What will we do with Sir Walter?
by - 22:12 on 29 April 2008
We also got the song ‘Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary, / and leave old Scotia’s shore’ etc as a result of his planned exile. This was addressed to one of the women (Mary Campbell, the mysterious ‘Highland Mary’) who were causing him such pangs. Anyway, more on Burns another time.
The 750th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn will be along in 2064, so expect the first of the Chief Executives to be appointed shortly. In the meantime, there is the 200th anniversary of the publication of ‘The Lady of the Lake’ coming up in 2010.
Hands up anyone’s who’s read it? Hmmm. Thought so. That’s the trouble with Sir Walter Scott’s long verse narrative. Yes, it’s got terribly clever rhyme schemes and sets the romantic action right across that chunk of pleasantly tame and easily accessible Highlands we know as the Trossachs. It’s just that poor old Scott is fearfully unfashionable and nobody much reads him. While the poetry of Burns is embraced by the Scots and celebrated annually, Scott seems to be associated with dry and ponderous passages we had to learn at school. (I can still remember my heart sinking one day as a small child on being presented with a copy of ‘Ivanhoe’ at some long ago prize-giving. Chapter one starts ‘In that pleasant district of merry England which is watered by the River Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest, covering the greater part of the beautiful hills and valleys which lie between Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster.’ Racy or what?
Nevertheless, in 1810, ‘The Lady of the Lake’ did for the Trossachs what ‘The Da Vinci Code’ has done for Rosslyn Chapel. James Fitz-James, Roderick Vich Alpine, Allan Bane the Seer and Ellen, the chieftain’s daughter and actual lady on the loch (Katrine) came alive to a transfixed readership. All right, the fiery cross that roused the clans was made and lit with much ceremony by a character called Brian the Hermit, but everyone else presumably sounded so-oo romantic. Though Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge had already ‘discovered’ the area by 1803, the ‘cult of the picturesque’ – still a cornerstone of 21st century tourism in Scotland - was uniquely bolstered by Sir Walter and his interpretation of his native land. The later ‘Waverley’ (and ‘Rob Roy’) in novel format set the tone for this vision of Scotland where wild landscapes were peopled by clan heroes and loyal followers.
Incidentally, in Scott’s world, everyone knew their place. In his works, only ‘the lower orders’ speak in the Scots language. After all, in 1797, this same Scott with some of his chums had founded the Edinburgh Light Horse, a kind of Home Guard on horseback, to guard against the Napoleonic threat of invasion at the time. Sadly for our literary maestro, who had always enjoyed dressing up as a soldier, he only ever saw riot duty. Scott, forever destined to be described as ‘Scotland’s champion’, was apparently responsible for taking a few potshots at miners protesting about working conditions and also threatening some mill workers with a sabre, both these events occurring around Edinburgh.
Unmatched in output and immensely influential in shaping the later Victorian view of Scotland, he has been described by the novelist A N Wilson as ‘the greatest single imaginative genius of the 19th century’. Maybe we should have Scott Suppers, as we have Burns Suppers. Instead, we seem to prefer ‘Trainspotting’ to ‘Waverley’. Still, what other writer has a railway station named after one of their works? Not even J K Rowling has managed that so far.
You can visit Abbotsford, the home of Sir Walter Scott - it is 2 miles from Melrose in the Scottish Borders.www.scottsabbotsford.co.uk
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