St Columba's Church, Glasgow, also greatly influenced the Mòd's inception when, in 1891, its choir was invited to give a Gaelic Concert in Oban, presided over by Lord Archibald Campbell.

[1] This concert was the prelude to the first Mòd, which was held at Oban the following year and St. Columba Choir won the award in the Choral music competition.

[1] The poet, traditional singer, and Highland Land League activist Màiri Mhòr nan Òran (1821–1898), performed in the first Mòd's Gaelic song competition, but she was not awarded a medal.

Offering a distinctive middle path between traditional and modern verse, the competition produced much work of note which deserves to be put into perspective... (Many subsidiary prizes remained; Sorley Maclean won a junior one in 1928, while in 1946 Derick Thomson won a gold medal as the most distinguished entrant in the literary competitions generally).

"[4] A watershed moment took place during the 2011 Royal National Mòd at Stornoway, when the poetry of Lewis MacKinnon, composed in the Canadian Gaelic dialect spoken in Antigonish County, Nova Scotia, won the Bardic Crown.

Choral events and traditional music including Gaelic song, fiddle, bagpipe, clarsach and folk groups dominate.

The Mòd is a celebration of [Scottish] Gaelic language and culture,[6] which raises its profile and contributes towards the aim of securing its future.

[7] Improvements in and the recent mass expansion of Scottish Gaelic-medium education across Scotland has meant that beginning in 2007 the junior fluent speakers' section increased to such an extent that the organisers were forced to extend some Mòd competitions beyond one day.

[citation needed] There has been some recent criticism of the "Gold Medal" event, which favors the style of Gaelic singing as adapted into the Victorian era art song tradition, which was popularized in the early 20th century by Marjory Kennedy-Fraser.

"[11][12] More recently, Scottish traditional musician Fergus Munro has also gone on the record, as Scotland has grown increasingly secularised, as a critic of what he alleges is a growing tendency to exclude both Christian poetry and Gaelic psalm- and hymn-singing from the Mòd.