Abstract
Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border represents itself as a negotiator across several borders, including the boundary of orality and literacy, and then the crossing into the farther country of typographical commodities. These crossings, advertised as acts of preservation, may be, rather, acts of destruction: Walter J. Ong writes that “oral habits” were “effectively obliterated in English, for the most part, only with the Romantic Movement.”1 As Ong’s aggressive vocabulary indicates, his metalinguistic account includes a negatively critical argument about the cultural effects of literacy and its technologies: “writing…is a particularly pre-emptive and imperialistic activity that tends to assimilate other things to itself.”2 Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border makes a theme of imperialistic activity in the narratives it includes, and the book also performs a different kind of imperialism: in Scott’s lengthy and learned discourses about its supposedly oral contents (which are typographical contents) he converts border balladry to a monument of things past. When Scott packages the narrative poems for his English-language audience, he removes the Scottish folk songs into a geographical and historical distance from the nineteenth-century readership. The medium is imperialistic, and not only the burden of the songs.
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Notes
Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982; rpt. London: Routledge, 1995), 26.
Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, plate 8; in William Blake: The Early Illuminated Books, ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi (Princeton: William Blake Trust and Princeton University Press, 1993), 256
The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 18.
Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, ed. T. F. Henderson, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1902
Davis, “At’ sang About’: Scottish Song and the Challenge to British Culture”, in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 189].
In addition to Henderson’s notes, see A[ndrew] Laing, “The Sources of Some Ballads in the ‘Border Minstrelsy,’” Folklore, 13, no. 2 (June 24, 1902): 191–97.
Dave Harker, Eakesong: The Manufacture of British “Folksong” 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1985), 3.
James Macpherson, Fingal: An Ancient Poem in Six Books (1762; rpt. N.p.: Kessinger, 2003)
Robert Chambers, letter to Thomas Percy, 1789; transcribed by A. Watkin-Jones, “Bishop Percy, Thomas Warton, and Chatterton’s Rowley Poems (1773–1790)”, PMLA, 50, no. 3 (Sep. 1935): 777.
Ritson, Ancient Songs and Ballads, from the Reign of King Henry the Second to the Revolution. Collected by Joseph Ritson, New Edition, 2 vols. (London: Payne and Foss, 1829).
Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of Our Earlier Poets, Together with Some Few of Later Date... Reprinted Entire from the Author’s Last Edition, ed. Charles Cowden Clarke, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1864), 1: xxxii.
Terence Allan Hoagwood, Politics, Philosophy, and the Production of Romantic Texts (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), 37–43.
Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 50–51.
See Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 1: 131
J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, 5 vols. (1837–38; rpt. Boston, 1902), 1: 317
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, tenth ed. (London: J. Dodsley, 1791), 113.
In addition to the essays by Johnston and Nicholes and by Hoagwood, cited in the previous note, see Mary Jacobus, “‘The Great Stage Where Senators Perform’: MacBeth and the Politics of Romantic Theatre”, Studies in Romanticism, 22 (1983): 353–87.
Daniel P. Watkins, A Materialist Critique of English Romantic Drama (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 123–33.
Writing of the Lay of the Last Minstrel, Jane Millgate suggests something similar about the distancing-effect that Scott produces with his editorial apparatus: “The subjection of his own poetry to the kind of editorial treatment normally reserved for ancient texts serves to modify the authorial role itself, to detach Walter Scott, Esq., in some degree from the troubling figure of the poetic creator” [Millgate, Scott’s Last Edition: A Study in Publishing History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1987), 18].
Nancy Goslee’s observations in Scott the Rhymer (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1988)
Though he writes of Scott’s prose fiction rather than his poetry, Jerome McGann’s excellent observations are helpful on this point: “The whole game of Scott’s art is being put on display—indeed, is being drawn into the fictional space of the text” (117); Scott’s prefatory materials and narrative apparatus “make the subject of tale-telling an explicit and governing preoccupation of the fiction” (119); and in this way, even when Scott’s editorial persona cites archival sources, it is not authenticity but rather a “self-conscious fictionality [that] is coded deeply and thoroughly” (127): McGann, “Walter Scott’s Romantic Postmodernity”, in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 117
William Collins, An Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland; Considered as the Subject of Poetry (London: John Bell, 1789).
Milton’s ode is reprinted in The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, ed. Francis Turner Palgrave (London: Macmillan, 1861), 41–47.
The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Penguin, 1991), vii.]
Wordsworth’s note, dictated to Fenwick, is printed in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940–49), 4: 463–64.
Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Correspondence of Sir William Jones, ed. Lord Teignmouth [John Shore,] (Philadelphia: Wm. Poyntell, 1805), 304.
Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Printed by James Ballantyne for Longman and Rees, London, 1803), 2: 336.
Jamieson, Popular Ballads and Songs, from Tradition, Manuscripts, and Scarce Editions; with Translations of Similar Pieces from the Ancient Danish Language, and A Few Originals by the Editor (Edinburgh: Printed for Archibald Constable and Co.; London: Cadell and Davies, and John Murray, 1806), 1: 157).
The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson (London: Constable, 1932–7), 1: 100–101.
Charles G. Zug, “Sir Walter Scott, Robert Jamieson and the New ‘Minstrelsy.’” Music and Letters, 57, no. 4 (October 1976): 398–403
Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel. A Poem,... Illustrated with engravings from the designs of Richard Westall (London: John Sharpe, 1809), 302n.
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© 2010 Terence Allan Hoagwood
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Hoagwood, T.A. (2010). Sir Walter Scott, “Ballad Deception,” and Romantic Pseudo-Songs. In: From Song to Print. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230105706_2
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