Minstrels and Metaphors: The Hidden Messages in Early Nineteenth-Century Celtic Song Collections

The introductions to late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Celtic song collections are often rich in imagery, harking back to bygone days of minstrels and bards, with mournful harps and sorrowful itinerant minstrels at every turn. To a certain extent, this paratextual material can be linked with the tradition of so-called 'minstrel writing' found in contemporary literature.
In my research into Scottish song collecting of this period, early nineteenth-century introductions are also sometimes characterised - by the more literary-minded compilers at least - with metaphors about wild flowers, rich jewels and flowing rivers.
In this paper, I propose to compare these Scottish collections with contemporary Irish ones - sharing the minstrels and bards, but not necessarily using the same natural metaphors - in order to test my hypothesis that the imagery and metaphors can be interpreted as a mirror of the cultural, and indeed national, preoccupations of their age. If such is the case, then these often overlooked Victorian song collections are worthy of more attention, and certainly deserve their place in the music libraries of today.