Sorley Maclean, Bard to the Gaelic Society of Inverness Society and doyen of contemporary Gaelic poets, died on 24th November 1996, aged eighty five. His early contributions to the Transactions appear under the name of Samuel Maclean (the form in the state register), later papers were published under the name Sam Maclean. Nowhere in the volumes of the Transactions did he use the nom de plume—Sorley Maclean—by which he was known to readers of his poems the world over.

He was born on 26th October 1911 in Oscaig, Isle of Raasay, the second son of Malcolm Maclean, the island’s tailor, and Christina Nicolson a native of the district of Braes, opposite Raasay, in Skye. A member of a family who achieved high distinction in various academic fields, Classics, Celtic and local history among others, he was educated in Raasay and Portree schools and at the University of Edinburgh, where, in 1933, he graduated with first class honours in English, having taken a course in Gaelic under W.J. Watson and played in the university shinty team.

After teacher training in Moray House College of Education he became, in 1934, an assistant teacher of English in Portree Secondary School (now Portree High School). In 1938 he took up an appointment in Tobermory, Mull, and in 1939 moved to an equivalent post in Boroughmuir where, in 1947, he was promoted to the position of Principal Teacher of English. In 1956 he became headmaster of Plockton Secondary School where he remained until his retirement in 1972. In addition to the normal demands of his office as headmaster, discharged with a meticulous, unfailing sense of duty, and made more onerous through his efforts to introduce a Gaelic learner’s paper in the Highers, he took a very active interest in promoting the game of shinty in the school.

The two years following his retirement were spent as Creative Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University; afterwards from 1975 to 1976 he was the Filidh at Sabhal Mor Ostaig in Skye.

He had been called up for military service in 1940 and, in December 1941, sent to Egypt on active service in the Signals Corps. There, eleven months later, he was wounded and finally discharged from the army in 1943.

The following year he met Renee Cameron, a native of Inverness, whose mother, from Perthshire, was of the same stock as Dugaid Buchanan. Sam and Renee were married on 24th July 1946. Renee’s devoted care and understanding, always infused with a delightful sense of humour, were an immense source of peace and happiness throughout fifty years of marriage. Of their family of three daughters, Catriona, a beautiful singer of traditional Gaelic songs, tragically predeceased her father.

As Bard to the Gaelic Society from 1945 onwards, he composed a formal ode each year. Two of them were addressed to old friends from university days on the occasion of their becoming Chiefs of the Society: Professor Angus Matheson and his brother Rev. William Matheson. Three of the bardic odes were reprinted in the Collected Poems of 1989: 0 Choille gu Bearradh: From Wood to Ridge.

His outstanding contribution to the Transactions of the Society is his literary criticism. It is worth noting that the great majority of his papers on Gaelic poetry (most of them in English, a few in Gaelic) were first given before this Society. These critical studies, full of sensitive perception, trenchant in judgement and vivid in expression, display his passionate involvement with the Gaelic poetry of the past. It is not too much to say, indeed, that they revolutionised the critical approach to the entire Gaelic tradition much as Dain do Eimhir (1943) and subsequent publications re-created the writing of Gaelic poetry itself. The prose criticism was collected and published in Ris a’ birch, edited by Professor William Gillies.

The recipient of many honours, among them honorary doctorates from Dundee, Edinburgh, the National Library of Ireland and Glasgow, the MacVitie Prize for Literature and the Queen’s Medal for Poetry, Somhairle was made Freeman of Skye and Lochalsh in 1987.

His membership of the Society began in 1936 and he was elected Chief in 1970 and a second time in 1982; from 1955 to his death he was an Honorary Chieftain.