`S`Scotia" is Latin for Ireland. "Scotia" is Latin for Scotland. Ireland is also Latanised as "Hibernia", Scotland as "Caledonia". Their awesome formality is necessary when the charms of patriotism are being extolled with regretful necessity for emigration: "For who would leave, unbrib'd, Hibernia's Land . . ?" asked Dr Johnson's "The Vanity of Human Wishes". "O Caledonia! Stern and wild", intoned Scott's Last Minstrel, resisting comparable bribes, Twin iceberg tips of ornate laments by poverty-driven potential emigrants, the elaboration cushioning the emigration was regularly used for one country however conceived for the other.
But "Scotia", the cheeky, Puck-like, find-the-lady alternative does not merely symbolise the counterparts. You give yourselves the big names, girls, but when nobody is looking, are you the same thing? "Scotia" is Scotland, is Ireland, is a time when Scotland and Ireland were primarily shores of the same lake. Ireland and Scotland have shared much of the same history, even some of the same languages. Their Gaelic is interchangeable at their closest proximity: a Donegal Gaelic-speaker understands Lewis Gaelic more easily than Kerry Gaelic. Mutual comprehension is less frequently tested between Kerry and Aberdeen, but their English uses "f" for "wh".
The old ports of Scots and Irish coasts grew up under the hard logic of Viking founders. Folklore survived in variants in the Scots and Irish countryside, the same stories with the same priorities, with differences seldom showing signs of which country had preserved them: their common ancestor knew no political frontier.
The twin Scotiae began their duality in a maritime world. The Faustian tale of St Columba choosing Iona as a punitive location whence the Ireland he had left would be invisible, moralises justly of how zeal for learning might turn into scholarly jealousy and hence internecine conflict: the horror-stricken cause of the warfare sentences himself never again to see the native land he has devastated. But while a fine parable with which to rebuke bellicose peoples in either Scotia, the real St Columba probably chose Iona as a strategic location whence to control culture and society, whether for poets in Donegal or monsters in Loch Ness - or such other crises as might emerge. His return to Ireland to arbitrate court protocol between kings and poets related to intellectual migration from Scotia to Scotia and proved effective enough for Hugh Trevor-Roper in The Invention of Highland Tradi- tion to place it eleven hundred years later. One more victim of the Scotiae.
Columba's leading Irish Associations are Derry City, Tory Island, and the coast of Donegal, although the cult united the diversifying countries and creeds. Iona shrouds the regal leaders of Scotland from Macbeth to John Smith, whose death awoke national grief fit for any beloved king cut down in his prime. Iona battled for the Celtic Church at Whitby, embodying Scots and north Irish alike. But Columba today radiates from our local Roman Catholic Church in Edinburgh's Newington to Dublin's leading Protestant secondary school.
And Columba's kingship of the Celtic seas is reflected in the procession of migrants from his native land to his mission territory. Modern Irish nationalism assumes Ireland as the civilising agency: I was rudely shocked as a boy to encounter a Scots Catholic history which explained that St Ninian evangelised in Scotland before St Patrick, and that St Patrick himself was a Scots Christian boy stolen by pagan Irish pirates.
The missionary traffic was complex and two-way, and so was the migration that followed. Donegal folk down the centuries emigrated to Scotland, but in very many cases simply travelled for seasonal benefit, returning with Scottish experience and ideas. A sojourn in Scotland for self-education wins Cuchulainn his final proficiency in arms, according to the Gaelic legend, his Scots professor Scathach being a woman, and his field-work project for the course the defeat and impregnation of her leading rival Aoife. (Yeats's On Baile Strand's lyrically recounts the fatal meeting with the hero's Scottish son.)
Each Scotia seems to have offered itself as a kind of alternative world from its sibling. Very often this is a straight matter of personal safety. In the same Ulster cycle of epic legend as Cuchulainn, the fugitive heroine Deirdre of the Sorrows, her only true happiness with her young lover and his brothers when they take refuge in Scotland from the pursuing vengeance of the aged lustful king.
Later and more verifiably, Robert Bruce, fugitive from Edward I, found the inspiration of the patient spider on Rathlin Island off the coast of Antrim. The boy navvy Patrick MacGill helps build the Kinlochleven reservoir in the early twentieth century having fled from the short-term slavery into which many rural Irish parents were selling their children, as shown in his classic autobiographical novel Children of the Dead End, (1914); other migrants notably women, find the safety illusory and die in the squalor of misery of Glasgow prostitution, recorded in MacGill's companion book The Rat-Pit, (1915). Twentieth-century Scottish literary rebels such as Hugh MacDiarmid, found Ireland's Yeatses and Joyces oases from what they saw as the cultural desert of Anglo-centric convention.
The twin societies developed with popular consciousness forged in the same sparse economies and hence community mutual dependence. At times historical phenomena that seem to polarise Scotland and Ireland really testify to their similarity. The Irish remained Roman Catholic, the Scots became identified with Calvinism, antitheses in biblical versus ritual priorities: but the two faiths acutely resemble one another as products of popular decision. The Royal court determined the religion of its people during the Reformation in most societies, but each Scotia with its religious way against the court. Ireland rejected its rulers' Anglicanism, Scotland rejected its rulers' Catholicism and, having survived persecution, held their religious sway by community pressure far more powerful - and sometimes far more cruel - than the state could muster. The result is in fact a strong tradition of popular cultural superiority to the state in both countries. The Irish fondness for being "the government" can be matched in modern Scotland by Canon Kenyon Wright's reply to the Thatcherite "we say no, and we are the state" by "we say yes, and we are the people".
The Presbyterians in Scotland and Ulster established an ideological network, radicalising itself in the Ireland and America of the War of Independence, but drawing on Irish inspiration in Scotland for the development and even the origin of Enlightenment. Dublin had its own Enlightenment in the aftermath of the Williamite wars: it provided the father of the Scottish Enlightenment when Francis Hutcheson emigrated to Glasgow in 1729 to become Professor of Moral Philosophy.
The growth of Irish numbers in Scottish University students' ranks and their return, civilises Irish Presbyterian hearts towards their Catholic fellow-victims of episcopalian discrimination. They build up associations and when Ulster Presbyterians in Revolutionary America developed their political machines, the Irish Catholic emigrants who followed them entered those fellowships. Irish Catholics in Ireland under Daniel O'Connell continued to cultivate Presbyterians support, and Scotland's leading evangelical Presbyterian Thomas Chalmers backed O'Connell in the struggle for Catholic emancipation and developed agitation techniques under his influence (as American anti-slavery leaders learned to do).
Irish writers learning their trade in Scotland, such as Maurice Walsh or Bernard McLaverty, reflect the reappraisal of the conventions of Irish art when ripened by the wind of comparable but challenging Scottish experience. Arthur Conan Doyle, celebrating Englishness as an emigrant Irish-Scot focused a hilarious alien perspective on English conventions in his supposedly French memoirs of Napoleonic Europe, the Brigadier Gerard series surpassing any other historical short story succession yet written.
The Scotia duet has been singing very nicely for long over 2000 years and shows every vitality in its new phase of Consulates, Councils of the Isles and - who knows? - future Confederacies. The more we become ourselves, the more we discover ourselves in each other.
