Mar a chuala mi: remembering and telling Gaelic Stories: a study of Brian Stewart

This thesis is a study of one storyteller, Brian Stewart, and his storytelling. The aim of the project is to understand and elucidate the way in which one storyteller remembers and tells stories. The methods used in the study are the direct questioning of the storyteller about his relationship to storytelling, as well as a detailed comparative analysis of the stories themselves. As such, the thesis is as much concerned with the storyteller's own beliefs about storytelling as with the evidence supplied by the stories.In the Introduction I discuss the aims of the project and explain its genesis and my reasons for choosing the methods employed.In Chapter One I discuss questions about the nature of Gaelic storytelling, and review the scholarly literature related to this study.In Chapter Two I discuss Mr. Stewart's life story, relying heavily on comments and material recorded from the storyteller himself. This discussion concentrates on topics which Mr. Stewart has emphasised in the course of interviews, including boyhood memories of travelling and the travelling life, related activities such as tin-smithing and horse-dealing, and storytelling.In Chapter Three I consider Brian Stewart's development as a storyteller: his knowledge and experience of storytelling, and his own comments on how he learned and remembered stories, how his memory works, and on storytelling practices in general.Chapter Four consists of an analysis of the stories themselves. Here I use close to 40 separate recordings of nine different stories recorded between 1958 and 1995, comparing different recordings of the same stories in terms of their episodic structure, content, and use of language. The aim of the comparison is to discover patterns of variation and similarity between the story versions, and so to identify features of Brian Stewart's storytelling and to better understand his storytelling ethos. The Conclusion summarises the overall findings of the thesis, and points to some possibilities for future scholarly inquiry in this field.Following the main body of the thesis, transcriptions of the recorded story versions discussed in Chapter Four are contained in an appendix, as is other background information on the stories as may be useful to other scholars