Abstract
Dùthchas is a Gaelic concept which encompasses notions of kinship, heritage, and connection to place. In recent years, there has been an unprecedented explosion of interest in relating dùthchas to contemporary environmental, political, and social issues affecting Scotland’s Highlands and Islands. For around half a century, Scottish historians have recognised the term’s relevance in studies of clanship or historical land use patterns in Gaelic Scotland, but dùthchas has never been the focus of any systematic scholarship. This has largely been influenced by the fact that until recently, interest in dùthchas has been predominantly historical but very few Scottish historians are proficient Gaelic speakers, limiting their ability to interact with Gaelic sources and restricting them to mentions of the term within Anglophone sources.This thesis targets this lacuna. It begins by seeking out the earliest usage of the term within Irish sources to establish its origins. Subsequently, it investigates the way dùthchas evolved between 1640 and 1900 in Scotland, beginning around the start of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and ending several years after the peak of political action associated with the Land Agitations and the Highland Land League. Dùthchas is analysed synchronically and diachronically, exploring how its meaning shifted over time and how it was used in response to specific historical contexts. This is done by compiling an extensive corpus of instances where dùthchas was used in Scottish Gaelic poetry from 1640 to 1900, and analysing it using a bespoke methodology inspired by works from the fields of intellectual history and anthropological linguistics which explore the way concepts or words evolve over time. Such an approach is required when exploring a polysemic word which is a cultural, political, and epistemological concept. Poetry is the primary source of choice for this study, as the practitioners of this conservative art form were seen to be fulfilling the public role of contemporary Gaelic society’s social and political commentators. It is also the most abundant Gaelic-language source in the period under scrutiny.
This study reveals that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, poets predominantly used dùthchas in panegyric poetry addressed to clan chiefs or the clan gentry. The term bound together the addressee’s genealogy, territories, and personal attributes to lay out the expectations held of them by the people. Deviating from these would make a leader illegitimate. However, a novel grammatical formulation becomes the predominant way dùthchas is used in the nineteenth century, reflecting the term’s evolution in response to agricultural Improvement and the Highland Clearances, with poets reformulating dùthchas as an inalienable right possessed by the tenantry independent of the clan gentry. The term also resiliently retained its association with hereditary characteristics and identity across this entire time period: it was a key aspect of clans’ kin-based identities, invoked in times of crisis, while also being a key aspect in the Gaels’ ethnic identity, as evidenced by its use among Jacobite propagandists and the poets of the Land Agitations alike. This thesis locates the roots of dùthchas in early medieval Ireland and improves our understanding of what dùthchas meant in Scotland between 1640 and 1900. It contributes to our understanding of the emotional and conceptual framework which underpinned the Land Agitations and paved the way for Scotland’s twenty-first-century ‘land reform revolution’. Finally, by exploring dùthchas as a cosmological and epistemological concept, it encourages the examination of other Gaelic concepts in this way.
| Date of Award | Mar 2025 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Iain MacKinnon (Supervisor), James Bennett (Supervisor) & Martin MacGregor (Supervisor) |