Murder Ballad MondayCruel is the snow – the massacre of Glencoe – part two
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Cruel is the snow – the massacre of Glencoe – part two — 1 Comment

  1. Tom, this is fascinating stuff. Thanks for the exploration of these events. I’m curious still, however, about the song itself. In your previous post, you wrote:

    “Inevitably this story has also become weaved into the national myth of Scotland as another example of victimhood against the English. However in many ways this story is almost exclusively an internal Scottish story, another marker in the split between modernity and medieval, between the ‘progressive Lowlands’ against the ‘backwards Highlands.'”

    What do you think Maclean was up to relative to these options in telling the story? Where does it fit within his other work, and what’s your sense of its popular reception in Scotland over the years? Why do you think audiences resonate with it? It seems far less a rallying cry for nationalism, than a lament for (a) the victims of a heinous crime, and (more pertinently, although not more importantly) (b) a lost way of life.

    The events happened before the Sir Walter Scott era of romanticized Scottishness, but the song comes well after. I’m interested in how the dynamics of nostalgia, mourning, and loss play out here, and am curious whether there was any cultural production (musical or otherwise) that emerged back in the 18th century or thereabouts that we can hold up beside “The Massacre of Glencoe” for comparison.