2 - Walter Scott and Heroic Minstrelsy

Summary

‘THE NATIONAL MUSE IN ITS CRADLE’

John Sutherland makes a straightforward distinction in his biography of Walter Scott: between Scott as ‘philosophical historian’ and as antiquarian. In the first capacity, Scott is the heir of the Scottish Enlightenment, familiar with the notion of history as a series of stages progressing from the savage state through to modern commercial civilisation. Such ideas, indeed, were a central part of his education. Scott's role as an antiquarian, by contrast – ‘the hoarder of coins, suits of armour, old manuscripts and heroic relics’, in Sutherland's words – was perhaps at least as important in his formation as a writer. But it is Scott as philosophical historian that I wish to discuss in this chapter, especially as his writings carry forward an aspect of the problematic described in the Introduction – that combination of ideas that associates epic with the barbarous stage of society and hence pushes it to the margins of contemporary civility. It is above all through the figure of Walter Scott, as ballad collector and poet as much as novelist, that the connections between epic, romance, national balladry and the pre-modern world were conclusively established for the nineteenth century. This chapter will trace the nature of those connections, and the centrality of the figure of the bard, in Scott's writings about ballads and related topics, and in his poems The Lay of the Last Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake.