Scottish Authors > Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdair Poet

Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdair (Alasdair Macdonald) was born about 1695 in Ardnamurchan where his father, a near relative of Clanranald, was an Episcopalian minister. He received a good education and is said to have studied at Glasgow University. In 1729 he was appointed by the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge as teacher of a Charity School at Island Finnan, and he continued in this and other centres for about fifteen years. With his duties as schoolmaster he combined the office of Catechist, an office to which he was appointed by the Presbytery of Mull.

Sometime in the '40s he turned Catholic and became an enthusiastic propagandist for Prince Charles in whose army he served as captain, fought in various campaigns and was on the march to Derby. He wrote a number of passionate Jacobite songs, one with the refrain:

O hi ri ri he is coming

O hi ri ri our exiled king

Let us take our arms and clothing

And the flowing tartan plaid

He also of course wrote other poems not connected with the '45. His Oran an t-Samhraidh (Song of summer) has a wonderful freshness with which Duncan Ban Macintyre may have been competing in his poem of the same title. He also wrote Oran a Gheamhraidh (Song of winter). He had a wonderful range of vocabulary and splendid distinctive detail.

However the poem for which he is most famous (as Duncan Ban Macintyre for Ben Doran) is the Birlinn (or Galley) of Clanranald. In this poem there is detailed description of the leading seamen some of whom may have been historical persons. There is a lot of technical detail. The poem begins with A Blessing of the Ship, followed by a Blessing of the Arms. Then there is an Incitement to Rowing to the Sailing Point. There are sixteen men seated at the oars. Perhaps the most dramatic (even melodramatic) part of the poem is the storm in which the sea is disturbed to an extraordinary extent:

The whole sea turned to porridge

Foul and turbid

With the blood and filth of splayed sea-beasts

Turned red and horrid

The poem with its detail and drama is one of the major poems in Gaelic and if Duncan Ban Macintyre wrote of glens and the deer, Macdonald wrote of seamen and the sea and a tremendous storm in equally fine detail.

During the last twenty years of his life Macdonald lived in Glenuig, Knoydart, Morar and Arisaig. He died about the year 1770 and is buried at Arisaig (see photo above of Arisaig Graveyard).

A translation of the storm scene from the Birlinn can be found in Iain Crichton Smith's Collected poems (Carcanet 1992). A number of Macdonald's poems including Song of summer, Song of winter and some of his Jacobite songs can be found translated in Professor Derick Thomson's Gaelic poetry in the Eighteenth Century - a bilingual anthology (The Association for Scottish Literary Studies 1993).

Ian Crichton Smith

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