3 - Epic Translation and the National Ballad Metre

Summary

MACAULAY, MAGINN AND THE NATIONAL BALLAD METRE

Scott's relationship to popular poetry in The Lay of the Last Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake was partly conditioned by his own activity as collector and editor of ballads in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in 1802–3; this volume is itself one of the key documents in the revival of interest in traditional and non-elite forms that dates from Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765. This important cultural current is contemporaneous with the developing Homeric controversy and shares some of the same assumptions. If the Homeric epics were made up of a combination of earlier lays, then those lays were presumably the equivalent of the ballads being rediscovered on the Borders. More than this; just as the Iliad emerged from an earlier, heroic, stage of human society, so the ballads too came out of the rough and primitive conditions of a society dominated by violence, feuding and warfare. This suggestive equivalence between the Border ballads and the pre-Homeric lays became the basis for a style of Homeric translation whose most notorious practitioner was Francis Newman.

Newman's predecessor in this line was the Irish author and journalist William Maginn; his Homeric Ballads, originally published in Fraser's Magazine (which he founded), were republished together, posthumously, in 1850.