” … The idea of a language of the birds was already old when it appeared in Norse myth. This was the belief that birdsong and human speech were sometimes so close that certain gifted individuals could cross from one to the other. This is a seductive theory. In 1857, hauling through the Pentland Firth aboard the Fox, Captain Francis McClintock likened the ‘hoarse screams and unintelligible dialect’ of the Orkney pilots to the sound of the sea birds that mobbed them, ‘as if we had suddenly awoke in Greenland itself’. And in the online database Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches, two recordings from the late 1950s demonstrate an old established belief in the adjacency of human and bird song. In wax cylinder recordings, Mrs Annie Johnston of Barra integrates the ‘conversation’ of the thrush, the lark, the crow, the gull and the dove into her own Gaelic. In another, her husband, Mr Calum Johnston, sings a Pilliù, an ancient caoine or keening song. The Pilliù mimics the long call and syllables of the redshank. Of these kinds of singing, says ethnologist Mairi McFadyen, ‘the dividing lines between bird-song, music and speech are impossible to determine … ’.

Delighted to see my article in the new issue of PNReview, ed. Michael Schmidt, publ. Carcanet.