Calum Iain Maclean was a Scottish folklorist, collector, ethnographer and author. He was a son of Malcolm MacLean (1880 - 1951), tailor, and his wife, Christina (1886 - 1974). One of his brothers was the Gaelic poet and scholar, Sorley MacLean (1911 - 1996). Maclean received his early education at Raasay Primary School and then Portree High School (1929 - 1935), Skye. Maclean then went to the University of Edinburgh (1935 - 1939) where he took a first in Celtic Studies under the tutelage of two famous Gaelic scholars, Professor William J. Watson (1865 - 1948), and his son Professor James Carmichael Watson (1910-1942). He won the McCaig and Macpherson scholarships which enabled him to enrol at University College Dublin where he undertook further study in Early Irish under Professor Osborn Bergin (1872 - 1950) and in Medieval and Modern Welsh under Professor J. Lloyd-Jones (1885 - 1965). In December 1945, the Irish Folklore Commission sent Maclean to the Hebrides with an ediphone recording device to capture the folklore and song of the islands before the last Gaelic storytellers and folk-singers to have escaped the net of the 1872 Education Act passed away. On New Year's Day 1951, Maclean formally began to work for the newly founded School of Scottish Studies based at the University of Edinburgh.