Outlander Theme Tune: History of The Skye Boat Song

Skye's Otherworldly aspect is hammered home when linked with Outlander. Here too is a strong, independent woman, who slips between realities in a great saga. In novels and television series alike, Claire wonders if those folktales, which tell of individuals disappearing for a while into Faery, mask the truth of time-travel journeys through the stones.

And that is the story recounted in this latest rendering of the Skye Boat Song, framed to fit Claire's tale by Bear McCreary:

Sing me a song of a lass that is gone,
Say, could that lass be I?
Merry of soul she sailed on a day
Over the sea to Skye.

Billow and breeze, islands and seas,
Mountains of rain and sun,
All that was good, all that was fair,
All that was me is gone.

It's a perfect invocation, given Skye's propensity to appear both mythical and Earthly. Yet Claire learns only too well that this area of Inverness is a real place, and so is the ugliness which its sea and landscape has witnessed.

One of those horrific historical realities is what The Skye Boat Song usually recalls, and Outlander will too in time.

Thus began the reign of James's children. First Mary, along with her husband William of Orange, then Ann. But both died without heirs. Faced with an empty throne, the English Parliament invited Hanoverian King George to be their monarch.

When the Scottish protested, a series of events was kicked into being, which resulted in the country aggressively being forced into the United Kingdom. All the riots in Edinburgh, Glasgow and many other major towns and cities were ignored, and the Scots were told accept George or be destroyed.

It was at this point that many people remembered that a parallel royal line was being raised across the ocean. James VII/II was dead, but his son survived. The crowning of the erstwhile James VIII/III was the goal of the Jacobite movement.

History tends to recall that lazily as Scottish Jacobites versus English Hanoverians. It wasn't quite that simple, as the Jacobites included Scots, Irish, English, Welsh and many from other nations too. Nor were all of the armies raised in defense of the Georgian kings solely English.

But overwhelmingly the sides ultimately arrayed at Culloden were Highland Scots under the command of Prince Charles - son of uncrowned James VIII - versus a Hanoverian army mostly made up of men from the English East Midlands, led by William, Duke of Cumberland.

What followed was a massacre.  A mixture of Scottish tactical errors, and superior fireman strategies by Cumberland's troops, led to thousands of Highlanders dead or desperately injured on Drumossie Moor. It would be the last pitched battle on British soil, but also one of its most dreadful and dishonorably staged.

That dire accolade came not so much with the battle itself, but its immediate aftermath. Cumberland's army rode roughshod over centuries worth of tradition and normal etiquette of war. None were allowed to carry their dead and injured from the field. Next morning, those who'd survived the night were systematically slaughtered in cold blood where they lay.

Scots who hadn't even been there - nor necessarily shared Jacobite sympathies - were nonetheless hunted down in homes, streets and fields. Homesteads were rifled for valuables, then set alight. Crops were destroyed where they grew; stockpiles and storage barns too. Women were sexually abused, and children treated like mini-Jacobite warriors.

Random Highlanders were executed, deported or locked up for years in prison. A series of highly punitive laws were passed in Westminster, rendering illegal much of the ancient Scottish culture. It sounded a death knoll for the clan system, which had been in place for countless centuries.

Even today, over two and a half centuries later, the memory of Culloden not only holds fast, but invokes much emotion in Britain. It goes without saying that this sentiment is most keenly felt in Scotland, especially in the ravaged Highlands.

Once entrenched upon Skye in relative safety (with a strong emphasis on the word 'relative'), a message could be sent to a French frigate named L'Heureux.  Six months after Culloden, Bonnie Prince Charlie arrived in France and spent the rest of his life in exile.

Those months fleeing, hiding and always just escaping from the dragoons is the story told in The Skye Boat Song. As the title of the song suggests, this Highland air culminates in that final treacherous passage across the sea to the isle.

However, she didn't write the tune down immediately upon returning home. Later, she was to cobble together as much as she could recall, and this became the basis for The Skye Boat Song.

MacLeod had only recalled the music, not the lyrics, so when she collaborated with Sir Henry Boulton on their book Songs of the North, he took it upon himself to add words to her tune. Hence the original Skye Boat Song lyrics.

However, its inclusion amidst the rest - all genuinely traditional airs - meant that readers assumed this too was at least a century and a half old. Its subject matter proscribed any older antiquity. Boulton and MacLeod were bemused, and not a bit startled, to suddenly become inundated by letters and public approaches from people convinced that they'd known The Skye Boat Song in childhood!

One hallmark of traditional folksongs is the plethora of alternative lyrics. Poets, bards and composers can update them with impunity, as the mood takes them or in order to reflect the times in which they live, because a) there's no copyright and b) it may be presumed that people could easily pick up a song to sing with altered lyrics, if they already know the tune.

Robert Louis Stevenson was one such reader who immediately penned his own verses, upon reading the apparently older (and out-dated) lyrics in Songs of the North. As a famous poet of the times, many people heard or read his words before the other, hence these have stuck as a commonly sung alternative version.

They became the inspiration for the words sung for the Outlander theme tune.

It is a mistake to assume that everyone singing the original lyrics are secretly anti-English.  Nor that those choosing Robert Louis Stevenson's alternative are striking a blow for Anglo-Scottish unity and/or English supremacy.

In truth, most people today assume that The Skye Boat Song is a traditional air, and they pick the nearest lyrics to hand.

However, there are plenty of performers who know precisely what they're singing, and they'll pick their version with care. The vast majority will opt for the original, telling the semi-romantic story of Bonnie Prince Charlie, in stirring terms of heroic failure.

But most will omit the last verse, with some skipping the penultimate one too. Those are the most overtly political ones, reminding listeners of the carnage caused at Culloden and by Cumberland's dragoons in the aftermath.

Without those, The Skye Boat Song becomes a tale about a thwarted king with hints of a love affair with Flora. It's sentimental, appealing to national pride, but missing out the truly ugly scenes.

Those two verses, particularly the last one, tend to get left in by singers intending it as a rebel song, or wishing to score political points. But again not exclusively.

Robert Louis Stevenson's version is chosen by those more interested in the personal emotion than the historical legend. It was written from the point of view of Bonnie Prince Charlie, though that's not at all obvious. It could be any lad sailing away there or, as Outlander has shown, lass.

This one isn't about heroic failure. It's about an individual realizing that they've lost everything, including their own innocence. It's a feeling which anyone, at a moment of great change in their lives, might invoke. There's something downright human about the sentiment, in all its pathos and poignancy.

Whether we end on Charlie will come again or All that was me is gone is ultimately the difference between our choices for The Skye Boat Song. Perhaps that changes throughout our lives, depending upon what those evocative words mean to us at any given moment in time.