994. His series of programmes for the BBC on different kinds of Gaelic folk tales is also remembered with pleasure.

If we include student supervision, external examination in the National University of Ireland, membership of important committees in Scotland and Ireland, times as Head of Department in the School of Scottish Studies, we are still mentioning only some of the achievements of Donald Archie MacDonald. We have a saying in Gaelic which is, roughly translated: If you want to be miscalled, get married; if you want to be praised, die--Pos, 's cainear thu, basaich 's molar thu. It is a pity that we do not praise as much when people are alive as we do when they die. Donald Archie MacDonald was a very modest man, so that he was not as famous as his intellectual qualities ought to have made him. At the same time, he was a very proud man, proud of his own heritage and of the dual cultures of Scots and Gaelic from which he was bred. His pride also manifested itself in a standard of perfection which sometimes allowed people who were less well equipped to tackle subjects which should have been his prerogative; and another side to this pride, or nobility of nature, meant that people who might have been seen as rivals were never treated as such. He was also most encouraging to those of us who were of lower intellect than himself. I doubt if he even thought of us in such terms!