Lá Fhéile Colm Cille: explore the hidden folklore connections between Ireland and Scotland
On this day in 597 (1,428 years ago!), Colm Cille died on the island of Iona in Scotland. While not as well known as Lá Fhéile Pádraig (17 Mar), the 9th of June is Lá Fhéile Colm Cille and is marked here and there. The 1500th anniversary of his birth was widely celebrated in 2021. Colm Cille was born in Donegal, founded monasteries in Derry (Doire Cholm Cille) and Swords (Sord Cholm Cille), and spread Christianity in Scotland. While he spent time in many places in Ireland and is commemorated in many building names, organisation names, school names and placenames (a quick search for “Colm Cille” on www.logainm.ie returns 50 results), his legacy is perhaps defined by his relationship to both Ireland and Scotland and the links he formed between the two territories.
Colm Cille lived at a time when the Gaelic-speaking world spanned from Mizen to Man to John o' Groats. The Gaelic language, at the height of its powers and unhindered by the Roman Empire, was spoken throughout the island of Ireland (Éire), the Isle of Man (Manainn) and most of Scotland (Albain). In those days, invasions went in the other direction! The English language was only getting started while Irish had been in its prime for over a thousand years. At the centre of this Gaelic-speaking world (and of the Gaelic kingdom of Dál Riata) was the Christian monastery on the island of Iona (Í). It was here that Colm Cille spent most of the second half of his life until his death in 597.

A map of Scotland, Man and Ireland, rotated 15° anti-clockwise on the www.hiddenheritages.ai website to evoke the continuum of the Gaelic world
What Colm Cille nicely represents is the shared heritage of Ireland and Scotland. Our linguistic and cultural connections run deep, and while the Gaelic-speaking communities in Scotland are declining, much like the Irish-speaking communities in Ireland, this shared cultural heritage is still apparent (and hidden) in the stories we tell our children. Similarities (and differences) between the types and versions of the folktales that we hear told in Ireland and Scotland provide evidence of this shared culture.
Luckily, many of these stories were captured during the 19th and 20th centuries, while still being transmitted orally in the Gaelic languages (the Irish, Manx and Scottish varieties of Gaelic gradually diverged over time to become three closely related but distinct languages). Many of the stories were written down by professional folklore collectors and deposited in archives for future study. In some cases, storytellers were recorded, the recordings were transcribed, and then the recordings were overwritten to save on costs. Extant audio recordings can be found here and here. In the case of the 1937–39 School’s Collection, the stories were collected by schoolchildren and transcribed by them, or recounted to their teachers who then transcribed them by hand.
A recent project entitled Decoding Hidden Heritages, funded by the IRC in Ireland and the AHRC in the UK, has put together a Scottish–Irish collection of over 5,500 of these folktales, combining material from the School of Scottish Studies Archives in the University of Edinburgh and the Irish National Folklore Collection in UCD for the first time. Most importantly, handwritten text recognition technology was used to generate text representations of the handwritten tales, which has made the material fully searchable as never before. This new collection is available from today at www.hiddenheritages.ai.
This collection of Gaelic traditional narrative is a treasure trove for both researchers and anyone who loves a good story. Parents wishing to revive old stories to tell to their children will find material here, and with the advent of machine translation, linguistic barriers are not as significant as before (there are also English-language stories in the collection). Because these folktales have been classified according to the Aarne–Thompson international index of folktale types, similar stories which occurred across Ireland and Scotland can be compared and contrasted. If we take, for example, the classic magic tale ‘The Gifts of the Little People’, we see instances of it right across Ireland and Scotland, and while the exact telling of the story may vary geographically, we see similar structural elements and motifs within the stories repeated right across the Gaelic-speaking world.
While there is only one example in the collection of a story about Colm Cille from Ireland, there are 32 examples from Scotland. How fitting! But there is much much more besides. There are stories about the devil, stories about pigs and other four-legged animals, and stories about the sea, to name but a few. Anois, sin é mo scéal is má tá bréag ann, bíodh!
Dr Brian Ó Raghallaigh is an Assistant Professor in Fiontar & Scoil na Gaeilge at Dublin City University. His research focuses on digital terminology, onomastics and folkloristics, as well as phonetics and language technology. He is the Principal Investigator of the Department of the Gaeltacht-funded Logainm Placenames Database of Ireland project and Co-Principal Investigator of the IRC-funded Decoding Hidden Heritages project.