“Glenfinlas; or, Lord Ronald's Coronach ” by Walter Scott, written in 1798 and first published in 1800, was, as Scott remembered it, his first original poem as opposed to translations from the German. [1] A short narrative of 264 lines, it tells a supernatural story based on a Highland legend. Though highly appreciated by many 19th century readers and critics it is now overshadowed by his later and longer poems.
“Glenfinlas” opens with a lament on the passing of the Highland chieftain Lord Ronald, before moving on to the describe the visit paid to him by Moy, another chief from distant Scottish islands, who we are told has studied the occult and has the second sight. The two go on a hunting expedition, unaccompanied by any of their followers, and after three days retire to a primitive hunting lodge in the wilds of Glenfinlas. Ronald says that his sweetheart Mary is herself out hunting along with her sister Flora; he proposes that Moy should win over Flora by the playing of his harp, leaving Ronald free to court the unchaperoned Mary. Moy replies that his heart is too low-spirited for such things, that he has had a vision of the sisters’ shipwreck, and a presentiment that Ronald himself will die. Ronald mocks Moy's gloomy thoughts and goes off to keep a tryst with Mary in a nearby dell, alone except for his hounds. Presently the hounds return without Ronald. Night falls, and at midnight a huntress appears, dressed in water-soaked green clothes and with wet hair. She begins to dry herself before the fire, and asks Moy if he has seen Ronald. She last saw him, she says, wandering with another green-clad woman. Moy is afraid to go out into the ghost-haunted darkness to look for them, but the woman tries to shame him out, and shows that she knows more of Moy than he realizes:
Not so, by high Dunlathmon’s fire,
Thy heart was froze to love and joy,
When gaily rung thy raptured lyre
To wanton Morna’s melting eye.
Angry and afraid, Moy replies,
And thou! when by the blazing oak
I lay, to her and love resign’d,
Say, rode ye on the eddying smoke,
Or sail’d ye on the midnight wind?
Not thine a race of mortal blood
Nor old Glengyle’s pretended line;
Thy dame, the Lady of the Flood—
Thy sire, the Monarch of the Mine.
The strange woman, revealed as a spirit, flies away. Unearthly laughter is heard overhead, then there falls first a rain of blood, then a dismembered arm, and finally the bloody head of Ronald. Finally we are told that Glenfinlas will forever after be avoided by all travellers for fear of the Ladies of the Glen, and the poet returns to his initial lament for Lord Ronald.
In 1797 the popular novelist and poet Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis was shown copies of Scott's “Lenore” and “The Wild Huntsman”, both translations from Bürger, and immediately contacted him to ask for contributions to a collection of Gothic poems by various hands, provisionally called Tales of Terror. [2] One of the ballads Scott wrote for Lewis the following year was “Glenfinlas”. [3] It is based on a Highland legend which belongs to an international folktale type found from Greece and Brittany to Samoa and New Caledonia. [4] [5] Scott himself summarised the legend thus:
While two Highland hunters were passing the night in a solitary bothy (a hut built for the purpose of hunting) and making merry over their venison and whisky, one of them expressed a wish that they had pretty lasses to complete their party. The words were scarcely uttered, when two beautiful young women, habited in green, entered the hut, dancing and singing. One of the hunters was seduced by the siren who attached herself particularly to him, to leave the hut: the other remained, and, suspicious of the fair seducers, continued to play upon a trump, or Jew's harp, some strain, consecrated to the Virgin Mary. Day at length came, and the temptress vanished. Searching in the forest, he found the bones of his unfortunate friend, who had been torn to pieces and devoured by the fiend into whose toils he had fallen. The place was thence called the Glen of the Green Women. [1]
On completing the poem Scott sent it to Lewis, who responded with a list of supposed faults of rhyme and rhythm. Comparing these with other criticisms made on the poem by his friends Scott found that they almost perfectly cancelled one another out. This persuaded him never to act on detailed criticisms of his poems from friends, only on blanket condemnations. [6]
Scott published “Glenfinlas” first of all in Tales of Wonder, as Lewis's project was finally called. Though the date 1801 appears on this book's imprint it was actually issued on 27 November 1800. Several other of his early poems appeared in the same collection, including “The Eve of St. John”. “Glenfinlas” was next included in Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802), a collection of traditional ballads alongside some modern imitations. [7] [8] In 1805 he published his first long narrative poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel , which proved to be such a sensational success with both readers and critics that its publisher, Longman, followed it up with a volume of Scott's original poems from the Minstrelsy together with some of his translations and lyric poems. These Ballads and Lyrical Pieces appeared on 20 September 1806, and proved to be a success in their own right, with 7000 copies being sold. [9] [10] [11]
In the critical press the reception of Scott's early poems on their first appearance in print was, on the whole, encouraging. Though the reviews of Matthew Lewis's Tales of Wonder were largely unfriendly, he noted that “Amidst the general depreciation…my small share of the obnoxious publication was dismissed without censure, and in some cases obtained praise from the critics”; the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border was ringingly applauded for both its traditional and original ballads. [12] [13] To the poet Anna Seward, who expressed her delight with “Glenfinlas”, Scott reported that “all Scotchmen prefer the 'Eve of St. John' to 'Glenfinlas', and most of my English friends entertain precisely an opposite opinion”. [14] [15] He himself took the Scottish view. [16] [3] In 1837 his son-in-law and biographer J. G. Lockhart reluctantly half-agreed with those critics who, he tells us, thought that the German influences on Scott did not suit the poem's Celtic theme, and that the original legend was more moving than Scott's elaboration of it. [17] Nevertheless, some 19th century critics rated it very high among Scott's poems. [18] In 1897 the critic George Saintsbury judged “Glenfinlas” and “The Eve” to be the poems in which Scott first found his true voice, though he preferred “The Eve”. [19] 20th and 21st century critics have generally been more severe. Among Scott's biographers, John Buchan thought it “prentice work, full of dubious echoes and conventional artifice”, [20] S. Fowler Wright found the ballad unsatisfactory because the original story has too little variety of incident, [21] and Edgar Johnson thought the poem too slow, its language sometimes over-luscious, and the intended horror of its climax unachieved. [22] Recently the critic Terence Hoagwood complained that the poem is less vivid than “The Eve”, and its morality (like that of “Christabel” and “La Belle Dame sans Merci”) is misogynistic. [23]
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet, was a Scottish historical novelist, poet, playwright and historian. Many of his works remain classics of European and Scottish literature, notably the novels Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, Waverley, Old Mortality, The Heart of Mid-Lothian and The Bride of Lammermoor, and the narrative poems The Lady of the Lake and Marmion. He had a major impact on European and American literature.
John Gibson Lockhart was a Scottish writer and editor. He is best known as the author of the seminal, and much-admired, seven-volume biography of his father-in-law Sir Walter Scott: Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart
James Hogg was a Scottish poet, novelist and essayist who wrote in both Scots and English. As a young man he worked as a shepherd and farmhand, and was largely self-educated through reading. He was a friend of many of the great writers of his day, including Sir Walter Scott, of whom he later wrote an unauthorised biography. He became widely known as the "Ettrick Shepherd", a nickname under which some of his works were published, and the character name he was given in the widely read series Noctes Ambrosianae, published in Blackwood's Magazine. He is best known today for his novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. His other works include the long poem The Queen's Wake (1813), his collection of songs Jacobite Relics (1819), and his two novels The Three Perils of Man (1822), and The Three Perils of Woman (1823).
William Laidlaw (1780–1845) was a Scottish poet. The son of a border farmer, he became steward and amanuensis to Walter Scott, and was the author of a well-known ballad, Lucy's Flittin.
Saunders Mucklebackit is a character in Walter Scott's 1816 novel The Antiquary, an elderly fisherman and smuggler who is bereaved of his son. Though a comparatively minor character he has often been singled out for praise as one of the novel's most masterly creations.
Edie Ochiltree is a character in Sir Walter Scott's 1816 novel The Antiquary, a licensed beggar of the legally protected class known as Blue-gowns or bedesmen, who follows a regular beat around the fictional Scottish town of Fairport. Scott based his character on Andrew Gemmels, a real beggar he had known in his childhood. Along with Jonathan Oldbuck, the novel's title-character, Ochiltree is widely seen as one of Scott's finest creations.
Jonathan Oldbuck is the leading character in Sir Walter Scott's 1816 novel The Antiquary. In accordance with Scottish custom he is often addressed by the name of his house, Monkbarns. He is devoted to the study and collection of old coins, books and archaeological relics, and has a marked tendency to misogyny due to disappointment in an early love affair. His characteristics have been traced back to several men known to Scott, and to the author himself, an enthusiastic antiquary. Many critics have considered him one of Scott's finest creations.
"The King and the Beggar-maid" is a 16th-century broadside ballad that tells the story of an African king, Cophetua, and his love for the beggar Penelophon. The story has been widely referenced and King Cophetua has become a byword for "a man who falls in love with a woman instantly and proposes marriage immediately".
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border is an anthology of Border ballads, together with some from north-east Scotland and a few modern literary ballads, edited by Walter Scott. It was first published in 1802, but was expanded in several later editions, reaching its final state in 1830, two years before Scott's death. It includes many of the most famous Scottish ballads, such as Sir Patrick Spens, The Young Tamlane, The Twa Corbies, The Douglas Tragedy, Clerk Saunders, Kempion, The Wife of Usher's Well, The Cruel Sister, The Dæmon Lover, and Thomas the Rhymer. Scott enlisted the help of several collaborators, notably John Leyden, and found his ballads both by field research of his own and by consulting the manuscript collections of others. Controversially, in the editing of his texts he preferred literary quality over scholarly rigour, but Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border nevertheless attracted high praise from the first. It was influential both in Britain and on the Continent, and helped to decide the course of Scott's later career as a poet and novelist. In recent years it has been called "the most exciting collection of ballads ever to appear."
The Lady of the Lake is a narrative poem by Sir Walter Scott, first published in 1810. Set in the Trossachs region of Scotland, it is composed of six cantos, each of which concerns the action of a single day. There are voluminous antiquarian notes. The poem has three main plots: the contest among three men, Roderick Dhu, James Fitz-James, and Malcolm Graeme, to win the love of Ellen Douglas; the feud and reconciliation of King James V of Scotland and James Douglas; and a war between the Lowland Scots and the Highland clans. The poem was tremendously influential in the nineteenth century, and inspired the Highland Revival.
The Bridal of Triermain is a narrative poem in three cantos by Walter Scott, published anonymously in 1813. It is written in a flexible metre of four and three stress lines. Set in Cumberland, it recounts the exploits of a knight as he seeks to rescue a beautiful maiden, Gyneth, the illegitimate daughter of King Arthur, doomed by Merlin 500 years previously to an enchanted sleep inside a magic castle.
Sir Adam Ferguson (1770–1854) was deputy keeper of the regalia in Scotland.
William, Earl of Glenallan, otherwise Lord Glenallan, is a character in Sir Walter Scott's 1816 novel The Antiquary, a Scottish aristocrat whose life has been ruined by the suicide of his wife and the belief that he has unwittingly committed incest. His story forms the melodramatic Gothic strand in an otherwise largely realistic comic novel.
The Journal of Sir Walter Scott is a diary which the novelist and poet Walter Scott kept between 1825 and 1832. It records the financial disaster which overtook him at the beginning of 1826, and the efforts he made over the next seven years to pay off his debts by writing bestselling books. Since its first complete publication in 1890 it has attracted high praise, being considered by many critics one of the finest diaries in the language.
Rokeby (1813) is a narrative poem in six cantos with voluminous antiquarian notes by Walter Scott. It is set in Teesdale during the English Civil War.
John Bacon Sawrey Morritt was an English traveller, politician and classical scholar.
Ninestane Rig is a small stone circle in Scotland near the English border. Located in Roxburghshire, near to Hermitage Castle, it was probably made between 2000 BC and 1250 BC, during the Late Neolithic or early Bronze Age. It is a scheduled monument and is part of a group with two other nearby ancient sites, these being Buck Stone standing stone and another standing stone at Greystone Hill. Settlements appear to have developed in the vicinity of these earlier ritual features in late prehistory and probably earlier.
Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft Addressed to J. G. Lockhart, Esq. (1830) was a study of witchcraft and the supernatural by Sir Walter Scott. A lifelong student of folklore, Scott was able to draw on a wide-ranging collection of primary and secondary sources. His book found many readers throughout the 19th century, and exercised a significant influence in promoting the Victorian vogue for Gothic and ghostly fiction. Though on first publication it met with mixed reviews, it is now recognised as a pioneering work of scientific anthropology, treating of its subject in an acute and analytical way which prefigures later scholarship on the subject, as well as presenting a highly readable collection of supernatural anecdotes.
Illustrations of Northern Antiquities (1814), or to give its full title Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, from the Earlier Teutonic and Scandinavian Romances; Being an Abstract of the Book of Heroes, and Nibelungen Lay; with Translations of Metrical Tales, from the Old German, Danish, Swedish, and Icelandic Languages; with Notes and Dissertations, was a pioneering work of comparative literature which provided translations and abstracts of various works written in medieval Germany and Scandinavia. Its three authors were Henry Weber, who précised the Nibelungenlied and Heldenbuch; Robert Jamieson, who translated Danish and other ballads, stressing their close connection with Scottish ballads; and Walter Scott, who provided an abstract of Eyrbyggja saga. It significantly extended British readers' access to early Germanic literature.