Greek Gaels, British Gaels: Classical allusion in early-modern Scottish Gaelic poetry

This chapter explores the use of Classical allusions in early-modern Scottish Gaelic poetry, and the two distinct ways in which they connected with the Scottish Gaels’ understanding of Britishness. Gaelic Scotland and Gaelic Ireland shared the same field of literary reference, with Ireland as the fountainhead. Consequently, Classical reception in Scottish Gaelic literature owed much to Classical reception in Ireland. However, once Scotland became part of the kingdom of Britain, and particularly in the Jacobite period, poets began to deploy new Classical allusions, in which a shift in type and purpose can be detected, designed to address contemporary political circumstances. A sense of Gaelic Britishness, and a specific understanding of what it meant to be British, developed in Gaelic Scotland in the seventeenth century. Classical allusion played a meaningful role in its expression through poetic discourse right up to the aftermath of Culloden, the final Jacobite defeat.