Virginia Blankenhorn is an Honorary Fellow in Celtic and Scottish Studies at Edinburgh University. She received a B.A. degree in music from Wellesley College, pursued post-graduate study in Celtic Studies at Harvard University, the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and the University of Edinburgh. She has held lectureships at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Ulster. Publications include works on modern Irish poetic metre, paralinguistic features in spoken Irish, and the repertoire of Connemara singer Seosamh ÓhÉanaí (Joe Heaney). She has published many articles on the song traditions of Ireland and Gaelic Scotland.

«Dr Blankenhorn’s publications are essential reading for any scholar of Scottish or Irish musicology or ethnology. They are distinguished by their empiricism, coherence, analytical precision and thought-provoking nature. In this age of vapid ‘pop-trad’ recordings and commercialisation of heritage, Dr Blankenhorn implores us to consider the aesthetics, emotional contexts and Weltanschauung that informed Gaelic song in the past and which continue to do so in Gaelic-speaking communities today. She strips away ephemeral, gauche varnish and celebrates what is enduring, real and good in Gaelic song.»(William Lamb, Senior Lecturer in Scottish Ethnology, University of Edinburgh)«This volume, by an outstanding scholar on her field, fills a major gap in Gaelic academic literature to date. It will appeal widely to other scholars of music, song, orality and literary creativity. Peter Lang is to be congratulated on publishing it.»(Professor Emeritus Donald E. Meek)

• CONTENTS: Verse Structure and Performance in Scottish Gaelic Vernacular Poetry - A New Approach to the Classification of Gaelic Song - Observations on the Performance of Classical Gaelic Syllabic Verse - The Rev. William Matheson and the Performance of Scottish Gaelic Strophic Verse - Griogal Cridhe: Aspects of Transmission in the Lament for Griogair Ruadh Mac Griogair of Glen Strae - From Ritual to Rhetoric, from Rhetoric to Art: Women’s Poetry of Lamentation in the Gaelic World - MacCrimmon’s Return: Traditional and «Bogus» Elements in «MacCrimmon’s Lament» - Songs of the Hebrides and the Critics.