‘Griogal Cridhe’ Aspects of Transmission in the Lament for Griogair Ruadh Mac Griogair of Glen Strae

Abstract

With the advent of Tobar an Dualchais (www.tobarandualchais.co.uk), the online trove of materials recorded from oral tradition during the last century and held by the National Trust for Scotland, the BBC, and the sound archive of the School of Scottish Studies, it has become easier to integrate study of published and manuscript versions of traditional materials – most of which date from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – with more recent orally-transmitted versions of the same materials. Such study has the potential to help us understand the workings of oral transmission over time, to evaluate the printed and manuscript sources of an earlier day, and to understand the complex inter-relationship between written and orally-transmitted traditional materials in the Gàidhealtachd itself.