Listen to this episode and find more information about the topics therein at theallusionist.org/fiona2.
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, huddle around language to keep warm.
This episode is the second half of the two-parter about the name Fiona. Listen to part 1 first, then come back here for part 2, which will make a lot more sense that way round. Apt for the subject matter that they are two mutually necessary halves.
One last reminder: the Allusionist live show Your Name Here is happening at the Hot Docs cinema in Toronto at 1pm on Sunday 11 December. Masks on, come along, musical entertainment about eponyms doesn’t happen every day, or indeed the majority of days, but it is happening on this day in Toronto. Tickets are at theallusionist.org/events.
On with the show.
HZ: Previously on the Allusionist:
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Everyone thinks it's an old Scottish name, but it's not an old Scottish name.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Given how common the name Fiona is now, you wouldn't have thought it just suddenly appeared in like 1893 or whatever.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: The first public figure who had the name Fiona is the Scottish writer Fiona Macleod. Fiona Macleod was kind of talked about as this prophetess of the Celtic revival.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: William Sharp was a late Victorian writer, was not really the most popular writer in the world. After William Sharp's death, everybody else found out that he wrote as Macleod.
HZ: That’s Moll Heaton-Callaway, who has written a PhD thesis about William Sharp and Fiona Macleod, or Willfion as they were sometimes called, and writer and performer Harry Josie Giles. I asked Josie what the response had been in the literary world when, upon William Sharp’s death in 1905, he was revealed to have been Fiona Macleod.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Some people just take this as a kind of beautiful expression of an artistic ideal. A lot of people continue to speak of Fiona Macleod's work in high terms and continue to talk about it as worked with a great deal of value.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: There was a mix of, "Oh, we knew it," because it had been speculated that Fiona and William Sharp were the same person, or some sort of a personal link between them. So there was a certain degree of, "Yes, we could have figured that out on our own." And a mix of, for some people, a sense of betrayal or a sense of, “I can't believe I was taken in by that.” But in all in all, it is mostly respectful.
HZ: William Sharp’s wife Elizabeth Sharp published her affectionate biography of William and Fiona in 1910, and released volumes of selected writings of Fiona Macleod and William Sharp. But over time, the public attitude towards them and their work did become more negative.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: From the early to mid 1910s, publication of Sharp and Macleod's works been dropping off. But it's only really in the 1930s that it starts to become controversial. After Elizabeth Sharp died in the 1930s, this is when we start seeing rejection of William Sharp and Fiona Macleod. So it's very much sort of a, "We can only be disrespectful once Elizabeth Sharp is no longer there to make us feel ashamed of ourselves."
HARRY JOSIE GILES: As the years pass, there's more and more criticism, and I think particularly of what is more manufactured, or what we might now say appropriated, in Fiona Macleod's work - that you start to see questioning of the authenticity of the work. And this is as ideas of authenticity are starting to gain more traction in literature, in art. And I think less the gender material, actually, I think less the trans aspect of what's going on, and more the questioning of the authenticity of the Celtic material itself starts to undermine Fiona Macleod's reputation. And even though people wrote about her at the time as one of Scotland's most important writers, she passes remarkably quickly out of the literary canon, to the point where most people have never heard of Fiona Macleod.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Fiona goes from being one of the absolute figureheads of the Celtic Renaissance to being almost completely forgotten about.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: And yet, there are echoes. There are echoes of Fiona Macleod and William Sharp. And the name Fiona is just one of them, that it is now an ordinary name. And I don't think that anyone should come away from this conversation not wanting to use the name Fiona. I think this is a beautiful and rich history. It might not be quite the history that you imagined, but I think it's a beautiful history. I can't get them out of my head because they seem to me to teach us so much about Scottishness and Scottish literature.
HZ: To recap: William Sharp was a Protestant Lowlander also writing as the Catholic Highlander Fiona Macleod.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: There is something uncomfortable about that, and I think we should find that a bit uncomfortable. This was happening before language around cultural appropriation was used, and this kind of writing across cultural lines was not so uncommon at the time. But there is something uncomfortable about it. And particularly there's something uncomfortable, I think, about someone from a largely Lowland background, who was not a fluent Gaelic speaker, trying to be this prophetess of the Celtic revival and trying to write authentically as a Gael and trying to take on that role.
HZ: Something we talked about in Fiona part 1 is that by writing as Fiona Macleod, William Sharp was able to publish without being sullied by his reputation as an uncelebrated hack writer of potboilers and whatever else he could pay the bills with. And Moll Heaton-Callaway sees further reasons for William and Fiona to have been kept distinct.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: One thing I speculate in my thesis is that this was a way to distance Fiona Macleod from William Sharp not only professionally but also personally, to make these distinctions so that Fiona Macleod was not too much like the woman that William Sharp would've been had he been assigned female; to give personal emotional distance.
But there is also a sense that William Sharp in his writings, in his letters, for example, never seems to consider himself fully Scottish. He is Scottish, but he's Lowlands Protestant rather than Highlands Catholic. And it's quite clear in his writing that he considers Highlands Catholicism to be like the highest form of Scottishness, the purest form of Scottishness. And so it could potentially be an attempt to allow himself access to Scottishness that he doesn't necessarily have in his daily life, and also in his daily publishing. He's very much beholden to the London market. The London market at that period doesn't want anything to be particularly... questioning of the colonial project, let's put it that way. So Welsh literature shouldn't sound too Welsh, Scottish literature shouldn't sound too Scottish; it should sound just Scottish enough or just Welsh enough to be exotic. But it shouldn't be problematic for the London market. So, William Sharp's literary career as William Sharp often underplayed his Scottishness. And sometimes you'll come across some of his writing that seems anti-Scottish. But I think you kind of have to interpret that in the light of this is a person who is constantly having to write for whatever opportunity will come up. And so there is this little bit of self denial in that, that I think Fiona's incredible Scottishness, her sort of ‘ideal’ Scottishness, is intended to counteract that in some ways.
HZ: So William is both not Scottish enough and too Scottish.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Not Scottish enough for himself or for his own artistic desires, but too Scottish for London. So Fiona is this gateway into kind of Scottishness that William Sharp has kind of been personally and professionally denied.
HZ: Elizabeth edited these books with Celtic poetry and stuff. But did the two of them spend that much time in the Highlands?
HARRY JOSIE GILES: No! No, they did not. They went there on holiday. They both mention William's time in the Highlands when he was a child, and they both mention the influence of a Gaelic nurse or a Gaelic fisherman, a Gaelic-speaking fisherman that William spent time with. And this is usually mentioned to kind of ground the authenticity of the Fiona Macleod project. They were constantly striving for that authenticity, but I think it's rather more dubious than they would like us to believe.
HZ: It's interesting, isn't it, that all these things that Fiona had that were perceived disadvantages, like more Scottishness, femaleness, worked great for her professionally.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Absolutely, absolutely. I do think it is interesting, and I do think it is perhaps a sign that Fiona's works were so good that they kind of overcame these disadvantages. Or you might also interpret it that they reinforced some of these exotic ideas about Celticism, and these exotic ideas about Celtic femininity. Celticism is very much associated with femininity. There's all of these stereotypes of airy, psychic Celtic femininity. And you might say that Macleod's work is playing into all of those tropes, and it absolutely is.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: So something that is going on here, and that I think ties into this Highland/Lowland Gaelic/ English binary, is that male/female gets written into that binary as well, and so femininity in the mind usually of Lowland writers becomes associated with Gaelic culture, with the Highlands, with the natural. And this definitely exists in William Sharp's mind as a binary as well. And so Fiona Macleod almost becomes this kind of natural expression of William Sharp's emotionality; and coded into a Gaelic writer, his emotionality, which is maybe suspect as a man, becomes authentic as a Celtic woman. That's kind of what's happening there, I think. With hindsight, I would want to problematize all of these binaries and would say that the way that Gaelic culture is identified with the feminine and identified with the natural is a colonial binary, and is part of the system of thinking that continually erodes Gaelic culture.
I think it's also the case that a huge part of Scottish literary history, that so much of what we understand of Celtic mythology now has been relayed through people who were not Gaels and has been relayed through a colonial framework; that our very way of thinking about Gaelic life has been colonized partly through centuries of literature, and this goes a long way back to the beginning of the Celtic Revival. James Macpherson's Tales of Ossian, which is this totemic work of literary romanticism and this foundation of the Celtic revival, and was supposedly an English translation of myths and stories and legends and a translation of an original epic from the Gaelic: but what we know now is that Macpherson fabricated a huge amount of the Tales of Ossian. Potentially the first part of it was a kind of stitching together of actual Gaelic songs and stories. But some of it was fabricated out of whole cloth. And certainly the way that Macpherson put it all together in English was his creation.
HZ: It’s fine if he'd put "inspired by real mythology", if that's not too contradictory.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: It would've been helpful. And there's been centuries of debate since about how much of Ossian was fabricated by Macpherson and how much of it predates Macpherson. And it makes it harder sometimes to get to Gaelic originals beneath the kind of English super-imposition. That's still true today. And there are still people who don't know that Ossian is largely a fabrication. And this is so much of Scottish literature. At the same time, there is and has always been a continuing Gaelic literature, which has rarely had as much attention as the interpretations of Gaelic literature as made by people who didn't have Gaelic, by English speakers.
HZ: It's reminding me of that kid that made up all that Scots language wikipedia recently.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: That's a very good contemporary version of the same dynamic, I think.
HZ: In August 2020 it was revealed that some 23,000 articles, about a third of the articles on Scots Wikipedia, had been cobbled together in a mixture of English gobbledygook and English rendered into Scots through translation software. The perpetrator was an American teenager who didn't speak any Scots.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: That's actually a really good example, because that American kid wanted to be doing good, like really wanted to be strengthening the Scots language, creating more resources in the Scots language, and didn't know enough to understand the damage that he was doing and the way that the work that he was doing was creating a false corpus for the language.
HZ: That's clear to see because we are alive at the same time as those events unfurled. But yeah, when you're looking back to late 1700s with James Macpherson, it's cloudier.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: So much cloudier. In that cloud, in that mist, we have this name, Fiona.
HZ: Because the fIrst known appearance in writing of the word 'Fiona' is actually in the English version of James Macpherson's Tales of Ossian that he published in the 1760s.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: There is one usage of the word Fiona, actually with the two little dots over the o, the diacritical mark, so we know it's supposed to be pronounced fee-O-na. It's a really passing reference. It's just used once, and in fact, in the Gaelic version of Ossian, which we now think Macpherson back translated from the English, it's not used at all.
HZ: Oh! How does he do the line instead? Because the line that I've seen is: "Let the sighs of Fiöna rise on the dark heaths of her lovely Ardan."
HARRY JOSIE GILES: That's the line. So there's a different name in that place, the name is Eibhir, which is E I B H I R, which is another name I can't figure out where Macpherson got that from. It's possible that he invented both names out of whole cloth. The versions of Eibhir that I've seen are masculine versions, so it's a little bit obscure where that comes from.
HZ: And is Fiona weather here? Or some kind of divine force? Or supposed to be to be human in this line?
HARRY JOSIE GILES: In the first edition of Ossian that I can find, there's a footnote to Fiona, which translates it 'a fair maid'. Now, whether that 'a fair maid' is referring to a person called Fiona, or whether Fiona is a kind of epithet for a fair maid, or whatever Macpherson intended, is a little bit hard to find.
HZ: Right.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: But as far as I can tell, Macperson puts together the word, just fabricates the word.
HZ: He's got practice.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Yeah, yeah, exactly, he fabricates a whole epic. And I can't find a written example of Fiona in that usage before Macpherson. It looks like there’s some derivation from a Gaelic word for ‘white’ in there, that something like that may be going on. Confusingly, in the Gaelic version of Ossian, there's another use of that sequence of letters, but in the context, it's very clear that that's supposed to be pronounced FEE-na. In the English that gets translated as Fiona-Bràgail, and in the Gaelic, it's just as Fiona [FEE-na], F I O N A, without the accent. So that's in there in Macpherson's creation as well.
And then also confusingly, Macpherson uses the same sequence of letters to refer to what we now call the Fèinne, the sort of wandering Warrior Bands. In Scots Gaelic, it's pronounced FAYN-ye; generally you'd find it in English as FYEN-a now. But, in some of the notes on some of the editions of parts of Ossian, Macpherson writes that as F I O N A as well. So it's possible that either of those are getting muddled up in what Macpherson is doing. It's a little bit obscure.
There's also, I found one set of that sequence of letters in an older Gaelic text, with reference to a male figure actually is an alternative name for the Saxon Alfred. Alfred in a couple of older Irish texts actually is referred to as Flann Fiona, F I O N A, son of Ossa, King of Saxonland. But all of these are very different usages and are different spellings and don't have the accent that tells us that this is supposed to be pronounced Fiona [fee-OH-na].
HZ: The Welsh name Ffion, F F I O N, is a modern one when given to girls; it means 'foxglove'. But the male name Ffion is old, more than a thousand years old in Welsh and Breton.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Yeah, yeah. So that is a male name. A lot of my research here owes a debt to a researcher called Sharon Krossa, who did some of the earlier work on the origins of the name Fiona. and I am not an expert in Gaelic by any means. I'm just a Gaelic learner, and my pronunciations and my knowledge are quite weak.
HZ: Better than mine.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: But Sharon Krossa does understand the medieval origins of these names and words a lot better than me, and has done quite a fine piece of etymology arguing that to form a female name from Ffion or Fionn with just by adding an -A to it: that's not something that happens, that's not how a Gaelic feminine is formed. And we can't find any examples of anyone actually doing that to Fionn to make Fiona. So this is the other complication that comes in there: there is an old Gaelic name, which is Fionnghal. And that is the Gaelic name, the English equivalent of which - there's a tradition of Gaelic names having English equivalents - that would usually be given in English as Flora, which is the old name. So usually when somebody uses Fionnghal in the Gaelic context, they would use Flora in an English context. William Sharp claimed occasionally that Fiona was an abbreviation of Fionnghal. I can't find any evidence of anyone doing that before Fiona Macleod. And again, according to Sharon Krossa, it's just not how you would form a diminutive from Fionnghal. It doesn't make sense in a Gaelic linguistic context. And we already had Flora to do that work.
HZ: In case this isn't complicated enough, Flora and Fionnghal may be used as equivalents, but they have different meanings - Flora is from the Latin for 'flower' whereas Fionnghal means 'white-shouldered', being the Scottish form of the Irish name Fionnghuala [other spellings include Fionnuala or Finola], which IS centuries old and female-assigned, and means white-shouldered - this might have been an expression for someone having fair hair. In Irish mythology, Fionnghuala was turned into a swan for 900 years, I guess swans have white shoulders, if they have shoulders? Do swans have shoulders? A question for another time!
There's also the old Irish male name Fionnan or Finnian, which also means pale or fair, there are several saints called it from the 5th, 6th, 7th centuries - and the name Finn which has various different origins that all ended up as the modern 'Finn', but one origin is the aforemented Ffion.
There is also an early Gaelic name [FEEN-ya], spelled Fíne, that meant 'vine', so etymologically unrelated to Fiona, which means 'white' if you believe all the baby name lists.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: This is probably the same thing going on where people are taking this word for white, where Finn and Fionn come from, and assuming that's that's what the meaning of Fiona is. And that's possibly why Macpherson uses it. And that's possibly why we get 'a fair maid' as a translation of Fiona, 'fair' and 'white' being kind of connected there. Sharp gives it as the same meaning that Macpherson does: he says it's a fair maid. So in some letters he says, "Fiona means a fair maid, it's an ancient Scottish name, I've heard it, there's a minister's daughter just the next island over who has the name Fiona." This is something he says every so often. So sometimes he says it means a fair maid, at other times he says it's a diminutive of Fionnghal. And in fact, he does write a letter to Fiona, in which he addresses her as ‘Fionaghal NicLeòid’ which is a Gaelic version of Fiona Macleod. So he does sometimes call her Fionaghal.
HZ: A letter from Fiona Macleod says:
It may interest you to know that the name which seems to puzzle so many people is (though it does exist as the name “Fiona,” not only in Ossian but at the present day, though rarely) the Gaelic diminutive of “Fionaghal” (i.e. Flora). “Fiona,” however, and not “Fionaghal,” is my name.
Note that the letter asys the name “seems to puzzle” - this I think does indicate the name Fiona was not common - if it did exist at all - before Fiona Macleod, because contemporaries of Fiona Macleod, William Sharp, really struggled with it - they couldn't pronounce it, couldn't spell it...
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: They just don't seem to know how to pronounce it, which is very strange, considering how it seems to be one of the most intuitive names to pronounce.
HZ: Yes. There's no silent letters…
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Exactly. Not a single one.
HZ: Even the vowels don't come with the ambiguity that a lot of words do.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: No. They don't. They absolutely don’t!
HZ: It's short.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Yeah. It definitely doesn't seem as intuitive to people in the 1890s as it is later on. There might have been young girls in the Highlands who had been called Fiona and they'd just never been reported on a census; so it might be that Fiona was being used as a nickname for a longer name for an extremely long time and had just never been a Christian name. But this was just not a name that was in use.
HZ: Why do you think people want this name to be old? Like old, old - because for some people, late 19th century is old - but, old, old.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: I think people want it to be old for exactly the same reason that William Sharp created Fiona Macleod. They want a connection to Celtic authenticity. I think that's what William Sharp was reaching for. William Sharp, as best I can tell, plucked the name out of Ossian. But whether that was consciously or not, William Sharp did edit an edition of Ossian, and he edited an edition of Ossian where there is that accent over the O of Fiöna. So I think when he was looking for an authentic Celtic Gaelic name, he reached for Fiona because it's mentioned in Ossian and because he didn't really want to believe that Ossian itself was a bit of a fabrication. It's fabrication all the way down.
But Scottishness is made up all the way down, that whenever you go searching for kind of authenticity or ideas of Scottishness, you find someone telling a story that's a little bit shaky. And it also means to me that there is transness at a really pivotal moment in Scottish literature and that some of the binaries that have now become almost a cliche in Scottish literary analysis - Catholic/Protestant, Highland/Lowland, English/Gaelic, male/female as well - these cliches of what gets called the Caledonian Antisyzygy, in a wonderfully overblown term, are really embodied in this one creation of Willfion, of William Sharp and Fiona Macleod.
HZ: Caledonian Antisyzergy, noun: “The presence of duelling polarities within one entity, considered to be characteristic of the Scottish temperament.”
HARRY JOSIE GILES: There's a last story that I think is really worth telling. It kind of sums up the whole story to me. So they're on holiday in the Highlands, and they're out walking and they spy a boat, a little rowing boat that's on a loch. And they squint at the boat, and they squint at the name of the boat and they think, “It can't be, can it? Can it?” And they get closer and closer and they look at it and they realize that yes, indeed this little rowing boat on this little loch is named Fiona. And they go closer and they realize that there's a man in the boat, and William Sharp, not giving the game away at all, says, "Oh, that's a very pretty name on your boat there. Where did you get that name from? Is it a real name?" And the man says, "Yes, it's a real name. It's an old Highland name." And Sharp says, "Do you know anyone who has that name then?" And the man in the boat says, "Yeah, there's a daughter of a minister over the way that's called Fiona." And Sharp says, "Oh, so it'll be after her then that the boat's named?" And the man in the boat says, "No, no, it's not named, It's not named after her." "Oh," says Sharp, " is it named after your mother or your grandmother?" And the man says, "No, no, no. It's named after this great writer lady from Iona." And apparently this man read a story of Fiona Macleod's in the Oban Times - Oban being a town in the West Highlands - and decided to name the boat after her. So in this search for authenticity, in this search for the real use of the name of Fiona, all that William Sharp can come back to is themself.
HZ: What a fan encounter.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: It's, it's beautiful, isn't it? And I just love the way that you can see in the questions that Sharp is so desperate, so desperate to find some authentication of this name Fiona, and can only encounter Fiona Macleod. But then, maybe Fiona Macleod is authenticity enough for the name.
HZ: Yeah. I mean, all names had to start somewhere. They were all made.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Yeah.
Following the first Fiona episode, Beth says in the Allusioverse Discord: “When I googled Fiona MacLeod, I discovered that Google just pulls up William Sharp's information, in a way that feels less sensitive to the complexities of their identity than this podcast was. It's interesting to me how these choices are made - if you google George Eliot or Mary Ann Evans, the heading that comes up is George Eliot.” Very interesting. Care to comment, Google? Anyway this kind of thoughtful chat is one of the several things that make the Allusioverse Discord such an inviting and charming place to spend time online, and you can be there with your fellow excellent podfans if you support this independent podcast at theallusionist.org/donate.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
hyperbaton, noun, rhetoric: an inversion of the normal order of words, especially for emphasis, as in, “This I must see.”
Origin 16th century via Latin from Greek huperbaton, ‘overstepping’.
Try using ‘hyperbaton’ in an email today.
In this episode you heard from Harry Josie Giles, who is a performer and writer; her verse novel Deep Wheel Orcadia recently won the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction book of the year! You also heard from Moll Heaton-Callaway, scholar of queer book history, who has written their phd thesis about Fiona Macleod and William Sharp.
Thanks to Julie Dineen, and Shannon Krossa, whose article ‘Concerning the Name Fiona’ I’ll link to at theallusionist.org/fiona2. Martin Austwick provided editorial advice as well as the original music for the Allusionist. Hear his compositions via palebirdmusic.com and as Pale Bird on Bandcamp.
Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor an episode of the show in 2023, contact them at multitude.productions/ads.
There’ll be one more episode this year: Bonus 2022! I love these bonus episodes, they’re selection boxes of intriguing etymological tidbits and interesting chat. Throughout the year I’ve been squirrelling away cool stuff that the interviewees have said that there wasn’t room for in their episodes or it was on a different topic, and in the bonus episode, you get to hear all of it! They’re always a treat. Meantime, find me @allusionistshow on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. And find every episode of the podcast in audio and transcript form, and the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, and links to the guests plus more information about the episode topics, and event listings like the upcoming Toronto live show, all at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
