Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/412

 388 Reviews.

piper, and his own dog, which had fought in his defence, came out of the cave without a hair on his body, so terrible had been the encounter with the gall-uaine. One of the tunes resembles the one to which the song was sung in our district.

To take another example of a universally known lullaby, which is here placed among " Nurses' Songs," that of " Maolruainidh " (No. 30), — in the tune as noted by Miss Tolmie, E occurs where we have F, and the last two bars of the refrain have less resem- blance to the first two than have ours. There is also a local difference in naming the wooden vessel in which the butter was kept, (verse 3), ghoid i 'ckuach instead of thug in curasan. Then, our version ends differently, thus, —

" 'S ged nach tig an t-aon lathilleas i Bheir mi mo ghlun, is mliirn is mire dhuit." (And though the day of her return may never come I will give thee my lap (literally knee), and joy and merriment).

" Mhnathan a Ghlinne So " (No. 17) and " Colann gun Cheann " (No. 32) are two other interesting examples of the varied render- ings of well-known songs. It was as Beinn Eidirinn I heard the name of the hill pronounced, instead oi Eadarainn as in the latter song. The tune is much the same as that of a version I heard an old Appin man sing, away in New South Wales.

Among the less known, " Laoidh Oscair" (No. 87) is the most interesting. The tune here given suggests " Mackintosh's Lament." Our Argyllshire version is very different, unlike any other tune I know.

Special thanks are due to Miss Gilchrist and Miss Broadwood for the two " Prefatory Notes " contributed by them on the various modes of the Scottish pentatonic scale. These notes are lucid and convincing, and should make the comparative study of our music more simple, and therefore more popular. Often has the elusive character of some of our musical notes perplexed me when a Gaelic tune was being taken down. A thrush's song is more easily noted. It has also been a source of wonder to me, when listening to Gaelic psalm singing, to find that, while any number of grace notes enwreathed those of the tune, whenever B came in, — in certain combinations, — it was always flattened. This habit is to a great extent explained in these notes.