Tartan Myths

Novelist and presenter of the Writing Scotland television series, Carl MacDougall, introduces an online learning journey on tartan myths in Scottish literature.

O Caledonia! Stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and the flood,
Land of my sires, what mortal hand
Can e'er untie the filial band,
That knits me to thy rugged strand!

From The Lay of the Last Minstrel by Sir Walter Scott

When James Macpherson's Fragments of Ancient Poetry was published in 1760, he claimed they contained shards of a great, lost, oral history of Scotland.

His second collection, Fingal, supposedly detailed the adventures of the third century, Gaelic warrior poet Ossian, son of Fingal, and was greeted more rapturously than the Fragments. Versions were translated, initially into the main European languages and Napoleon is said to have carried a copy. Macpherson's third book Temora was published in 1763. It's authenticity was questioned and he was discredited, though later research showed his works were not completely faked.

Sir Walter Scott was captivated by the romanticism of Ossian and said he could have ërepeated without remorse whole cantos.' Scott made his name with The Lady of The Lake, published in 1810. A year later it had sold more than 20,000 copies. Thousands came to see Loch Katrine for themselves and when his first novel Waverley was published in 1814, many more came to see the places Scott used as a background to adventure and romance.

Scott is one of our greatest writers and the first example of a world best seller. His work affected virtually every strand of Scottish life. His house at Abbotsford influenced Scottish baronial architecture; his novels provided the plots for many European operas and inspired painters to reproduce Highland landscapes.

When King George IV came to Scotland in August 1822, Scott oversaw the events. He invented a mythology of Highland customs and dress, which were accepted as ancient tradition. The royal visit led to the kilt being adopted as national dress. Highlanders and their ancient traditions, dances and even Highland Games, all adapted or invented by Scott, were given a prominent role in the ceremonies.

The burgeoning Industrial Revolution needed a literate and numerate working class, who began to read for pleasure and the Whistle-Binkie pamphlets brought stability and couthiness to every home. The Whistle-Binkie collections did not represent the only kind of writing, nor the only writers working in Scotland from 1832 to 1890, but they were extremely popular and presented a cosmeticised view of Scottish life and values which ignored or distorted the social and political realities of the time, especially the Highland Clearances and massive urbanisation, something the Kailyard exploited.

The novels by SR Crocket, John Watson and JM Barrie also ignored the iniquities of what was happening around them, and could be accused of deliberately striving to disguise them. Kailyard writers exploited the parochial, painted a sanitised picture of rural sentimentality where everyone knew their place. Changes of heart, especially before death, were common. Family reunions and sudden conversions shifted plots entirely. The dramas tended to revolve around the minister or the dominie and the standard village communal events such as weddings and funerals, strangers arriving and familiar departures. The city appears as a distant place where people disappear.

The Kailyard dream got a rude awakening when The House With The Green Shutters by George Douglas Brown was published in 1901 and John MacDougall Hay's 1914 novel Gillespie is similarly unrelenting. The nationalist movement of the 1930s brought a small tartan explosion, and when Compton Mackenzie's ëfinely observed comedy of Scottish life and manners Monarch of the Glen, was published in 1941 it appealed to an audience who expected a Scotland of dependable emotions and romance.

Mackenzie's novels set in the Highlands such as Hunting the Fairies, Monarch of the Glen, The Rival Monster and Whisky Galore rewove the Tartan Myth internationally and bequeathed Scotland with the most internationally recognizable and enduring images of the 20th century. And while the tartan myths have obscured some of our greatest writers, Americans await the latest tartan bodice ripper from Diana Gabaldon whose Outlander series clearly delivers what her market expects from a Scottish novel. She is the most successful of a number of American writers whose novels are set in 18th century Scotland and who use a mythic Highland landscape as a backdrop to romance and adventure.