While growing up, I occasionally learnt some Highland dances through my local Scottish
Country Dance class in Stockholm, Sweden. I later deciphered solo dances through various
textbooks, a process that taught me much about the shortcomings of written manuals as
sources as compared to being taught in person. Along the way I encountered some of the
stories associated with the most well-known Highland dances. At the time, I did not pay
much attention as to whether there was any truth to them or not; I merely thought of them as …

… The process of digitization has enabled tune scholarship to blossom, producing informed
suggestions rather than the wild guesswork of melody history. A pity there is not yet a Traditional
Dance Archive website, but we can live in hope. The second, related development is an
increasing awareness of a popular shared Western European culture. As a result, both books
show a tendency towards a denationalized research agenda, acknowledging that Ireland and …