Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer

by Edwin Muir

Genres: Nonfiction

182 pages, Textbook Binding

First published January 1, 1936

About the author

Edwin Muir, Orcadian poet, novelist and translator noted, together with his wife Willa Anderson, for making Franz Kafka available in English.

Between 1921 and 1923, Muir lived in Prague, Dresden, Italy, Salzburg and Vienna; he returned to the UK in 1924. Between 1925 and 1956, Muir published seven volumes of poetry which were collected after his death and published in 1991 as The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir. From 1927 to 1932 he published three novels, and in 1935 he came to St Andrews, where he produced his controversial Scott and Scotland (1936).

Reviews

[Ned Rifle · Rating 5 out of 5]

When asked to write a piece on Sir Walter Scott, Edwin Muir got to thinking about the nature of 'Scots' the language. In the end, this is only tangentially about Scott but all the better for that (I have not read any Scott).
Looking at the history of Scottish literature, he comes to the conclusion that Scots is a dead language and is incapable of producing works of real literary merit. This is due to the fact that it has become a language in which it is only capable to feel and not to think. Scott serves as an example, as does Burns - in contrast to this, Muir uses the ballads to show an example of a complete and functioning language. He hails Hugh MacDiarmid attempts at creating a synthetic Scots but ultimately decides that writing in English is the only feasible option that doesn't divide experience into thinking/feeling.
This idea is echoed (though never expressly mentioned by Muir) in the concerns of James Kelman, who felt uncomfortable with the fact that whilst many people were willing to write dialogue in dialect, the narrative voice was always in English, surrendering all authority to it. Most of his work has been an attempt to redress this balance. All in all this is an essential book for anyone interested in the history of Scottish literature, and a very interesting one even if you're not.


(This review will probably be expanded once I can find the book.)

[Amy Drozdowicz · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm shocked at how this has such a high rating on GR. If the only written review below mine is to be generalised, then that's because people are blindly reading literary criticism without reading the literature it refers to, or even reading the book. Please don't do that.

Now onto why this is awful. Muir's voice is utterly elitist - he decides that Scottish literature isn't 'real' because it isn't part of the established literary canon, which even a total novice to literary criticism should snort at, says that Scotland isn't a real society (laughably stating that Weimar is more legitimate) with absolutely no evidence, and that Scott does himself an injustice by writing peasants and adventurers more lovingly than upper class "highly civilised" people. This is the kind of drivel I would expect from an early-18th century critic, not a 20th century one.

Additionally, if you want this to be a detailed analysis of Scott and Scotland as the title suggests, prepare to be disappointed. Muir mostly talks about Scottish Literature (and why he doesn't think it has any merit), with his Scott chapter at the end being comparatively short and containing the absolute bare minimum in literary criticism. If this was marketed as a thesis on why Scottish lit is dead, it would make far more sense. But it simply doesn't address what the title puts forward.

[Gavin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Exciting, novel and almost totally wrong, in a fertile and important way. Muir diagnoses four hundred years of post-Reformation Scottish art as weak, makes giant claims about national psychology, and traces out a Scottish Renaissance at odds with the nationalists, MacDiarmid in particular (Muir thinks it’s not the Union’s fault but Knox’s.) A sort of radical conservatism.

Pairing Muir with Allan Massie’s careful hatchet-introduction strikes me as a public service.