Scots-language literature

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Robert Burns in portrait by Alexander Nasmyth

Scots-language literature is literature, including poetry, prose and drama, written in the

makars, poets with links to the royal court, which included James I, who wrote the extended poem The Kingis Quair. Writers such as William Dunbar, Robert Henryson, Walter Kennedy and Gavin Douglas have been seen as creating a golden age in Scottish poetry. In the late fifteenth century, Scots prose also began to develop as a genre. The first complete surviving work is John Ireland's The Meroure of Wyssdome (1490). There were also prose translations of French books of chivalry that survive from the 1450s. The landmark work in the reign of James IV was Gavin Douglas's version of Virgil's Aeneid
.

anglicise their written language and only significant court poet to continue to work in Scotland after the king's departure was William Drummond of Hawthornden
.

After the

Burns clubs sprang up around Scotland, filled with poets who fixated on the "Burns stanza" as a form. Scottish poetry has been seen as descending into infantalism as exemplified by the highly popular Whistle Binkie anthologies, leading into the sentimental parochialism of the Kailyard school. Poets from the lower social orders who used Scots included the weaver-poet William Thom. Walter Scott, the leading literary figure of the early nineteenth century, largely wrote in English, and Scots was confined to dialogue or interpolated narrative, in a model that would be followed by other novelists such as John Galt and Robert Louis Stevenson. James Hogg provided a Scots counterpart to the work of Scott.[1] However, popular Scottish newspapers regularly included articles and commentary in the vernacular and there was an interest in translations into Scots from other Germanic languages, such as Danish, Swedish and German, including those by Robert Jamieson and Robert Williams Buchanan
.

In the early twentieth century there was a new surge of activity in Scottish literature, influenced by

Synthetic Scots that combined different regional dialects and archaic terms. Other writers that emerged in this period, and are often treated as part of the movement, include the poets Edwin Muir and William Soutar. Some writers that emerged after the Second World War followed MacDiarmid by writing in Scots, including Robert Garioch, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Edwin Morgan, who became known for translations of works from a wide range of European languages. Alexander Gray is chiefly remembered for this translations into Scots from the German and Danish ballad traditions into Scots. Writers who reflected urban contemporary Scots included Douglas Dunn, Tom Leonard and Liz Lochhead. The Scottish Renaissance increasingly concentrated on the novel. George Blake pioneered the exploration of the experiences of the working class. Lewis Grassic Gibbon produced one of the most important realisations of the ideas of the Scottish Renaissance in his trilogy A Scots Quair. Other writers that investigated the working class included James Barke and J. F. Hendry. From the 1980s Scottish literature enjoyed another major revival, particularly associated with a group of Glasgow writers that included Alasdair Gray and James Kelman were among the first novelists to fully utilise a working class Scots voice as the main narrator. Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner
both made use of vernacular language including expletives and words from the Scots language.

Background

Main article: Scots language

In the late Middle Ages, Middle Scots, often simply called English, became the dominant language of the country. It was derived largely from Old English, with the addition of elements from Gaelic and French. Although resembling the language spoken in northern England, it became a distinct dialect from the late fourteenth century onwards.[2] It began to be adopted by the ruling elite as they gradually abandoned French. By the fifteenth century it was the language of government, with acts of parliament, council records and treasurer's accounts almost all using it from the reign of James I (1406–37) onwards. As a result, Gaelic, once dominant north of the Tay, began a steady decline.[2]

Development

See also: Scottish literature in the Middle Ages
The seal of Gavin Douglas as Bishop of Dunkeld

The first surviving major text in Scots literature is

historical romance with the verse chronicle. They were probably influenced by Scots versions of popular French romances that were also produced in the period, including The Buik of Alexander, Launcelot o the Laik, The Porteous of Noblenes by Gilbert Hay.[2]

Much Middle Scots literature was produced by

Chaucer and Aesop in works such as his Testament of Cresseid and The Morall Fabillis. Gavin Douglas (1475–1522), who became Bishop of Dunkeld, injected Humanist concerns and classical sources into his poetry.[9] Much of their work survives in a single collection. The Bannatyne Manuscript was collated by George Bannatyne (1545–1608) around 1560 and contains the work of many Scots poets who would otherwise be unknown.[8]

In the late fifteenth century, Scots prose also began to develop as a genre. Although there are earlier fragments of original Scots prose, such as the Auchinleck Chronicle,

Anglic language, finished in 1513, but overshadowed by the disaster at Flodden in the same year.[2]

Golden age

See also: Literature in early modern Scotland
James VI
in 1585, aged 19. He promoted poetry in his native Scots but abandoned it after he acceded to the English throne in 1603

As a patron of poets and authors

Calvinism, also discouraged poetry that was not devotional in nature. Nevertheless, poets from this period included Richard Maitland of Lethington (1496–1586), who produced meditative and satirical verses in the style of Dunbar; John Rolland (fl. 1530–75), who wrote allegorical satires in the tradition of Douglas and courtier and minister Alexander Hume (c. 1556–1609), whose corpus of work includes nature poetry and epistolary verse. Alexander Scott's (?1520–82/3) use of short verse designed to be sung to music, opened the way for the Castilan poets of James VI's adult reign.[9]

From the mid sixteenth century, written Scots was increasingly influenced by the developing

Lowlands when they invaded in 1547.[14] With the increasing influence and availability of books printed in England, most writing in Scotland came to be done in the English fashion.[15] Leading figure of the Scottish Reformation John Knox was accused of being hostile to Scots because he wrote in a Scots-inflected English developed while in exile at the English court.[16]

In the 1580s and 1590s James VI strongly promoted the literature of the country of his birth in Scots. His treatise,

Some Rules and Cautions to be Observed and Eschewed in Scottish Prosody, published in 1584 when he was aged 18, was both a poetic manual and a description of the poetic tradition in his mother tongue, to which he applied Renaissance principles.[17] He became patron and member of a loose circle of Scottish Jacobean court poets and musicians, later called the Castalian Band, which included William Fowler (c. 1560 – 1612), John Stewart of Baldynneis (c. 1545 – c. 1605), and Alexander Montgomerie (c. 1550 – 1598).[18] They translated key Renaissance texts and produced poems using French forms, including sonnets and short sonnets, for narrative, nature description, satire and meditations on love. Later poets that followed in this vein included William Alexander (c. 1567 – 1640), Alexander Craig (c. 1567 – 1627) and Robert Ayton (1570–1627).[9] By the late 1590s the king's championing of his native Scottish tradition was to some extent diffused by the prospect of inheriting of the English throne.[19]

In drama Lyndsay produced an interlude at Linlithgow Palace for the king and queen thought to be a version of his play The Thrie Estaitis in 1540, which satirised the corruption of church and state, and which is the only complete play to survive from before the Reformation.[12] The anonymous The Maner of the Cyring of ane Play (before 1568)[20] and Philotus (published in London in 1603), are isolated examples of surviving plays. The latter is a vernacular Scots comedy of errors, probably designed for court performance for Mary, Queen of Scots or James VI.[21]

Decline

William Drummond of Hawthornden

Having extolled the virtues of Scots "poesie", after his accession to the English throne, James VI increasingly favoured the language of southern England. In 1611 the Kirk adopted the English

high style in his own Scottish tradition largely became sidelined.[26] The only significant court poet to continue to work in Scotland after the king's departure was William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649),[20] and he largely abandoned Scots for a form of court English.[27] The most influential Scottish literary figure of the mid-seventeenth century, Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty (1611 – c. 1660), who translated The Works of Rabelais, worked largely in English, only using occasional Scots for effect.[28] In the late seventeenth century it looked as if Scots might disappear as a literary language.[29]

Revival

See also: Scottish literature in the eighteenth century

After the

guinea at a time (about £200 in today's money,[32]) they were attended by over 300 men, and he was made a freeman of the City of Edinburgh. Following this, some of the city's intellectuals formed the Select Society for Promoting the Reading and Speaking of the English Language in Scotland. From such eighteenth-century activities grew Scottish Standard English.[33] Scots remained the vernacular of many rural communities and the growing number of urban working class Scots.[34]

Allan Ramsay who led a vernacular revival in the eighteenth century

Synthetic Scots in the twentieth century[39] and he would be a major influence on Robert Burns.[40]

Burns (1759–1796), an Ayrshire poet and lyricist, is widely regarded as the

Scottish cultural identity, poverty, sexuality, and the beneficial aspects of popular socialising.[44]

Marginalisation

See also: Scottish literature in the eighteenth century

Scottish poetry is often seen as entering a period of decline in the nineteenth century, with Scots-language poetry criticised for its use of parochial dialect.

Burns clubs sprang up around Scotland, filled with members that praised a sanitised version of Robert Burns' life and work and poets who fixated on the "Burns stanza" as a form.[46] Scottish poetry has been seen as descending into infantalism as exemplified by the highly popular Whistle Binkie anthologies, which appeared 1830–90 and which notoriously included in one volume "Wee Willie Winkie" by William Miler (1810–1872).[46] This tendency has been seen as leading late-nineteenth-century Scottish poetry into the sentimental parochialism of the Kailyard school.[47] Poets from the lower social orders who used Scots included the weaver-poet William Thom (1799–1848), whose his "A chieftain unknown to the Queen" (1843) combined simple Scots language with a social critique of Queen Victoria's visit to Scotland.[45]

Walter Scott (1771–1832), the leading literary figure of the era began his career as a ballad collector and became the most popular poet in Britain and then its most successful novelist.[48] His works were largely written in English and Scots was largely confined to dialogue or interpolated narrative, in a model that would be followed by other novelists such as John Galt (1779–1839) and later Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894).[46] James Hogg (1770–1835) worked largely in Scots, providing a counterpart to Scott's work in English. Popular Scottish newspapers regularly included articles and commentary in the vernacular.[49]

There was an interest in translations into Scots from other Germanic languages, such as Danish, Swedish and German. These included Robert Jamieson's (c. 1780–1844) Popular Ballads And Songs From Tradition, Manuscripts And Scarce Editions With Translations Of Similar Pieces From The Ancient Danish Language and Illustrations of Northern Antiquities (1814) and Robert Williams Buchanan's (1841–1901) Ballad Stories of the Affections (1866).[50]

Twentieth-century renaissance

See also: Literature in modern Scotland and Scottish Renaissance
Scots Makar

In the early twentieth century there was a new surge of activity in Scottish literature, influenced by

Scots Makar (the official national poet), appointed by the inaugural Scottish government in 2004.[52] Alexander Gray was an academic and poet, but is chiefly remembered for this translations into Scots from the German and Danish ballad traditions into Scots, including Arrows. A Book of German Ballads and Folksongs Attempted in Scots (1932) and Four-and-Forty. A Selection of Danish Ballads Presented in Scots (1954).[53]

The generation of poets that grew up in the postwar period included

Glaswegian dialect, pioneering the working class voice in Scottish poetry.[55] Liz Lochhead (born 1947) also explored the lives of working-class people of Glasgow, but added an appreciation of female voices within a sometimes male dominated society.[54] She also adapted classic texts into Scots, with versions of Molière's Tartuffe (1985) and The Misanthrope (1973–2005), while Edwin Morgan translated Cyrano de Bergerac (1992).[56]

The Scottish Renaissance increasingly concentrated on the novel, particularly after the 1930s when Hugh MacDiarmid was living in isolation in Shetland and many of these were written in English and not Scots. However, George Blake pioneered the exploration of the experiences of the working class in his major works such as The Shipbuilders (1935). Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the pseudonym of James Leslie Mitchell, produced one of the most important realisations of the ideas of the Scottish Renaissance in his trilogy A Scots Quair (Sunset Song, 1932, Cloud Howe, 1933 and Grey Granite, 1934), which mixed different Scots dialects with the narrative voice.[57] Other works that investigated the working class included James Barke's (1905–1958), Major Operation (1936) and The Land of the Leal (1939) and J. F. Hendry's (1912–1986) Fernie Brae (1947).[57]

From the 1980s Scottish literature enjoyed another major revival, particularly associated with a group of Glasgow writers focused around meetings in the house of critic, poet and teacher

But'n'Ben A-Go-Go (2000) by Matthew Fitt is the first cyberpunk novel written entirely in Scots.[58] One major outlet for literature in Lallans (Lowland Scots) is Lallans, the magazine of the Scots Language Society.[59]

Notes

  1. ISBN 074863309X
    , p. 58.
  2. ^
    ISBN 0748602763
    , pp. 60–7.
  3. ISBN 0-86241-681-7
    , p. 3.
  4. ISBN 81-269-0041-5
    , p. 23.
  5. ISBN 0-86241-477-6
    , pp. 9–10.
  6. ISBN 0-19-538623-X
    , pp. 216–9.
  7. ^ A. Grant, Independence and Nationhood, Scotland 1306–1469 (Baltimore: Edward Arnold, 1984), pp. 102–3.
  8. ^
    ISBN 0-19-211696-7
    , pp. 117–8.
  9. ^
    ISBN 0-19-211696-7
    , pp. 129–30.
  10. ^ Thomas Thomson ed., Auchinleck Chronicle (Edinburgh, 1819).
  11. ISBN 0-7546-6273-X
    , p. 111.
  12. ^
    ISBN 0-7486-1615-2
    , pp. 256–7.
  13. ISBN 0-7486-1596-2
    , p. 10ff.
  14. ISBN 0-7486-0276-3
    , pp. 102–4.
  15. ISBN 0-7486-1596-2
    , p. 11.
  16. ISBN 074863309X
    , p. 44.
  17. ISBN 0-08-037728-9
    , pp. 126–7.
  18. ISBN 0-7073-0367-2
    , pp. 1–2.
  19. ISBN 0-08-037728-9
    , p. 137.
  20. ^
    ISBN 0-19-211696-7
    , pp. 127–8.
  21. ISBN 0748641076
    , p. 15.
  22. ISBN 0748602763
    , pp. 192–3.
  23. ISBN 0521893615
    , pp. 253–3.
  24. ISBN 0-08-037728-9
    , pp. 141–52.
  25. ISBN 0-7190-6636-0
    , pp. 38–9.
  26. ISBN 0-08-037728-9
    , pp. 137–8.
  27. ISBN 1853594318
    , p. 77.
  28. ISBN 1853594318
    , p. 89.
  29. ISBN 1853594318
    , p. 94.
  30. ^ C. Jones, A Language Suppressed: The Pronunciation of the Scots Language in the 18th Century (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1993), p. vii.
  31. ISBN 0191613940
    .
  32. ^ UK Retail Price Index inflation figures are based on data from Clark, Gregory (2017). "The Annual RPI and Average Earnings for Britain, 1209 to Present (New Series)". MeasuringWorth. Retrieved June 11, 2022.
  33. ISBN 0-7486-1596-2
    , p. 13.
  34. ISBN 0-7486-1596-2
    , p. 14.
  35. ISBN 0521264782
    , p. 39.
  36. ISBN 0-06-055888-1
  37. ISBN 0585041555
    , p. 100.
  38. ISBN 1847674666
    , pp. ix–xviii.
  39. ISBN 1853594318
    , p. 106.
  40. ISBN 0-19-538623-X
    , p. 335.
  41. doi:10.1215/00982601-29-2-25
  42. ^ Robert Burns: "Literary Style Archived 2013-10-16 at the Wayback Machine", retrieved 24 September 2010.
  43. ^ Robert Burns: "hae meat", retrieved 24 September 2010.
  44. ^ Red Star Cafe: "to the Kibble." Retrieved 24 September 2010.
  45. ^
    ISBN 0748624813
    , pp. 301–07.
  46. ^
    ISBN 074863309X
    , pp. 58–9.
  47. ISBN 074862015X
    , pp. xxxiv–xxxv.
  48. ISBN 0389208736
    , p. 112.
  49. ^ William Donaldson, The Language of the People: Scots Prose from the Victorian Revival, Aberdeen University Press 1989.
  50. ISBN 1853594318
    , pp. 116.
  51. ^ a b c d e f "The Scottish 'Renaissance' and beyond", Visiting Arts: Scotland: Cultural Profile, archived from the original on 30 September 2011
  52. ^ The Scots Makar, The Scottish Government, 16 February 2004, archived from the original on 4 February 2012, retrieved 2007-10-28
  53. ISBN 1853594318
    , pp. 161–4.
  54. ^
    ISBN 1400841429
    , pp. 1276–9.
  55. ISBN 074863309X
    , pp. 67–9.
  56. ISBN 0521651328
    , p. 223.
  57. ^
    ISBN 0-19-211696-7
    , pp. 157–9.
  58. ISBN 1611483743
    , p. 121.
  59. ISBN 0748608265
    , p. 16.
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