Scottish literature
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Scottish literature, the body of writings produced by inhabitants of Scotland that includes works in Scots Gaelic, Scots (Lowland Scots), and English. This article focuses on literature in Scots and in English; see English literature for additional discussion of some works in English. For a discussion of writings in Scots Gaelic, see Celtic literature.
The earliest extant literature in Scots dates from the second half of the 14th century. The first writer of note was John Barbour. He wrote The Bruce (1376), a poem on the exploits of King Robert I, who had secured Scotland’s independence from England several decades earlier. Harry the Minstrel (“Blind Harry”) continued the Barbour tradition of the military epic by composing the heroic romance The Acts and Deeds of the Illustrious and Valiant Champion Sir William Wallace, Knight of Elderslie in the late 15th century. More prophetic of the sophisticated poetry that was to follow was The Kingis Quair (The King’s Book), attributed to King James I and written circa 1423. It contains possibly the finest major love poem of the 15th century and ushered in a vibrant era of Scottish literature—the years 1425 to 1550. The leading figures—Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, Gawin Douglas, and Sir David Lyndsay—were strongly influenced by the works of the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, but their courtly romances and dream allegories show a distinctively ornamental use of language that has a rich etymological and idiomatic texture. The elaborate style of their poetry, according to some critics, is excessive and artificial, but they succeeded in enlarging the Scottish literary use of the vernacular and managed to combine elements of satire and fantasy with a high standard of poetic utterance and diction.
Scots prose during this period underwent its own significant development, particularly from 1450 to 1630. The first original literary prose appears in the theological writing of John Ireland, who was active in the 1480s. The inflexible and limited Scots language of the 15th century became plainer and less Latinized in the historical writings of John Bellenden and John Leslie and especially in John Knox’s History of the Reformation in Scotland (1567). Standing by itself is the Complaynte of Scotland (1548–49), which is both an exposition of Scottish patriotism and an experiment in the various usages of Scots prose.
The 17th century was a less distinguished age for literature in Scots. The union of the English and Scottish crowns in James I in 1603 and the removal of the Scottish court to England deprived writers of the court patronage that, in the absence of a wealthy and leisured middle class, was indispensable to the continued existence of secular literature in the vernacular. Ballads such as Robert Sempill’s “Life and Death of Habbie Simson, the Piper of Kilbarchan” (1640), however, kept the vernacular tradition alive at the edges of an increasingly Anglicized body of Scottish writing.
In the early part of the 18th century there developed a cultural reaction against the implications of the union of England with Scotland (1707). This reaction was marked by the appearance of numerous anthologies of both popular and literary Scots verse. Such works as James Watson’s Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems (1706) and Allan Ramsay’s The Ever Green (1724), however, while deliberately invoking past achievements in Scots, could serve only to highlight the gradual Anglicization of the language. This process ultimately led to the development of such major Scottish poets as Robert Burns and Robert Fergusson, who wrote in both English and Scots and produced significant bodies of work.
After Burns’s death, in 1796, Walter Scott became, arguably, the most prominent Scottish writer of the first half of the 19th century. Scott wrote poetry and prose in English, but his works are suffused with Scots dialogue and often engaged with Scotland’s history and future. Credited with inventing the modern historical novel, Scott considerably influenced literature in English, though he also overshadowed fellow Scottish writers who were publishing in Scots. Also writing in English during the 19th century were James Hogg (who was discovered by Scott), Thomas Carlyle, Margaret Oliphant, and Robert Louis Stevenson. J.M. Barrie’s early books, in the 1880s, plumbed his early life in Scotland. Scottish literature of this period came to be defined largely by Scots writing in English and, often, living outside of Scotland.
After World War I there occurred a “renaissance” in literature (particularly poetry) in Scots that sought to restore the language’s prestige and to modernize it. The Scottish renaissance was also called the Lallans revival—the term Lallans (Lowlands) having been used by Burns to refer to the language—and it centred on Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve), a poet who expressed modern ideas in an eclectic blend of archaic words revived from the 16th century and various Scots dialects. The enriched language that emerged was sometimes called by its critics synthetic Scots, or plastic Scots. The new intellectual climate also influenced the development after World War II of a new generation of Scottish poets called the Lallans Makars (the “Lowlands Makers”) of poetry.
As in the 19th century, however, the most prominent Scottish authors continued to be those who wrote predominately in English. During the latter half of the 20th century, George Mackay Brown celebrated Orkney life in verse, short stories, and novels, and Muriel Spark wrote witty enigmatic stories and novels. Alasdair Gray spent decades writing his novel Lanark, which revolutionized Scottish literature when it was finally published in 1981. Douglas Dunn’s poems and Irvine Welsh’s novels vividly describe working-class life. At the turn of the 21st century, three writers working in Scotland—J.K. Rowling, Ian Rankin, and Alexander McCall Smith—published series of popular novels that reached a global audience; that two of them were not born in Scotland, and none were writing in Scots, underscored the elasticity of the idea of Scottish literature.