Text only
University of Aberdeen Takes you to the main page for this section

JISS Book Reviews

Frank Ferguson's Ulster-Scots Writing: an anthology
Gavin Falconer (QUB)
A review of
Frank Ferguson, Ulster-Scots Writing: an anthology (Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2008), ISBN 978-1-84682-074-8, xv + 544 pp.

Frank Ferguson’s monumental and keenly awaited collection could be criticised for trying to be all things to all people, but its impressive scope allows it to serve two (and more) masters with ease. It is a representative anthology (1) in whose compilation ‘literary value has been one of the criteria’ (10). It is an act of recovery and awareness-raising that ‘aspires to preserve some of the most vulnerable texts and to stimulate interest in Scottish influence in Ulster writing’ (22). It is historiography whose rationale ‘has been to clarify and chart the emergence of [Ulster Scots] in the public sphere’ (3). It is no exaggeration to state that, in the scale of its achievement, it might be likened to a further Field Day volume.

In only one respect is it less than it claims. The anthology may define ‘”Ulster-Scots” as a very broad, fluid and comprehensive term to classify the numerous textual products of Scottish influence in the province of Ulster’ (10), but in practice its ambit is limited to Lowland Scots and its standard kin-tongue, with Goidelic culture present only in historical translations or not at all. A full exploration of the very different Scotsness of Rathlin and the Glens will have to wait.

Ferguson’s collection encompasses literature in Ulster Scots, but also writing by and about those of Scottish descent, making it an important collection of source texts. Perhaps inevitably, given the province’s mixtur-maxtur of bloodlines, the question may be asked why Ian Paisley is included in English while others such as Gerry Adams or John Hume, the bearers of Lowland Scots surnames, and presumably Y chromosomes, are not. Admittedly, the inclusion of a contemporary Nationalist evaluation of Presbyterian Republicanism towards the end of the collection might have provided a welcome counterblast of the trumpet, but pleasing everyone is an impossible task. As it is, the anthology has approximately 100 contributors, their work in many cases virtually unavailable elsewhere.

The author makes few assumptions regarding readers’ background knowledge, and over 60 of the volume’s 544 pages are given over to painstaking notes and a glossary, making it suitable for students, specialists in other fields, and, selectively, post-primary schools. One personal gripe is that Ferguson departs from academic consensus, and an academic’s consistency, by referring to Ulster Scots alternately as language and dialect. While he is not the first to have done so, such simmerin-an-winterin triangulation is surely unnecessary, given the Ulster-Scots Agency’s recent criticism of those who fail to treat the variety as a form of Scots. However, a successful compiler must often be a diplomat.

The editor’s determination to include texts of historical and religious interest — and, in so doing, to broaden the definition of ‘literature’ — sees a fair number of early texts represented. Moving on somewhat, the histories of John Michelburne and Robert Ashton are surely ripe for sympathetic translation into Scots. Conversely, Ferguson’s decision to exclude unpublished seventeenth-century transactional texts from Ulster means that the linguistic tradition bursts onto the stage fully formed in the shape of the wonderfully racy William Starrat.

All the main Ulster-Scots poets are included — many of them Irish Nationalists of one sort of another, and many writing something barely or not at all distinguishable from Central Scots — but there is also a host of lesser-known figures. Ferguson himself has championed Donegal’s tragically short-lived Sarah Leech as underrated and relevant also to the study of non-canonical women’s writing. Oddly, given contemporary associations, Scots comes together with religion less in this volume than it might in a Scottish equivalent. There are no historical Bible translations, and few vernacular treatments of religious themes.

The more modern work falls into two categories, those writers whose starting point is English and those who choose to write in Scots. Seamus Heaney treats words as precious artefacts in a quest to explore and understand Ulster’s complex regional and ethnic identity, while Michael Longley performs an intriguing and valuable experiment in the production of what one might term maximally Scots-influenced English. The danger of including these and other acknowledged masters of English-language literature is that the bar is set unflatteringly high for those from the relatively slender contemporary dialect tradition, whose work as a result may appear minor or better suited to radio — a medium that Hugh Robinson, here included with a humorous and insightful anecdote, has made his own. The widely read and elegiac Jim Fenton easily retains his dignity, while Philip Robinson’s writing, anthologised at length, is interesting chiefly for glottopolitical reasons. Close observers of the Ullans controversy may wonder about the identities of the ‘Professors’ and ‘Civil Sarvaints’ castigated in his poem ‘Thocht Polis’ (429). The work itself seems to argue against a binary divide between language and dialect and therefore, presumably, in favour of Ulster Scots as a half-language, something symbolised by the messy patchwork of a Frisian cow that, appropriately enough, also reminds one of Frysk.

Although Ferguson’s tireless research goes a long way towards discounting the notion that Ulster ceased to produce literature in Scots in the mid-twentieth century, the fracture of the tradition among those consciously writing in the variety can be seen in the decline of Modern Scots orthographic practice and its replacement by a series of contradictory idiolects. Fenton in particular presents the reader with the difficult combination of eye dialect, dense Scots, and a greater variety of verse forms than employed hitherto. Readers should rest assured, however, of the value of engaging with the work of the pre-eminent living Ulster-Scots poet. The long-time documenter of Antrim’s lexical riches shows himself at home with both Habbie and free verse, and in the poem ‘A’ it Taks’ (409) whittles down a lifetime’s experience to a cluster of highly charged emotional reference points reminiscent of Brendan Behan’s ‘Uaigneas’ — only to end playfully with the quotidian bathos of ‘soordook bocht / in Tesco’s’. Sadly, the more ambitious re-imaginings of Ulster-Scots orthography seen in the maximally differentiated synthetic Ullans of Philip Robinson’s Ulster-Scots grammar (Belfast, 1997) and his children’s books, which might have furnished the anthology with a further genre, are not included.

Other omissions can be attributed to Ferguson’s decision to exclude work not published in book form. The Lá columnist Gearóid Mac Siacais and his News Letter counterpart Conal Gillespie have, to many people, along with the ubiquitous Ullans translations of public-sector advertisements, been the public face of Ulster Scots, and their absence makes the contemporary scene appear at once less diverse and less dynamic.

A further niggle is that Ferguson, while often an eloquent writer, is not a careful one. Philip Robinson’s novel Back Streets of the Claw (Belfast, 2000), for example, is given as Backstreets of the Craw (9), while the village of Drumcrun in his work Wake the Tribe o’ Dan (Belfast, 1998) becomes ‘Duncrun’ (502). It is regrettable that a work in receipt of public subsidy should not have been proofed, and — given that Ulster-Scots writing has been calumniated by an unfairly generalised charge of dilettantism — especially unfortunate that transcription errors should make some practitioners appear unskilled. The metre in James Orr’s magnificent ‘Irish Cottier’s Death and Burial’ is twice rendered defective in the present volume, and it is to be hoped that future editions, of which there should be many, will correct this. Until then, rather than John Hewitt’s personal redactions, those seeking more authoritative texts of four major poets should turn to the excellent Folk Poets of Ulster anthologies of Orr, Porter and Thomson by J. R. R. Adams and Philip Robinson (Bangor, 1992), and to Ivan Herbison’s Webs of Fancy selection from the works of his ancestor David Herbison (Dunclug, 1980).

There remain at least two more possible Ulster-Scots anthologies. One is an Ulster equivalent of Manfred Görlach’s Textual History of Scots (Heidelberg, 2002), which showcased the full gamut of text types and approaches to orthography. The other is a selection of Ulster Scots at its best, exhibiting more depth and less breadth to make the case for the quality of its literature in the same way as Ferguson has, in this volume, convincingly made the case for its existence as a written — and for some doubters, perhaps, spoken — variety. To avoid the danger of a non-canonical selection itself becoming a canon, it is to be hoped that large-scale research and republication work will continue, with more use made of electronic media for the benefit of both lovers of belles lettres and corpus linguists.

Ferguson’s achievement is substantial, having more than any predecessor recovered and made available to the general public the unjustly neglected literary record of a once vital tradition, as well as furnishing historians with a wealth of primary documents. For writers, teachers, academics, and all those who seek to understand one of Europe’s great cultural confluences, it must surely be compulsory reading. For his sponsors in the Ulster-Scots Agency, it is a project that can engender unqualified pride.

return to JISS book reviews listing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arts and Humanities Research Council

The AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies >>