The Invention of Scotland by Trevor-Roper Hugh

Author:Trevor-Roper, Hugh [Trevor-Roper, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300136869
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2008-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

John Pinkerton was born in Edinburgh. He was denied a university education and thereby, perhaps, better enabled to resist conformity with the Scottish academic establishment. Escaping from the servitude of the law, he attempted to make a name through literature. The name which he made was bad. He had to admit that he had forged an ancient ballad – the second part of the (also forged) poem of Hardyknute. His proposals to improve the English language by adding Italian terminations to English words made him ridiculous. He made impertinent attacks both on Virgil and on Gibbon himself. However, these early follies were overtaken and redeemed, in part at least – for he never ceased to be eccentric – by his work as an antiquary. His edition of the Ancient Lives of the Scottish Saints, published in 1789, convinced Gibbon of his merit; and his Enquiry into the History of Scotland, which covered the early history until 1056, was praised by Gibbon as the only work which had given him precise and authentic ideas on the early history of the country.28 It did in fact correct, and correct very emphatically, Gibbon's former guides, the two Macphersons. In consequence, it caused an outcry in Scotland.

The animating theme of all Pinkerton's work was an antipathy to the Highlanders. He saw that the constructive part of Scottish history had been the work of the Lowlanders of the east – the descendants of Picts and Saxons, Normans and Danes – but that the Highlanders of the west had, again and again, distorted that history by imposing on it their own fanciful and self-glorifying interpretation. In the Dark Ages the Scots from Ireland had usurped the Pictish inheritance. In the Middle Ages they had falsified the national past, excluding the Picts from any share in it. Now, with Ossian and the false history which the Macpherson family had constructed in his support, they were seeking to take over Scottish literature too. To show that there was indeed an authentic Scottish literature, Pinkerton hunted out and printed ancient Scottish poems; and he wrote an essay on the origin of Scottish poetry. His polemical aim can be seen as the rescue of Scottish literature and Scottish history from the Highlanders. But that polemical aim, though never absorbed, was subsumed in a legitimate desire to reconstruct the authentic history and literature of Scotland, freeing them alike from Celtic usurpations and the nationalist prejudices of Scottish antiquaries, with their absurd ‘points of honour of Scotland quite unknown in more enlightened countries’.29

A noble task for a scholar! But how could it be done? Before it could even be begun, the base had to be cleaned of so much rubbish: first the detritus of the past which Innes had vainly tried to clear away, and then the luxuriant jungle of fresh weeds which had grown up in ‘this eighteenth century so fatal to real and solid literature’: a jungle which had been watered by a series of Scottish historians and now ‘dunged

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