page_title: Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair
section_title: Protestant missioner
hierarchical_section_title: Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair / Life / Protestant missioner
caption_attribution_description: English: Allt Choire Mhuilinn The house is Caim, belonging to Ardnamurchan Estate.
context_page_description: Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, legal name Alexander MacDonald, was a Scottish war poet, satirist, lexicographer, political writer and memoirist. He was one of the most famous Scottish Gaelic Bards of the 18th century. He served as a Jacobite military officer and Gaelic tutor to Prince Charles Edward Stuart.
context_section_description: In 1729 Alasdair was appointed to a school at Finnan Island, at the head of Loch Shiel and only a few miles from Alasdair's ancestral home at Dalilea, as a teacher by the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge. He was the catechist of the same parish under the Royal Bounty Committee of the Church of Scotland; his position required him to teach at various locations throughout Moidart.
  According to John Lorne Campbell, the unpublished early minutes of the S.P.C.K. in Scotland reveal that it was Anti-Catholic, Anti-Episcopalian, Anti-Jacobite, and set on destroying the Scottish Gaelic language. Therefore, Alasdair's employment as one of their schoolmasters from 1729 to 1745 was a violation of his natural loyalties as a member of the Clanranald branch of Clan Donald. Therefore, Campbell postulates that Alasdair must have had a dispute with the Captain and Chief of Clanranald and that this caused him to seek employment with the SSPK.
  In 1738, Alasdair he worked in a school at Kilchoan and supplemented the living of £16 a year by becoming the tenant of the farm at Coire Mhuilinn, where he composed one of his most famous poems: Allt an t-Siùcar (The Sugar Brook). 
  In 1741, the Bard compiled a 200 page Gaelic-English vocabulary at the request of the Society, which published it with a dedication to the Marquess of Lothian. As source material and a model for his spelling, Alasdair used the existing Irish language translations of the "Confession of Faith", the Westminster Shorter Catechism, and the Book of Common Prayer.
  In his dedication to the volume, the Bard wrote, "It seems to have been reserved for you to be the happy instruments of bringing about the Reformation  of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, diverse places of which are remote from the means of obtaining instruction; and indeed when we consider the situation of the inhabitants, their ignorance, their inclinations to follow the customs, fashions, and superstitions of their forefathers, the number of Popish Emmissaries in many places of these countries; and add to that their way of life, the unfrequented passes and the distance of their houses from one another, one would not think, but that an attempt to reform them would be a very arduous task to be brought about, even by the most desirable means."
  According to John Lorne Campbell, "His Galick and English Vocabulary was commissioned by the S.P.C.K. for use in their schools in furthering their policy of replacing Gaelic by English as the vernacular of the Highlands and Islands... No doubt the reading MacDonald did in preparing this translation, for which he was ultimately paid the princely sum of £10, helped to develop his powerful command of the resources of the Gaelic language." The vocabulary was the first secular book to be printed in Scottish Gaelic. 
  Alasdair's whereabouts during the year of 1744 are unknown. The SSPK believed him to have "deserted his post to help rally the Jacobite clans" and criticized him for charging his sixteen-year-old son Raonuill Dubh with his teaching duties; the SSPK finally dismissed Alasdair in a minute dated 14 July 1745. Early in 1745 he was summoned by the Royal Bounty Committee to Edinburgh, which had heard that he was composing overtly sexual poems in Gaelic. He ignored the summons.
caption: Coire Mhuilinn, near Kilchoan, where Alasdair farmed
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