#rassay

November 24th marks the 2t6h anniversary of the death of Sorley MacLean, Somhairle MacGill-Eain.

For those that don’t go through the whole post, but you have an interest in Scotland and The Gaelic, I implore you to watch Sorley go through the names of some of our famous peaks, it’s great for those of us who  do not have the Gaelic.

Arguably Scotland’s greatest modern Gaelic poet and a man many experts feel should have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for the genius of his poetry and his efforts to preserve and promote the Gaelic language.

I posted a lengthy biography just last month , so I’ll keep this a wee bit brief, 

His early poetry was in English, but soon came to the conclusion that his true love was for verse in Gaelic, and certainly by the mid 1930s he was well known as a writer in this tongue. Much of his work was specifically political, and his position was Marxist, although he was also a skilled and delicate writer of love poetry. During World War II he served in North Africa, and was wounded on three occasions, one of which was severe. His work in the field of Gaelic poetry at the time which very few writers of substance were working in Gaelic at all, has led to him being seen as the father of the Gaelic renaissance. His poetry articulated in Gaelic the crimes of the 20th century and modernised and reinvigorated the language in the process, drawing clear and articulate analogies between such tragedies as the Highland Clearances and the contemporary viciousness and injustice of events in places such as Biafra and Rwanda.