‘Out of a reverie, and as if giving unconscious expression to a deep internal feeling’

Abstract

This chapter discusses the songs which were performed to accompany the labour of clothmaking in Gaelic-speaking areas of Ireland and Scotland. Clothmaking was predominantly women’s work, and these songs provide us with an insight into the preoccupations of song-poets whose compositions are unlikely to have been preserved elsewhere in the tradition. There are deep underlying similarities between the Irish and Scottish clothmaking corpora which have not been discussed in any detail to date; there are also indications that the liminal context of clothmaking songs demonstrates a degree of overlap with other elements of Gaelic tradition, particularly in the contexts of matchmaking and fertility and in the reassertion of physical boundaries seen, for example, in traditional May Day celebrations.