A kelpie, or water kelpie, is a shape-shifting spirit inhabiting lochs in Irish and Scottish folklore. It is usually described as a grey or white horse-like creature, able to adopt human form. Some accounts state that the kelpie retains its hooves when appearing as a human, leading to its association with the Christian idea of Satan as alluded to by Robert Burns in his 1786 poem "Address to the Devil".
The Gàidhealtachd usually refers to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and especially the Scottish Gaelic-speaking culture of the area. The similar Irish language word Gaeltacht refers, however, solely to Irish-speaking areas.
The boobrie is a mythological shapeshifting entity inhabiting the lochs of the west coast of Scotland. It commonly adopts the appearance of a gigantic water bird resembling a cormorant or great northern diver, but it can also materialise in the form of various other mythological creatures such as a water bull.
Martyn Bennett was a Canadian-Scottish musician who was influential in the evolution of modern Celtic fusion, a blending of traditional Celtic and modern music. He was a piper, violinist, composer and producer. Diagnosis of serious illness at the age of thirty curtailed his live performances, although he completed a further two albums in the studio. He died from cancer in 2005, fifteen months after release of his fifth album Grit.
Charles Marius Barbeau,, also known as C. Marius Barbeau, or more commonly simply Marius Barbeau, was a Canadian ethnographer and folklorist who is today considered a founder of Canadian anthropology. A Rhodes Scholar, he is best known for an early championing of Québecois folk culture, and for his exhaustive cataloguing of the social organization, narrative and musical traditions, and plastic arts of the Tsimshianic-speaking peoples in British Columbia, and other Northwest Coast peoples. He developed unconventional theories about the peopling of the Americas.
Public folklore is the term for the work done by folklorists in public settings in the United States and Canada outside of universities and colleges, such as arts councils, museums, folklife festivals, radio stations, etc., as opposed to academic folklore, which is done within universities and colleges. The term is short for "public sector folklore" and was first used by members of the American Folklore Society in the early 1970s.
Canadian Gaelic or Cape Breton Gaelic, often known in Canadian English simply as Gaelic, is a collective term for the dialects of Scottish Gaelic spoken in Atlantic Canada.
Hilda Chaulk Murray is the nom-de-plume of Newfoundland author Hilda Emily Louise Murray, née Chaulk.
Florence Marian McNeill, was a Scottish folklorist, author, editor, suffragist and political activist. She is best known for writing The Silver Bough, a four-volume study of Scottish folklore; also The Scots Kitchen and Scots Cellar: Its Traditions and Lore with Old-time Recipes.
The Codroy Valley is a valley in the southwestern part of the island of Newfoundland in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Elsie Worthington Clews Parsons was an American anthropologist, sociologist, folklorist, and feminist who studied Native American tribes—such as the Tewa and Hopi—in Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico. She helped found The New School. She was associate editor for The Journal of American Folklore (1918–1941), president of the American Folklore Society (1919–1920), president of the American Ethnological Society (1923–1925), and was elected the first female president of the American Anthropological Association (1941) right before her death.
Bothy Culture is the second studio album by the Scottish Celtic fusion artist Martyn Bennett, released in January 1998 on the Rykodisc label. After winning critical acclaim for his debut album Martyn Bennett (1996), Bothy Culture builds upon that album's mixing of Scottish Celtic music with farther, international folk music styles and contemporary electronic music. The album celebrates and draws upon the music of Bennett's native Gaeldom as well as the music of Islam and Scandinavia, with Bennett finding and emotionally connecting to the similarities between the geographically dispersed styles. It mixes the styles with contemporary electronic music such as breakbeat and drum and bass.
Lori Watson is a fiddle player and folk singer who performs traditional and contemporary folk music. She is the first doctor of Artistic Research in Scottish Music.
Rosalind Mary Mitchison FRSE was a 20th-century English historian and academic who specialised in Scottish social history. She was affectionately known as "Rowy" Mitchison.
Wilhelm Fritz Hermann Nicolaisen was a folklorist, linguist, medievalist, scholar of onomastics and literature, educator, and author with specialties in Scottish and American studies.
The School of Scottish Studies was founded in 1951 at the University of Edinburgh. It holds an archive of approximately 33,000 field recordings of traditional music, song and other lore, housed in George Square, Edinburgh. The collection was begun by Calum Maclean - brother of the poet, Sorley MacLean - and the poet, writer and folklorist, Hamish Henderson, both of whom collaborated with American folklorist Alan Lomax, who is credited as being a catalyst and inspiration for the work of the school.
Canadian folklore is the traditional material that Canadians pass down from generation to generation, either as oral literature or "by custom or practice". It includes songs, legends, jokes, rhymes, proverbs, weather lore, superstitions, and practices such as traditional food-making and craft-making. The largest bodies of folklore in Canada belong to the aboriginal and French-Canadian cultures. English-Canadian folklore and the folklore of recent immigrant groups have added to the country's folk.
John Gregorson Campbell was a Scottish folklorist and Free Church minister at the Tiree and Coll parishes in Argyll, Scotland. An avid collector of traditional stories, he became Secretary to the Ossianic Society of Glasgow University in the mid-1850s. Ill health had prevented him taking up employment as a Minister when he was initially approved to preach by the Presbytery of Glasgow in 1858 and later after he was appointed to Tiree by the Duke of Argyll in 1861, parishioners objected to his manner of preaching.
Margaret Fay Shaw was a pioneering Scottish-American ethnomusicologist, photographer, folklorist, and scholar of Celtic studies. She is best known for her meticulous work as a folk song and folklore collector among Scottish Gaelic-speakers in the Hebrides, Canadian Gaelic-speaking communities in Nova Scotia, and among Connaught Irish speakers in the Aran Islands.
Marion Bowman is a British academic working on the borders of religious studies and folklore and ethnology. She is Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies, The Open University.
