Many of Thomson's activities as a scholar, editor, organiser and translator can also be conceptualised as part of the Gaelic revitalisation efforts. As this part of his work is one of the least explored, this chapter summarises Thomson's scholarly output, organisational work, activism and translations in the first comprehensive overview, and discusses their intended and possible connections to the promotion of the language. MacAulay remarked that Thomson's Gaelic activism, such as the foundation and maintenance of Gairm and The Gaelic Books Council, spring from the same motivation that pushed him into active participation in nationalist politics, for he saw those activities as ‘offering at least a marginal possibility of the survival of Gaelic culture’.

Scholarship

Thomson's main career was that of a university lecturer and academic, and throughout his life he continued to write and publish research on various aspects of Gaelic literature, from medieval poetry to developments in Gaelic verse that were occurring in his own lifetime. His scholarly oeuvre includes publications designed as reference works that are accessible both to Gaelic scholars and to an international readership, and also detailed specialised studies that resonate most within the field of Gaelic literature.

The vast majority of Thomson's purely academic work was published in English, which contrasts with the importance he accredited to conducting research on Gaelic topics through the medium of Gaelic, noting that ‘a contemporary living literature needs a contemporary criticism in its own language’, and the conviction that published criticism in Gaelic could provide the needed impetus for more university courses and school classes conducted through the medium of the language. As McLeod notes, until the late 1990s almost no scholarly work was published in Gaelic, which was a general trend in academia, and the practice of delivering lectures and papers and publishing academic essays on Gaelic topics in Gaelic only became more common in more recent decades. Thomson followed his own advice mostly through the contributions to Gairm, where essays on Gaelic literature and an extensive corpus of reviews in Gaelic appeared across fifty years, but all these articles are relatively short, running to about five pages maximum. Thomson's Gaelic prose also remains uncollected and untranslated, and constitutes one of the least studied parts of his work.