Hamish Henderson’s work is well-known to anyone who has worked with Scottish folklore. Though he worked with both Gaelic and English traditions, he is best known for his work on the English-language traditions of Scotland, and especially for his work on folksongs and ballads, as well as for his pioneering work with the Scottish Travelers. Alias MacAlias is a reprint of a collection of his folkloric, literary, and political writings that first appeared in 1992, making easily available again the writings of a major Scottish folklorist.
The book is divided into four sections: “Folk Song,” “People,” “Folktales,” and “Literature and Politics.” Folklorists are likely to find the first section the most interesting. Henderson was a fine scholar of Scottish ballad and folksongs, and his essays on these genres remain important contributions to the scholarship. Although many of his essays are rather traditional in their topics, Henderson’s involvement in the Scottish folk music revival led him to treat folk song and ballad as a living tradition with important ties to forms of performance other than that of the traditional rural singer, and thus to pay attention to a wider variety of forms and sources for folk tradition than has often been the case in Scottish folklore studies. “People” is a collection of biographical sketches of Henderson’s informants, and “Folktales” mostly a selection of reviews, though his introduction to Duncan and Linda Williamson’s A Thorn in the King’s Foot is also included, as are two brief notes on the Tinkers.
Though the fourth section is on “Literature and Politics,” it too has several essays of interest to the folklorist: for example, Henderson’s essay “The Women of the Glen: Some Thoughts on Highland History,” which examines the question of why women offered the greatest resistance to the Highland Clearances, the infamous process of depopulation of the Highlands for economic reasons in the nineteenth century. Most of the essays are, however, on literary topics—yet, because they represent another very important aspect of Henderson’s involvement with Scottish culture, they are no less important for understanding Henderson’s work than his folkloric essays.
The one shortcoming of the collection that should be mentioned is that many of the pieces were originally published as popular essays. But, while from the scholar’s perspective they can seem somewhat lightweight, they are also often very revealing about Henderson’s own commitments and activities as both a scholar and an advocate of Scottish culture.
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[Review length: 405 words • Review posted on January 12, 2007]