Walter Scott

I will admit that I avoided Walter Scott till the age of fifty-three, due in part to rumours that his writing is difficult to penetrate, but also, as a Scot, due to his place in Scottish history.

I probably know the same amount about Walter Scott as most Scots of my generation – his gothic monument pierces the Edinburgh skyline above the railway station that bears the name of his most famous novel(s) and the story of his ‘rediscovery’ of the Honours of Scotland, which had been lost for over a century after the union with England, is well known. He came early to my attention though, because of the story of his courting of the Hanoverian King George IV. That he rolled out the carpet for the monarchy, while orchestrating a pageantry of the Highland traditions and culture that the Hanoverians had crushed, never sat well with me.

It is difficult though, to avoid his place in world literature, influential as he has been, not only to one of my favourite authors, Robert Louis Stevenson, but also because of his profound impact on Scottish literature and beyond, while drawing the admiration of Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Edgar Allen Poe and Fydor Dostoyevsky among many other literary giants. I finally relented and added Scott to my reading list after receiving copies of Ivanhoe (1819) and The Talisman (1825) that had belonged to an old friend and had been given to me by his widow. As serendipity would have it, my son and daughter-in-lawalsogifted me a copy of Supernatural Short Stories (1816-1830) for Christmas, doubly fortuitous as short fiction is often where I prefer to start, if possible, with new authors.

This collection of Scottish stories actually starts with a German folk tale, warning of the dangers of greed in the typical moralistic style of folklore. As to be expected from early 19^th century literature, the story was on the verbose side, but the pace is good, the narrative full of suspense and nowhere near as ponderous as I had been expecting.

As the haunting stories moved on, Scott displayed his skill with a variety of writing styles, mainly delivering the tales in gentlemen’s’-club-framed-narrative type stories (for me one of the most entertaining ways to tell a ghost story). He also uses both standard English, though reflective of its time, and a variety of Scots dialects, including a particularly authentic rendering of a Highland lilt which swaps b’s for p’s as in “I couldna have set off the pest six peasts petter myself” (The Two Drovers), very reminiscent of Neil Munro’s Para Handy (1905-1923) with its pitch perfect dialect. This demonstrates an attention to detail and knowledge of the Highland way of life in the face of its degradation which began with the genocide perpetrated after the Jacobite Uprising and the ethnic cleansing that continued apace during the lifetime of Scott. (see my review of  Insurrection: Scotland’s Famine Winter  for more on this subject). Another point to note here is that ‘Scots was for Walter Scott a language of feeling; English, not his native tongue, was reserved for the higher registers.’ (The Oxford Encyclopaedia of British Literature, 2006).

This points to one definition of an issue that afflicts many in Scotland, the Caledonian Anti-syzygy (see my journal entry for a more detailed discussion of this) that allows an individual to be fiercely proud and protective of Scottish culture, while accepting and even pandering to the regime that destroyed it and continues to suppress it. This subliminal message that we should make the best of a bad job, (and the treachery of a ‘parcel of rogues’) is even more galling when we learn that when Scott was a young writing apprentice, he met that great critic of the union, Robert Burns, who by Scott’s own admission had a profound impact on his own writing.

This collection includes Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830), which is really an extended essay discussing a string of examples of supernatural events (very entertaining in themselves) often coming from credible sources, before providing rational explanations. More often than not, these explanations come in a court of law while dismantling a defendant’s version of the facts.

Throughout these stories Scott lays out the theme of moving on from the past and accepting things for the way they now are. This is best illustrated in The Highland Widow, a tale of the witch-like widow of a cateran (Highland warrior) who is the cause of misery for her son when he reluctantly enlists in the British Army as his most viable option of making his way in life. (See This Is What You Get for a modern take on this premise.)

In The Two Drovers, Walter Scott writes that a Scottish person’s sense of self-esteem would be viewed as ridiculous elsewhere, and should be hidden away:

“The pride of birth, therefore, was like the miser’s treasure: the secret subject of his contemplation, but never exhibited to strangers […]”

It is also interesting that in the same story he tells us of the gillie-casfluich, a Gaelic term meaning gillie wet-foot, as servant who carries his master over streams so that his feet don’t get wet while hunting. Is Scott admitting to something here? Whether he’s saying that he is a wet-foot, or that the Scottish people should be wet-feet, either way there is something here that still doesn’t sit right with me.

All this aside, though, and separating the art from the artist, I found this first foray into the work of Walter Scott very entertaining. I will definitely be reading my recent gifts in the near future, and allow myself to appreciate the art as my old friend, an ardent supporter of independence, had done.