Dance The Eightsome Reel 1931

Although it is over a hundred years old, “The Eightsome Reel” is a modern dance. According to The Scottish Country Dance Book, Book 2, published by The Royal Scottish Country Dance Society, “It is said that this dance was worked up by the late Earl of Dunmore and several friends, from their recollections of ‘Round Reels.’ They spent a week, in the early seventies, evolving this dance at the time of the Atholl Gathering Ball. Later that season, or possibly the following year, it was introduced at the Portree Ball and at Perth. It caught on throughout the country and is now danced in all parts of Scotland. There are examples of Round Country dances to be found in old books, but none with quite the same figures.”

The originator of the dance was Charles Adolphus Murray, 7th Earl of Dunmore (1841–1907). A descendent of Charles Murray, second son of John, 1st Marquess of Atholl, Lord Dunmore was an explorer in Kashmir and Tibet and the author of The Pamirs and Ormisdale. From 1874, about the time he devised the dance, until 1880 he was Lord in Waiting to Queen Victoria.

The old round reel upon which “The Eightsome Reel” was based is a relic of the “Witches’ Sabbath” of Scottish antiquity. Performed as a pagan fertility rite, a group of men and women danced in a circle with frenzied abandon round and round the “priest” or Pan who, adorned with horns and a tail, played on pipes or flute and, in much later times and in secrecy, the fiddle. In the modern reel when a male dancer, taking his turn in the centre of the ring, raises his arms above his head, with thumbs to middle fingers ready to snap, it is symbolic of the long-ago Pan or, as he was sometimes called, the “Horned One”.

The Reformation leaders took a dim view of these often clandestine, non-Christian dances. It was during that time that the “Horned One” was identified with the Devil. The Calvinists did not approve of dancing at all for it smacked of the black arts, of devils, witches and warlocks and was on the whole ungodly. As early as the 16th century such overtones of sorcery were attributed, in poetry, to the dancing of reels, as can be seen in “The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins” by William Dunbar (c.1460–1520) and “Christ’s Kirk on the Green” attributed to James V (1513–1542).

In 1790 Robert Burns wrote one of his most famous narrative poems, “Tam O’ Shanter”, with the following descriptions of the witches’ dance in Alloway Kirk.

Warlocks and witches in a dance:
Nae cotillion, brent new frae France,
But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys, and reels
Put life and mettle in their heels.
A winnock-bunker in the east,
There sat Auld Nick, in shape o’ beast;
A tousie tyke, black, grim, and large,
To gie them music was his charge:
He screw’d the pipes and gart them skirl,
Till roof and rafters a’ did dirl.
* * * *
As Tammie glower’d, amaz’d and curious,
The mirth and fun grew hot and furious,
The piper loud and louder blew,
The dancers quick and quicker flew,
They reel’d, they set, they cross’d, they cleekit,
Till ilka carlin swat and reekit,
And coost her duddies to the wark
and linket at it in her sark!