The oral tradition and literature in Ireland and Scotland: Popular culture in Robert Burns and Charles Maturin

Abstract

In a much recounted anecdote, the writer James Hogg recalled a meeting between Sir Walter Scott and Hogg’s mother. Responding to Scott’s interest in whether a particular song she had sung had ever been printed, Mrs Hogg scolded Scott’s interest in printing what were orally transmitted ballads: [There] war never ane o’ my sangs prentit till ye prentit them yoursel’, an’ ye have spoilt them awthegither. They were made for singin’ an’ no for readin’; but ye hae broken the charm noo, an’ they’ll never sung mair. The anecdote serves perfectly to show the uneasy relationship between the enthusiastic antiquarian, eager to ‘preserve’ remnants of an oral culture, and an actual practitioner of that culture, suspicious of someone who transposes, and thereby destroys, songs from an oral culture into a textual one.