Life and Times of Rev. Charles Robertson

Sabhal Mòr Ostaig
Ionad Iain Nobail
21/11/19
13.00

Free event and open to all to attend.

Rev. Charles M. Robertson (1864–1927) was one of the greatest Scottish Gaelic scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A native of Strathtay in Perthshire, his work as a minister took him round the Highlands to places such as Arran, Argyle, Lochaber, Inverness-shire, Nairnshire, Sutherland, Wester Ross, Skye, Jura and Islay, as well as his native Perthshire. For over thirty years Robertson rigorously gathered detailed information on place-names, dialect and folklore from local Gaelic speakers. He did this at a time when Gaelic was still the dominant language in these places, and much of the information that he gathered, especially place-names, would have otherwise been completely lost to us were it not for his surviving notebooks.

Dr Jacob King has recently published Robertson’s place-name material as Scottish Gaelic Place-Names: The Collected Works of Charles M. Robertson. In this talk Dr King  will survey the place-name material as well as the vast amount of unpublished Gaelic dialect material Robertson produced in his lifetime.