The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #159466 Message #3778912
Posted By: Jim Brown
15-Mar-16 - 03:45 AM
Thread Name: druid chants---song choruses
Subject: RE: druid chants---song choruses
I can't help with the procedures for appointing professors in 19th century Oxford or with the scholarly reception of Mackay's work at the time, except to note that Alexander MacBain doesn't mention him in the bibliography of his Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language (1896).
For his inability to speak Gaelic (or indeed to understand spoken Gaelic), my source is The Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, Vol 2, 1872-73, pp. 101-2, where there is a report of a short address Charles Mackay made to the Society:
"Dr. Charles Mackay, who was received with loud applause, said that being a Highlander so far as he could trace his descent, and not having a single drop of Saxon blood in his veins, he stood there with a feeling of shame that he could not speak the language of his ancestors. He was sorry that the eloquent speech of Mr. Macgregor was not intelligible to him, but the sonorous beauty of the mere sounds was striking even to his ears, and put him in mind of the old lady in England who said that Mesopotamia was a blessed word ; it filled her with emotions of delight only to hear it pronounced. (Laughter and applause.) Something of the same kind filled his mind on hearing the Gaelic spoken."
In this address he talks briefly about his studies leading to the conclusion that "that Gaelic lay at the root not only of the vernacular and colloquial English, but of French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, and Greek." He features again in the 1873-74 volume, with a talk on "The Scotch in America", including, among other things, a report of a conversation he had with Jefferson Davis about slavery.