Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Scottish Dancing, early reels, laziness
Date: Sat, 07 Nov 1992 21:53:32

 First, the gritching..... This is what I get for not reading books  that I've purchased.  Mind you, I'm glad I've started this 
 discussion.....
     The book in question is
          _A Social History of Scottish Dance_, by George S. Emmerson
          pub. McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal & London 1972ok
          isbn 0-7735-0087-1
 This isn't the same tertiary source that I read about the early mention 
 of reels in, because he qualifies that mention substantially.  That 
 early mention is in "the 15th ce Lowland Scots poem "Colkelbie's Sow", 
 and GSE thinks that {_it's just a synonym for dancing & reveling. He 
 also states that "reel" is the Scots word for the figure that the Eng. 
 Country types call a "hay".
    Another quote is:
 " A favorite early example of the use of reel in connection with dance 
 occurs in the report of a trial of four women and a man accused of 
 witchcraft in 1590. .... One of the confessions recorded at the trial 
 avers that the witches took hands and "daunced this reill or short 
 daunce...."
   So, a solid mention of using the word reel to mean dance, although 
 it doesn't seem to be particularly meaningful so far as the type of 
 dance we now call reels.
   I still have not read the whole book, merely read the pertinant bits 
 as referenced by the excellent index.
   I'm still contemplating Strip the Willow.  What he gives is rather 
 inconclusive.  In the index, it's listed under the "Pantomime Reels", 
 which would give it a (small) link with the Pantomime Bransels. He 
 mentions that it's a weaving dance, links up another dance with an 
 "old Swedish weaving dance called Vava Vadmal" and implies that VV is as  old as the Viking era. (Certainly wadmal *is* a period norse {name for 
 fabric....).  Then he doesn't tie StW in particularly <grumph>.
    Then he mentions that Trenchmore has the same type of figure when 
 it shows up in the first Playford (longsways, any #), while saying 
 that it seems to have been corrupted by the time it got that far!  
 Apparently the Trenchmore he reads of in Elizabethan accounts has more 
 "capers and stamping" than the Playford version.  He also states that 
 Trenchmore "is probably a corruption of the Irish Rinnce Mor (Great 
 Ring)", which would mean that something happened to turn it into a 
 longways set. 
     StW isn't listed in the early-ish (1700's) lists of dances, but 
 I don't see that as an absolute answer, either.  He does say "Still  
 other dances moved from the Hebridean or Shetland Fringe into the 
 mainland, such as the Foula Reel and Strip the Willow."  So if StW 
 is actually a period dance, then it's a very narrowly known one, 
 possibly unique to a village or island. 
   He does mention a period example of a longways set -- Chiarenza, with  an painting ca 1450 (Academia di Belle Arti, Florence, Adimari family) 
 which shows the longways set for several couples.  (Hmmmm, they may not 
 be facing.  I remember a painting w/several couples facing forward.)
   Well, I'm about to be booted off....
       Gwenllian Cwmystwyth

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