Folklore, antiquarianism, scholarship and high literary culture

Abstract

Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun claimed that ‘if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation’. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, then, at least one shrewd political observer recognised a relationship between nation, power and a particular literary kind associated with popular, anonymous production. National consciousness demands not only literary history, but also literary production. This story of scholars and antiquaries, translators and editors, and writers who ambiguously filled the roles required by what the age demanded will begin with the shaping notions of poets and move to the most controversial poet, who billed himself as a translator. Although the term ‘Folk-Lore’ was not coined until 1846 by the antiquary William J. Thoms as a Saxon replacement for ‘Popular Antiquities’, the antiquities not of classical Greece and Rome but of the British Isles, the project itself can be seen as part of or related to a number of literary developments in the eighteenth century, including what Rene Wellek dubbed ‘The Rise of English Literary History’: the editing of early English literature, the revision of the canon, the concern for the oxymoronic ‘British classics’, as a title of 1796 put it. This activity was in turn part of larger interests in the past complexly forwarded by a range of developments at mid century including primitivism, the end of Jacobite threats, the awareness of a long and rich vernacular literary tradition.