Òrain is Sgeulachdan na Fèinne (360G-BNG-CC-2024-01391)

The Òrain is Sgeulachdan na Fèinne project is a trilingual, multidisciplinary, traditional arts project which aims to share the songs and stories of the Fianna in an accessible way with a modern day audience.  The Finn Cycle stories and songs have been passed down through generations with some collected as field recordings by the School of Scottish Studies in the 1950s and 1960s, while others were preserved in printed collections in Scotland and Ireland, although few still survive in modern oral tradition.  The stories and songs are not as well known in Scotland in the present day as they are in Ireland, and this project aims to highlight the riches of the shared Gaelic traditions to a wider audience, in Scotland, Ireland and further afield. This is a continuing project involving collaboration between three Gaelic speaking artists and two Gaeilge speaking artists who have been studying the songs and stories of the Fianna together for the past two years and who have created an hour long trilingual performance of some of this material, entitled An Ceòl air Feadh na Fèinne. We would like to take the An Ceòl air Feadh na Fèinne performance on tour to some of the Gaelic speaking communities in the Scottish islands.  As part of the tour, the group will also hold workshops in Gaelic medium schools, further exploring and sharing the songs, stories, languages and resources with students of different ages. We aim to highlight the importance of these songs and stories in the shared Gaelic traditions of Scotland and Ireland and to bring them back to Gaelic speaking communities in their languages of origin.  The performance and workshops will be trilingual, and as such are also accessible to people who do not speak Gaelic or Gaeilge and therefore may be unaware of this shared Finn tradition of songs and stories. We also aim to explore the similarities and difference between the Scottish and Irish Gaelic languages, and to enable the Scottish Gaelic speaking communities to accses the songs and stories through the medium of Gaeilge, as well as Gaelic.