This will require some long quoting, so please bear with me there.
I've just finished reading "Warriors of the Word: The World of the Scottish Highlanders" by Michael Newton (fantastic, by the way, if this subject is of interest to you).
The final chapter is on human ecology, and concludes with the following anecdote of the Cailleach, in form of a glastig.
A hunter was one day returning from Beinn Bhric and when he reached the bottom of the mountain, he thought he heard a sound like the cracking two rocks striking each other, or like a stag's horns when he rubs them against a rock. He continued walking until he came within sight of a large stone that lay at the side of the road, and there he saw at the base of the stone a woman with a green shawl around her shoulders. She held a deer shank in each hand and was constantly sriking them together. Even though he realized she was a glastig, he was bold enough to say to her, 'What are you doing there, poor woman?'
But the only answer that he got was, 'Since the forest was burnt! Since the forest was burnt!' And she kept repeating this refrain for as long as he could hear her.
Then, Newton gives his conclusions of this piece, that I don't quite follow.
[...] the Cailleach's natural home is at the top -- not bottom -- of the mountain; her deer herd are represented in this tale only by the bones of a dead animal; the road is a sign of human impact and 'progress'; the man is noted as being unusually lacking in fear of her. The beating of the bones in the Cailleach's hands echos the practice of the striking of the palms in the rituals of keening: it is clear that she is mourning the forest, which represents the wilderness in general. The tale indicates that humankind's adoption of modern rationality has dethroned the Cailleach and hence she can no longer function as a protector of nature.
So here, my questions are several and quite possibly beyond what this subreddit can answer.
First of all, I understand how the glastig is identified, but don't understand how Newton then comes to the conclusion that the glastig is actually the Cailleach Bheur.
I also find, generally, that his interpretation appears very modern and imposing a certain perspective, and wonder if this is a typical approach to folkloric stories (here I dredge up a four-year-old question and answer to show where I'm coming from there.
Finally, I'm wondering if it really is "clear" that she is mourning the forest, as there is no context given to indicate it's gone (unless that's the road?) and the paragraph before the cited segments indicate that it is "prophetic." Would such actions as beating bones be clearly recognizeable in the historic era (endnotes credit this as from a work by James McDougall in 1910) as mourning? Keening, I had understood, had died out/been suppressed before then.
Sorry for the delay in responding.
This smells wrong to me for several reasons and on several levels. One of the problems one encounters with folklore interpretation is that primary sources seem loaded with hidden meaning, begging to be explained. In addition, the vague nature of an account can be "interpreted" by someone who can "explain" it and no one can really say whether the interpretation is right or wrong. It's rather like my Old English professor (who was on the linguistic side of the department) used to say about literary criticism: "Literary criticism: an open door to phonyism." It's not that all literary criticism is phony; it's just that in that realm nothing can be proven right or wrong. It's simply filled with opinions that can be more or less illuminating about the primary source.
I haven't read Newton, so I don't mean to critique him in general, but the paragraph you provide is loaded with assertions that amount to literary criticism: it seems to me that what he is asserting cannot be proven right or wrong. And I'm not sure he is casting much real light on the primary source.
To recast the challenge of folklore, alluded to above, is that it seems it is loaded with meaning because it is often embedded with what folklorists call "blind motifs." These are references to something that the bearer of the tradition does not understand, but that is maintained in the tradition without clear meaning, referring to something that has been forgotten. We have that situation with our "touching or knocking on wood." No one is entirely sure why we do that, and in the absence of clear explanation, it is easy to "explain" the cultural practice. Many say that we do that as a thank you to the elves who lurk in the forest among the wood of trees. Folklorists often settle on a more likely explanation that it refers back to a children's game of the nineteenth century, a game something like "tag" where a child was safe if they were able to reach out and "touch wood." The first explanation is pure speculation that cannot be proven since we lack primary sources to link the practice with the explanation. The second has at least some common ground, but it is hardly proof, and any good folklorist will advance it with caution.
We see a blind motif with the three weird sisters of the Scottish Play (because it is considered bad luck to give name to Shakespeare's play that begins with the letter "M"). The three witches that Macbeth meets seem to be a recollection of the Fates, AKA the Norns, who always appeared in threes and were the means by which the future was woven, determining what would happen to people with the idea of fate. There are enough common motifs shared by Shakespeare's text and primary source accounts of these strange supernatural beings that it appears this is what going on. If Shakespeare or his audience did not fully understand why the weird sisters should appear in threes (representing the past, present, and future), the link with an ancient, pre-Christian pantheon seems to be a reasonable explanation.
Yet another blind motif provides a means to see how interpretation can go wrong. Here I'll excerpt from my forthcoming book on Cornish folklore, presented here without the benefit of copyediting to make me seem smarter than I am:
The pioneering Scottish anthropologist James Frazer (1854-1941) incorporated the practice of crying the neck and its other British counterparts into a larger discussion about a figure he called the corn mother. For Frazer, practices such as these echoed imagined Neolithic rituals that involved sacrifices to ensure the bounty of the harvest. Thomas subsequently took up the motif in his treatment of Cornish folklore, embracing Frazer’s conclusion that the folk memory of ancient sacrifices surfaced in recorded Cornish folkways.
Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud in A Dictionary of English Folklore cite the existence of numerous harvest effigies from various places in Britain, and they provide an eloquent critique of Frazer: ‘For nearly a century, the study of harvest customs has been stultified by the tacit acceptance of J. G. Frazer’s theories about “corn spirits”. Few folklorists have bothered to analyse this material as they all assume that the origin and background has already been demonstrated. Frazer’s ideas have long been discredited…, but we still need to move on to a post-Frazer era.’ This presents the question, then, as to what can now be said about the practice of crying the neck in southwestern Britain.
Pre-industrial Northern European farmers typically believed that the vitality of the whole crop remained in the field until the final stalk had been cut and workers had corralled the strength of all the grain into the last corner. Legends from Scandinavia, for example, speak of the risk presented by this concentration of the harvest’s potency. Stories told of witches and supernatural beings trying to steal the last bit, because with it, they could take everything that was good about the entire field, leaving grain for the farmer that would fail to provide nourishment. People of various places consequently developed rituals that would protect the last stalks, even though the quantity was insignificant compared with the entire harvest.
The Cornish practice of crying the neck fits into larger regional practices of magically safeguarding the harvest’s essence from theft at the final critical moment. The tradition is at once consistent with what occurred elsewhere while also being unique in its specific details. Examining this custom as part of larger traditions provides a means to understand Cornish folklore as something that occupies a place within the greater region and yet is also distinct. By the time the crying the neck ceremony was recorded, most participants probably did not know about any deeper meaning in the event. It was merely a common, age-old practice. Folklorists sometimes refer to this sort of holdover as a blind motif; that is, people retain a custom but have forgotten its significance. Suggesting what it meant based on contemporary or near-contemporary observations from elsewhere is problematic in its own way, but it is less extravagant than inventing a Neolithic explanation, reaching thousands of years into the past with nothing more than speculation, as Frazer had done.
All this is a long way around to getting to Newton (sorry for the digression!). Because oral tradition often forgets foundational meanings and it often blurs lines and blends motifs, we often inherit texts that are difficult to unpack. Certainly this is the case with the account published by James McDougall in 1910, which Newton then interprets. Newton tells us that the glastig (a type of ghost in Scottish folklore) is in fact an allusion to the Cailleach Bheur, the pre-Christian divine hag, a sort of mother goddess akin to the mistress of the forest that appears elsewhere. It seems to me that is a fairly innocuous assertion, so I'm on board at that point. Since the Cailleach is often associated with mountains, I'm OK with that too, but there is no reason why a tradition would not find her at the base of a mountain as well. At this point, Newton strays into exotic literary interpretation with bones representing entire herds, roads representing evil human progress, bone rapping alluding to some ancient practice of keening, and that the entire story represents nature mourning its loss of control of the wilderness. That's a whole lot of interpretation without any science provided. It is, in essence, literary interpretation, hanging out in the wind, fluttering without being nailed down. This is not good folklore. I'm not sure it is good literary interpretation - if that is possible to evaluate.
We have to look at this as nothing more than Newton's opinion in the way I can tell you what a Van Gogh painting means to me - not based on anything I know of the artist, but simply how the image speaks to me personally. You may find my interpretation enlightening about the painting - or more likely only enlightening about me. You may be interested in what I have to say (or not!), but ultimately, what I have to say is opinion, not fact.