There's No Escaping Sir Walter Scott (Or His Poetry)

Consider this: the poetry of Sir Walter Scott, the Great Unread, is worth reading. Though his verse (some would object to this classification) is even less popular than his prose, I contend that it is worth your time.

A few years ago, I spoke at my local historical society on the subject of Sir Walter Scott's cultural legacy. I argued that it’s impossible to escape the influence of Sir Walter Scott — even if you’re not a fan of his writing, even if you have never heard of him. A task, perhaps, as daunting as trying to argue for the worth of his poetry.

Some of the audience appeared skeptical at my claim: Sir Walter Scott? Inescapable today? In response, I presented my next slide — a photograph of a street sign, Lammermoor Road, just outside the church in which we were congregated.

It had escaped the skeptics in the audience that we were in a council estate whose street names all recalled Scott, his world, and his works: Abbotsford Drive, Marmion Drive, Waverley Crescent, and the like. It’s quite possible no one currently living on Lammermoor Road has read The Bride of Lammermoor, but they would be hard pressed to deny Scott’s impact on their neighborhood.

There was certainly no escaping Scott for me as a youngster. I grew up on that same Abbotsford Drive, which had junctions with Kenilworth Road and Ivanhoe Drive. Scott has left an indelible mark on Scotland; place names that he invented for his 1810 verse epic, The Lady of the Lake, still appear on maps of the Loch Katrine area (Ellen’s Isle, Silver Strand), and a steamship named SS Sir Walter Scott plies the loch. A Scottish professional football club carries the name of one of his novels (Heart of Midlothian FC). His portrait can be found on Scottish banknotes. In Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Park, there’s a fountain decorated with scenes from The Lady of the Lake. There are statues of him everywhere, most notably perhaps atop a Nelsonian column in Glasgow’s George Square. The Scott Monument soars above Edinburgh’s Princes Street Gardens like a gothic rocket on the verge of launching to the heavens, the world’s second largest monument to a writer.

Edinburgh's principal railway hub is, inevitably, named Waverley Station. Furthermore, for more than a hundred years, it was the terminus for trains that ran through ‘Scott Country’ in the Scottish Borders, on a railway line that was named, with equal inevitability, The Waverley Route. Closed in 1969, part of this line was re-opened in 2015 as far as Tweedbank, just a twenty minute walk from Abbotsford. In celebration, Waverley Station was permanently bedecked in quotations from the works of Scott.

If Scott has a readership now, it is primarily for his Waverley Novels, named after the first in the series. His prose is admittedly stodgy at times, but the better novels are ground-breaking in their way, as Scott uses fiction to analyze historical change. Scott’s literary reputation declined sharply during the twentieth century, but is receiving attention once again from today’s scholars. It should be noted that many of his novels have never been out of print.

The same cannot be said for Scott’s poems, scorned by many literary academics. All the same, in 1995, Wordsworth Editions produced a brick-sized paperback that contained all of Scott’s poetry: the novels-in-verse that had established his reputation (The Lady of the Lake, Marmion, and The Bridal of Triermain); the shorter, individual poems (“‘Glenfinlas’ and the ‘Eve of St John’... must always rank as fine ghost stories,” wrote the master of the macabre, M.R. James, of two of them); the even shorter songs and verses, many of which appear as incidental music, so to speak, in the Waverley Novels. These latter pieces include many of the short epigraphs with which Scott introduced chapters. Often he ascribed them, vaguely, to ‘Old Play’, but he wrote them. Though Scott was very much of his time, he still loved a bit of what we might refer to as post-modern playfulness.

Until the early twentieth century, almost everyone read Scott. As the century wore on, his reputation diminished and fewer read his work. Regardless, the novels were still adapted into plays, operas, films, and later, TV dramas. In the 1990s, there was a mini-revival. The new Edinburgh edition of his complete works appeared, John Sutherland published a lavish critical biography (excellent and certainly worth reading), Allan Massie wrote The Ragged Lion (a powerful historical novel featuring Scott as the narrator of his declining days), and in addition to an Omnibus documentary about Scott, the BBC presented a decent TV dramatization — the umpteenth — of Ivanhoe. The Wordsworth Edition of The Works of Sir Walter Scott was, one supposes, part of this revival.

The revival was short-lived, however. Neither the BBC nor any other broadcaster has touched Scott since the 1997 Ivanhoe. Naturally, if streaming producers bothered to read Scott today, they would find more than enough bloody violence and torture. The gently-titled The Fair Maid of Perth is perhaps the goriest of them all. The more licentious scenes and profanity also seemingly required in streaming dramas would have to be invented, however, as there’s none of that in Scott.

In the new millennium, the cult of the anniversary came to Scott’s rescue. We are in the midst of a series of Scott 200th anniversaries. Though it hasn’t brought anything new in the way of TV or film adaptations (yet), a long-overdue new edition of The Lady of the Lake was released to coincide with its own 200th birthday in 2010. It now sits alongside my battered Wordsworth Works.

You can never escape Sir Walter Scott. I say, too, that you shouldn’t want to. There are things of value in Scott’s work, even his verse. Why read Scott’s poems? Well, firstly, they are an easier, more palatable introduction to his work than the heavier Waverley Novels. They are novels in verse, but with little fat on the bone. The Lady of the Lake is practically a rhyming novel, albeit much shorter and with a nearly relentless iambic pentameter. Its Trossachs setting, just over the Highland Line west of Stirling, has never stopped citing The Lady of the Lake to attract tourists, even when it was long out of print. Generations of schoolchildren once memorized its opening lines:

The stag at eve had drunk his fill

Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill

And deep his midnight lair had made

In lone Glenartney's hazel shade.

When reading the famous English humorist P.G. Wodehouse look out for his frequent allusions to this passage. For example, ‘Dash along and drink your fill, my unhappy young stag at eve,’ in Jeeves in the Offing.

Perhaps the best parts of The Lady of the Lake are Scott’s descriptions of the scenery around Loch Katrine (the ‘lake’ of the title):

... gleaming with the setting sun,

One burnish’d sheet of living gold,

Loch Katrine lay beneath him rolled;

In all her length far winding lay,

With promontory, creek, and bay,

[…]

High on the south, huge Benvenue,

Down to the lake in masses threw,

Crags, knolls, and mounds, confusedly hurled,

The fragments of an earlier world…

The story is cheery nonsense, involving James IV and his reported practice of traveling incognito as a commoner. There’s romance, clan songs, a fiery cross, and clashes of Highland broadswords — rather like an improved version of the TV show Outlander, complete with rhyming couplets.

Scott’s prose, as I’ve noted, can be dense, his spiky Scots dialogue excused. His oft-derided verse, though, displays a capacity for memorable phrasing. Even the hardest-nosed Scot may let slip a tear at these lines:

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd,
From wandering on a foreign strand!

[…]

O Caledonia! stern and, wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood
Land of the mountain and the flood…

This passage comes from his first success, The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Then, there’s this:

Oh what a tangled web we weave

When first we practice to deceive.

It’s widely quoted and misquoted and endlessly attributed to Shakespeare. In fact, it’s from Marmion. As is the following:

O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west,

Through all the wild border his steed was the best;

And save his good broadsword he weapons had none,

He rode all unarm’d, and he rode all alone.

So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war,

There never was knight like the young Lochinvar.

Surely, that stirs something within the intrepid reader.

————————

Scott’s home, Abbotsford, has recently been refurbished; it gained a new visitor center in 2012 (the 200th anniversary of Scott acquiring the property) and attendance has soared since the railway reopening. Surprising, is it not, that Scott is invoked to attract tourists to the Borders and the Highlands, when so few people read his books?

I’m well aware of Scott’s limitations, as well as his uncomfortable political conservatism. He is often, of course, criticized for his role in popularizing the Scottish symbols of tartan and pipes and Highland dancing, though there are arguably many nations envious of such distinctive cultural symbols.

On the other hand, many criticisms of Scott are simply uninformed. In order to earn the right to criticize Scott, one absolutely must read his work. In any case, his verse has outlived most of his critics; no doubt, it will continue to do so. You can never escape Sir Walter Scott.

Should the reader remain unconvinced, I’m not surprised. I’ve tramped across many of the hills described in The Lady of the Lake and Rob Roy, but championing Scott’s poetry is a much tougher proposition. So, let us return to that church in my home town, and to my next slide: A puzzling image of the cast of the British sitcom Are You Being Served? Why? Because there’s an episode of the program entitled O, What a Tangled Web. And if one cannot escape Scott’s poetry even inside the much-loved, camp, innuendo-ridden portals of the Grace Brothers, one can never escape him at all.

Recommend Selected Works:

Massie, Alan, The Ragged Lion, Sceptre, 1995
Scott, Sir Walter, The Works of Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth Editions, 1995
Scott, Sir Walter, The Lady of the Lake, Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2010
Sutherland, John, Sir Walter Scott – a critical biography, Blackwell, 1995

You can find these titles and support independent bookstores at IndieBound and BookShop, and peruse used copies at Better World Books. We receive a small commission from any purchases made through our site.

David McVey lectures at New College Lanarkshire in Scotland. He has published over 120 short stories and a great deal of non-fiction that focuses on history and the outdoors. He enjoys hillwalking (i.e., hiking), visiting historic sites, reading, watching telly (i.e., TV), and supporting his home-town football (i.e., soccer) team, Kirkintilloch Rob Roy C.

David McVeyJanuary 15, 2021