Allan MacDonald (poet)

The Reverend Allan MacDonald
Church	Latin Church
Diocese	Argyll and the Isles
Orders
Ordination	9 July 1882 by Charles Eyre
Personal details
Born	25 October 1859 Fort William, Inverness-shire, Scotland
Died	8 October 1905 (aged 45) Eriskay, Scotland

The Reverend Allan MacDonald (Scottish Gaelic Maighstir Ailein, An t-Athair Ailean Dòmhnallach) (25 October 1859, Fort William, Scotland – 8 October 1905, Eriskay) was a Scottish Roman Catholic priest during the Victorian era. During the later phases of the Highland Clearances, Fr. MacDonald was also an activist for the reform of the absolute power granted to Anglo-Scottish landlords to both rackrent and evict their tenants en masse and at will under Scots property law. Furthermore, Father Allan MacDonald was a radically innovative poet with a permanent place in the literary canon of Scottish Gaelic literature and a nationally respected folklorist and collector from the oral tradition in the Scottish Highlands and Islands.

Allan MacDonald was born in Fort William, Lochaber into a middle class family descended from Somerled, King Robert the Bruce, John of Islay, Lord of the Isles, and the first seven Chiefs of Clan MacDonald of Keppoch, while also being closely related, through their shared descent from the Keppoch Tacksmen of Bohuntine, to the iconic Nova Scotia Canadian Gaelic poet Allan The Ridge MacDonald.^[1][2][3] Despite this proud warrior ancestry, however, Allan MacDonald was raised to only speak English by his upwardly mobile parents.^[4] While studying for the priesthood in both Blairs College in Aberdeen and at the Royal Scots College in Spain, the already multilingual Allan MacDonald chose to also begin studying Scottish Gaelic, his ancestral heritage language, and was later to become both a fluent speaker and writer in the language.^[5]

After returning to his homeland and being ordained to the priesthood in the immediate aftermath of repeal of the Penal Laws, Catholic Emancipation in 1829, and the 1878 restoration of the Hierarchy for the formerly strictly illegal and underground Catholic Church in Scotland, Father Allan was assigned to the Diocese of Argyll and the Isles during the final decade of the Highland Clearances.^[6] This was during the height of the Highland Land League agitation and Fr. MacDonald became, similarly to many other Victorian era Highland priests and under orders from his bishop, a leading and formidable activist for tenant's rights, reasonable rents, security of tenure, free elections, and against the political bossism and religious discrimination that were keeping his parishioners in the Outer Hebrides critically impoverished.^[7][8]

In 1889, Father Allan MacDonald published a Catholic hymnal in Scottish Gaelic, consisting of traditional hymns, rooted in the spirituality of the Celtic Church, which he had personally collected from Catholic traditional singers and his own literary translations from a variety of other languages. This hymnal, of which Fr. MacDonald later published an expanded edition in 1893, is still in use. Despite eventually becoming a well-known national figure, a respected scholar of Celtic studies, and one of the most beloved Roman Catholic priests in Scottish history, Father Allan MacDonald "wore himself out in the apostolate" in the islands of South Uist and Eriskay, which are still located in one of the rainiest places in Europe. He died of pneumonia, pleurisy, and influenza at the age of only 45.^[9][10]

In his 27 October 1933 letter to the Stornoway Gazette, Skye-born Seanchaidh John N. MacLeod (1880–1954), recalled of Fr. MacDonald, (Scottish Gaelic: "Cha d' fhuair 'an duine mi-fhein', aite riamh an cridhe Mgr Ailean, agus nach e sin aon de na n-aobharan airson an tug clann nan Gaidheal agus nan eileanan an gu h-araidh a leithid de ghradh dha.")^[11]

"'The man myself' never found a place in Fr Allan's heart, and that is surely one of the reasons why the people of the Highlands and Islands in particular loved him so well."^[11]

Decades after his death in 1905, Fr. MacDonald's many unpublished manuscripts of his Christian and Secular poetry were tracked down as a passion project by Scottish nationalist and Gaelic-language literary scholar John Lorne Campbell, edited, and published for the first time in 1965. Also, the sources of the priest-poet's 1893 Gaelic hymnal and the degree to which Fr. MacDonald's folklore notebooks were both plagiarized and distorted by fraudulent medium and paranormal researcher Ada Goodrich Freer has also been meticulously documented and publicized by John Lorne Campbell.^[12]

In a 1958 article, John Lorne Campbell further praised the "sensitivity and scientific detachment" with which Fr. MacDonald had approached collecting from the Gaelic oral tradition. Campbell further wrote, "Fr Allan [himself], although possessed of a sense of humour, was a man of austere temperament and disciplined intellect. He was well acquainted with the concreteness of Gaelic oral tradition as with the earthier side of human nature. He hated anything savoring of sentimentalism, affectation, or pretense..."^[13]

Similarly to what Alan Riach said in 2016 about Scottish Gaelic national poet Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair,^[14] Fr. Allan MacDonald was an extremely sophisticated poet, whose poetry was built upon both immersion in his own literary culture and on a multilingual and encyclopaedic knowledge of world literature.^[15] For this reason and many others, literary scholar Ronald Black has praised Fr. Allan MacDonald as, "a huge literary talent",^[16] and as the first bard to introduce both Symbolist and modernist poetry into Scottish Gaelic literature. Black has particularly praised Fr. MacDonald's eerily prophetic Surrealist and Aisling poem Ceum nam Mìltean ("The March of Thousands"), which described waking up after a nightmare and feeling a sense of dread and foreboding about thousands of young men marching away, through the newly fallen snow, to a conflict they will never return from.^[17] Ronald Black has accordingly written that Ceum nam Mìltean deserves to be, "first in any anthology of the poetry of the First World War", and, "would not have been in any way out of place, with regard to style or substance", in Sorley MacLean's groundbreaking 1943 poetry collection Dàin do Eimhir.^[18] Black concluded by commenting that had Fr. Allan MacDonald not died prematurely at the age of only 45, "then the map of Gaelic literature in the twentieth century might have looked very different."^[19]