Storyteller

On the long winter nights in the old days, the people of the Hebrides would gather about their fires to listen to a Gaelic sgeulachlan (storytelling). Now the 1,000-year-old stories have been mostly forgotten, and there is little sgeulachlan in the Hebrides. One man who has not forgotten is Angus MacMillan.

Angus MacMillan is a jolly old man with a weather-lined face, a scraggly mustache, and a laugh that comes from his belly. He was born in Benbecula, in the Outer Hebrides, and only left the island once--to join the territorials during the Boer War. As a child, he went to school to learn a bit of reading. After seven weeks of it, he came home again to be a crofter on a small farm.

Some of the things Angus learned out of school he never would have found in books. They were the hundreds of tales his father knew, that had been told by the MacMillans for generations. Some of the stories took hours to tell (like the one about Warrior Fionn's wonderful swordsmith, who had four hands and could turn out two swords at a time). Other stories took only a few minutes (like the simpleton who outwitted the lawyer). Angus learned them all by heart, and never changed a word.

Soon, Angus was holding his own sgeulachlan, and his fame spread through Benbecula. Neighbors began coming from miles around to his stone farmhouse on the moors. There, in the smell of burning peat and freshly woven wool, Angus would begin his tales. And everyone would listen, including his wife, though she had heard all his stories before.

Last week, Angus MacMillan had more than his neighbors to listen to him. His fame had spread to Dublin, and the Irish Folklore Commission, which pursues Gaelic wherever it may lead, had sent a man with a Dictaphone to take down what he said. Working at night after his chores are done, Angus has finished about 700 recordings, and still has 700 more to do. The commission expects to have enough stories to fill 20 volumes, may some day translate them into English.

All this interests Angus little, though the commission keeps telling him that he is helping to save the Hebrides folklore from oblivion. At 74, Angus wants only to be a good crofter, to keep to his own sgeulachlan, and to tell of oldtime lovers and rogues and kings, ending each story with the very same words: "dhealaich mise rithe"--"and so I parted with them."

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