Allan MacDonald (poet)

The Reverend Allan MacDonald (Scottish Gaelic Maighstir Ailein, An t-Athair Ailean Dòmhnallach) (25 October 1859, Fort William, Scotland – 8 October 1905, Eriskay) was a Scottish Catholic priest during the Victorian era. During the later phases of the Highland Clearances, MacDonald was a direct action activist for the reform of the absolute power granted to Anglo-Scottish landlords to both rackrent and evict their tenants en masse and at will under Scots property law. As a highly sophisticated and multilingual reader and writer, MacDonald was a radically innovative religious and secular poet with a place in the literary canon of Scottish Gaelic literature and a respected folklorist and collector from the oral tradition in the Highlands and Islands.

Allan MacDonald was born in Fort William, Lochaber into a middle class family and was raised to only speak English by his upwardly mobile parents. While studying for the priesthood in both Blairs College in Aberdeen and at the Royal Scots College in Spain, the already multilingual MacDonald chose to also begin studying Scottish Gaelic, his ancestral heritage language, and was later to become both a fluent speaker and writer in the language.

After returning to his homeland and being ordained to the priesthood, in the immediate aftermath of repeal of the Penal Laws, Catholic emancipation in 1829, and the 1878 restoration of the Hierarchy, MacDonald was assigned to the Diocese of Argyll and the Isles during the final decade of the Highland Clearances. This was during the height of the Highland Land League agitation and MacDonald became, similarly to many other Victorian era Highland priests, inspired by the Irish Land War, and under orders from his bishop, a leading and formidable activist for tenant's rights, reasonable rents, security of tenure, free elections, and against the political bossism and religious discrimination that were keeping his parishioners in the Outer Hebrides critically impoverished.

In 1889, MacDonald published a Catholic hymnal in Gaelic, consisting of traditional hymns, personally collected from Catholic traditional singers and his own literary translations from a variety of other languages. This hymnal is still in use. Becoming a respected scholar of Celtic studies, MacDonald "wore himself out in the apostolate" in South Uist and Eriskay. He died of pneumonia, pleurisy, and influenza at the age of only 45.

Decades after his death in 1905, MacDonald's many unpublished manuscripts of his Christian and secular poetry were tracked down by Scottish nationalist and Gaelic-language literary scholar John Lorne Campbell, edited, and published for the first time in 1965. The sources of the priest-poet's 1893 Gaelic hymnal and the degree to which MacDonald's folklore notebooks were both plagiarized and distorted by fraudulent medium and paranormal researcher Ada Goodrich Freer has also been meticulously documented and publicized by both John Lorne Campbell and Trevor H. Hall. Celticist Ronald Black, who edited the 2002 bilingual collection of his verse for Mungo Books, wrote that had MacDonald, a pioneer of symbolist and modernist poetry in Gaelic, not died prematurely, "the map of Gaelic literature in the twentieth century might have looked very different."