Walter scott

Walter Scott, 2nd Baronet (Edinburgh, August 16, 1772 – Abbotsford House, September 21, 1832) was a prolific British writer of Romanticism, specializing in historical novels, a genre of which he can consider himself an inventor, as well as being a poet and editor. He was known throughout Europe in his time, and, in a sense, was the first author to have a truly international career in his time, with many contemporary readers in Europe, Australia, and North America.^{[citation needed]}

Her historical novels and, to a lesser extent, her poetry are still widely read, but she is less popular today than she was at the height of her success. Despite this, many of his works remain classics in English and specifically Scottish literature. Some of her most famous titles are Ivanhoe , Rob Roy , The Lady of the Lake , Waverley and The Heart of Midlothian.

Although best remembered for his extensive literary works and political engagement, Scott was a lawyer, judge, and legal administrator by profession, combining his writing and editing work with his day-to-day occupation as court clerk and bailiff throughout his career. -MP for Selkirkshire.

A leading member of the Conservative establishment in Edinburgh, Scott was an active member of the Highland Society, served a long term as President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1820-1832) and was Vice-President of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (1827-1829).

Early Years

Born at College Wynd, Edinburgh in 1771; he was the son of a lawyer. Young Walter Scott survived a childhood bout of polio that left him lame in his right leg for life. To restore his health, they sent him to live for several years in the rural region of the Borders (in the south-east of Scotland, bordering England) for seven months to stabilize his illness. There he lived on his grandparents' farm in Sandyknowe. He learned the language of the area, as well as the tales and legends that would characterize much of his work. His state of health also motivated him to spend part of his childhood in the spa city of Bath, in England.

After studying law at Edinburgh University, he followed in his father's footsteps and became a lawyer in Edinburgh. As a solicitor's clerk he made his first visit to the Scottish Highlands, to execute an eviction.

Scott was in love with Williamina Belsches of Fettercairn, to whom he had proposed several times. Despite the fact that she had been ambiguous when answering him, Scott hoped that sooner or later she would accept. But in 1796, Scott went on a trip, and when he returned he found that Williamina was falling in love with William Forbes, 7th Baronet of Pitsligo and one of his friends, whom she would end up marrying (later they would have the scientist James David Forbes). When the engagement between Belsches and Forbes was announced, Scott first became very angry with her. Although Scott suffered a disappointment in love and a feeling of pain that would stay with him for a while, he later realized that she did not want to hurt him. , and in a letter describing him as a good friend.

Beginning of his literary career

William Allan, Sir Walter Scott, 1771 - 1832. Novelist and poet (1844), oil of the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

At the age of twenty-five, he began writing as a wonderful and happy diversion, translating works from German. His first publication was a rhymed version of ballads by Gottfried August Bürger, in 1796. He subsequently published three volumes of Scottish ballads The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border ( Poems of the Scottish Border , 1802). It was the first sign of his interest in Scottish history from a literary point of view.

Scott then became an ardent companion of the yeomanry, a British volunteer cavalry force. In one of his forays he met, at the Gilsland spa, located on Hadrian's Wall, Margaret Charlotte Charpentier (or Charpenter), daughter of Jean Charpentier, from Lyon (France), whom he married in 1797. They had five children. In 1799 he was made a judge of Selkirk, residing in the royal burgh of Selkirk.

In the early years of their marriage, Scott lived well, thanks to his legal income, his salary as justice of the peace, his wife's, some money from his writings and even some income from the meager paternal inheritance.

After founding a printing press, his poetry, beginning with The Lay of the Last Minstrel / Canto del último troubadour in 1805, brought him fame. He published other poems in the next decade, including the popular The Lady of the Lake (1810).

Another work from this period, Marmion, included some of his most quoted and often misattributed phrases (canto VI.º, stanza 17):

Yet Clare's sharp questions must I shun, / Must separate Constance from the nun / Oh! what a tangled web we we weave / When first we practice to deceive! / A Palmer too! No wonder why / I felt rebuked beneath his eye. "However, I must avoid Clare's sharp questions, / I must separate Constance from the nun. How entangled network we knit / when we practice a deception for the first time! / Also a Palmer! It is not surprising why / I felt rebuked under his gaze"

Ifor Evans considers that his poems cannot be compared to novels, «but he uses all the romantic resources of chivalry, war, pathos, sentiment and the charm of an imaginary past. His poems had a certain value as survivals and are much better than many critics considered them, and even the author himself in his moments of sympathetic modesty ».

In 1809, his affinity for the tories led him to co-found the Quarterly Review, a journal to which he made anonymous contributions.

The novels

Sir Walter Scott in 1824, portrait of Sir Edwin Henry Landseer.

When the printing press ran into financial trouble, Scott decided, in 1814, to write works that would bring him a steady income. The first result was Waverley, Waverley, or Tis Sixty Years Since / Waverley, o Escocia hace sixty años, a novel published anonymously. It is set during the Jacobite rising of 1745 in the United Kingdom; Its protagonist, Englishman Edward Waverley, a sympathizer of Jacobitism due to his Tory upbringing, becomes involved in the events, but ultimately chooses the respectability that the House of Hanover represented. The work was a considerable success, and founded the genre of the modern historical novel.

It was followed by a succession of novels over the course of five years, all with a Scottish setting. Mindful of his reputation as a poet, she continued to publish anonymously, under the name Waverley Author or attributed as "Tales of..." with no known author. Even when it was clear he wasn't going to hurt her to admit his authorship, he kept up appearances, apparently for fun. During this time, the nickname The Wizard of the North was applied to the mysterious author of these hits. His identity as the author of the novels was a well-known secret, to the point that, in 1815, Scott had the honor of dining with George IV, the Prince Regent, who wanted to meet the "author of Waverley ». He founded the Bannatyne Club to print rare works of history, poetry or literature in general written in Scots. And it managed to print 116 volumes in total, even though it ended up dissolved in 1861.

In 1819 he stopped writing about Scotland with his best-known work, Ivanhoe, a historical novel set in 12th-century England, featuring such famous characters as Richard the Lionheart, Robin Hood or John without Land, and whose Jewish characters would project in the present the question of the Emancipation of the English Jews, which would only arrive in 1858. He achieved another success, this time resounding. And, as with his first novels, he gave birth to others of this genre, testing other settings and times, such as the France of Louis XI in Quentin Durward / Quentin Durward (1823). During this time of his career he achieved great fame and was granted a baronetcy, whereupon he became Sir Walter Scott.

It was then that he organized the visit of King George IV to Scotland (1822), of great political importance, to ingratiate himself with its rebellious and proud inhabitants; Scott had prepared a spectacular pageantry to depict George as a somewhat stocky reincarnation of "Gentle Prince Charles." The success of this visit made tartan and kilts or kilts fashionable, which became symbols of Scottish national identity.

Financial problems and his death

Abbotford House, residence of Sir Walter Scott, today

In 1825 he ran into financial trouble again, stemming from his publishing business, and his company nearly went bankrupt; he managed to get out at the cost of a sacrificed and continuous work. It was then that it was disclosed that he was the author of the novels. Rather than declare bankruptcy, he put his home, Abbotsford House, and his income into a trust managed by his creditors, and proceeded to cancel the debt. He continued his prodigious literary production until 1831. But so much work began to undermine his health; he finally died at Abbotsford in 1832. His novels continued to sell, and his debts were finally paid with that money. He was buried in Dryburgh Abbey, where nearby and somewhat fittingly can be found a large statue of William Wallace, one of Scotland's most romanticized historical figures.

AbbotsfordCountry SeatsMorris, 1800.

Abbotsford House

Abbotsford House interior.

As a boy, Sir Walter Scott traveled with his father from Selkirk to Melrose, on the border where some of his novels are set. At some point, the old gentleman stopped to show his son a stone where the Battle of Melrose (1526) took place. Not far away was a small farm called Cartleyhole, which Scott eventually bought.

Little by little she made this farm a wonderful home, resembling a fairy tale palace. Through windows enriched with heraldic signs, the sun shone on the armor, the delicate furniture and the even better paintings. Oak and cedar paneling and wooden ceilings with correctly colored coats of arms added to the beauty of the house. He even bought more land until he had almost a thousand acres (about 4 km²) and it is estimated that the construction cost him more than twenty-five thousand pounds.

A neighboring Roman road, with a ford used in days gone by by the monks of Melrose, suggested he call this mansion Abbotsford House ('Monks' Ford House').

Later vindication

The Smailholm tower, a watchtower near the Sandyknowe farm where Scott spent a part of his childhood and inhabited his ancestors.

"The meeting of Burns and Scott", oil by Charles Hardie, 1893 (Dunedin Public Art Gallery).

The Monument to Scott, Edinburgh.

Scott was an impoverished nobleman who mythologized his social origins as some kind of Don Quixote. His historical novel was also born as an artistic expression of the nationalism typical of the romantics and their nostalgia for the brutal changes in customs and values imposed by the bourgeois transformation of the world and the industrial revolution. The past is thus configured for him as a kind of refuge or escape and a place to develop the imagination, in line with the first generation of romanticist writers, the traditionalist.

It was immediately praised by its greatest authors, such as Goethe and Manzoni. He influenced many of the writers of the XIX century, and not only historical novelists (as recognized by Balzac). Later, someone as praised today as Robert Louis Stevenson was a great admirer and follower of this also Scottish novelist.

Scott was responsible for two of the major trends that have continued to this day. First, he basically invented the modern historical novel by taking inspiration from those of the German Benedikte Naubert, whom he knew well; and an enormous number of imitators (and imitators of imitators) appeared in the 19th century. Second, his Scottish novels continued the work of James Macpherson's Ossian cycle to rehabilitate Highland culture in the public eye, after years of shadows., due to southern distrust of hill bandits and Jacobite rebellions. As the enthusiastic president of the Celtic Society of Edinburgh he contributed to the reinvention of Scottish culture. It should be noted, however, that Scott was a Lowland Scotsman, and the Highland re-creations of him were a bit wacky. His organization of King George IV's visit to Scotland in 1822 was a watershed event, leading Scottish tailors to invent many clan tartans.

But after being one of the most popular novelists of the 19th century, Scott's popularity declined sharply after the First World War. Edward Morgan Forster led the way critically in his classic Aspects of the Novel (1927), where he was seen as a trivial writer of heavy, passionless novels (even though he admitted he 'knew'). tell a story and had that primitive faculty of keeping the reader in suspense, playing with their curiosity").

Scott also suffered from the growing public appreciation of Realist writers such as Jane Austen. In the 19th century she was considered an entertaining "women's novelist", but in the XX her work was revalued to the point of being considered perhaps the best English writer of the first decades of the century XIX. As Jane Austen's star rose, she declined Scott's, although (and it is a paradox) Scott had been one of the few male writers of his time to have recognized her genius. But Virginia Woolf, defender of Jane Austen, said that "true romantics can transport us from earth to heaven, and Scott, great master of the romantic novel, makes full use of that freedom", despite his conventions or his laziness.

Scott's certain shortcomings (historicism, prolixity) did not fit with the post-romantic modernist sensibility, which failed to appreciate his irony, his pompous characters and juicy descriptions and documented environmental reconstructions. However, Georg Lukács, in his excellent The Historical Novel (1955), wrote very nuanced and profound pages about the epic talent of Walter Scott and his overcoming of romanticism by elevating traditions with certain demonic heroes.

Now, after having been ignored for decades by specialists (but read in hundreds of editions to date), a revival of interest in his work began in the 1970s and 1980s. Curiously, postmodern taste (which favors discontinuous narratives, and the introduction of the first person in works of fiction) were more favorable to Scott's work than modernist tastes. Despite his artifice, Scott is now regarded as a major innovator and a key figure in the development of Scottish and world literature, given the strength of his writing. The regrowth of the historical novel, today, has brought back the great masters.

It is a measure of Scott's influence that Edinburgh Central Station, opened in 1854 for the British Northern Railway, is called "Waverley Station." Scott was also responsible, through a series of pseudonymous letters published in the Edinburgh Weekly News in 1826, for Scottish banks retaining their right to issue their own banknotes, which is commemorated today in day the writer appears on all banknotes issued by the Bank of Scotland.

Many of his works were illustrated by his friend William Allan.

Works

Monument in homage to Sir Walter Scott in Edinburgh.

Sir Walter Scottby Sir William Allan, 1831 (National Portrait Gallery, London).

Walter Scott sitting in ruins and accompanied by his dog

Novels and short stories

• Waverley (1814)
• Guy Mannering (Guy Mannering or The Astrologer1815)
• The Antiquary (The antiquarian1816)
• Cycle Tales of my Landlord (History of my inn) (first narrative series, 1816): The Black Dwarf (The Black Dwarf) and Old Mortality (Eternal Mortality or The Puritans of Scotland)
• Rob Roy (1818)
• Cycle Tales of my Landlord (History of my inn) (second narrative series, 1818): The Heart of Midlothian (The Heart of Mid-Lothian)
• Ivanhoe (1819)
• Cycle Tales of my Landlord (History of my inn) (third narrative series, 1819): The Bride of Lammermoor (Lammermoor's girlfriend or Lammermoor's or Lammermoor's pastor) and A Legend of Montrose (The Legend of Montrose)
• Narrations of Benedictine sources: The Abbot (The Abbot) and The Monastery (The Monastery)both 1820
• Kenilworth (Kenilworth1821)
• The Pirate (The pirate, 1822)
• The Fortunes of Nigel (The Adventures of Nigel, 1822)
• Peveril of the Peak (Peveril del Pico, 1822)
• Quentin Durward (Quintin Durward1823)
• St. Ronan's Well (The waters of St. Ronan, 1824)
• Redgauntlet (Redgauntlet: a history of the 18th century, 1824)
• Cycle Tales of the Crusaders1825): The Betrothed (The Betrothed or The Chester Accountant) and The Talisman (The Talisman or Ricardo Heart of Lion)
• Woodstock, or The Cavaliers: A Tale of 1651 (Woodstock or The Knights: a story of 16511826)
• The Fair Maid of Perth (The Beautiful Young Perth or Valentine's Day)1828)
• Anne of Geierstein (The daughter of the fog1829)
• Cycle Tales of my Landlord (History of my inn) (fourth narrative series, 1832): Count Robert of Paris (Robert, Count of Paris) and Castle Dangerous (The Dangerous Castle).

Short Stories

• Chronicles of the Canongate, first series, The Highland Widow (The widow of the Highlands), The Two Drovers (The two buoyers) and The Surgeon's Daughter (The surgeon's daughter(1827).

Poems

• William and Helen, Two Ballads from the German (translator) (1796)
• The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (Poems of the Scottish border, 1802–1803)
• The Lay of the Last Minstrel (Song of the last troubadour, 1805)
• Ballads and Lyrical Pieces (Balances1806)
• Marmion or Marmion: Tale of Flodden Field (1808)
• The Lady of the Lake (The Lady of the Lake, 1810)
• The Vision of Don Roderick (Vision of Don Rodrigo, 1811)
• The Bridal of Triermain (The Depositives of Triermain1813)
• Rokeby (Matilde de Rokeby1813)
• The Field of Waterloo (The Waterloo field1815)
• The Lord of the Isles (The lord of the islands1815)
• Harold the Dauntless (Harold, the intrepid1817)
• Young Lochinvar
• Bonnie Dundee (1830).

Others

• Gloss of the Eyrbiggia Saga (in Northern relics by Robert Jamieson and Henry Weber (1814).
• The Chase (translator) (1796)
• Goetz of Berlichingen (translator) (1799)
• Paul's Letters to His Kinsfolk (1816)
• Provincial Antiquities of Scotland (1819–1826)
• Lives of the Novelists (1821–1824)
• Halidon Hill (teatro, 1822)
• The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (The Golden Pages, i.e. impartial portrait of Napoleon / Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, preceded by a preliminary sketch of the French Revolution1827)
• Religious Discourses, by a Layman ("Religious Speech, by a Lego," 1828)
• Tales of a Grandfather, first series (1828)
• History of Scotland (History of Scotland), 2 vols. (1829–1830)
• Tales of a Grandfather, second series (1829)
• The Doom of Devorgoil (Devorgoil Fall)1830)
• Essays on Ballad Poetry1830)
• Tales of a Grandfather, third series (1830)
• Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1831)

Influence on other arts

Portrait of Franz Schubert of 1827

The success of Walter Scott's works has led to their adaptation to other art forms, such as opera and film.

In the operatic field, the following stand out:

• The donna of the lake (1819), Rossini. Inspired by The Lady of the Lake.
• Give me soft. (1825), Boïeldieu. Based on Guy Mannering and The monastery.
• Elisabetta al castello di Kenilworth (1829), Donizetti. Based on Kenilworth.
• Lucia di Lammermoor (1834), Gaetano Donizetti. Based on The Bride of Lammermoor.
• I puritani (1835), Bellini. Based on Old Mortality, although he might have other influences.
• La jolie fille de Perth / The beautiful girl of Perth1866, Bizet. Based on The Fair Maid of Perth.

Franz Schubert composed lieder (songs) inspired by poems by Walter Scott (op. 52), dedicated to Sophie, Countess of Weissenwolf, in 1825. Among them was Ellens dritter Gesang III , known as Schubert's Ave Maria. B. Paumgartner (Franz Schubert, Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1992) lists other lieder based on Scott's lyrics: Romanze des Richard Löwenherz, 1826, from Ivanhoe, op. 86; and the op. 85 (1827): Lied der Anne Lyle (from Montrose) and Gesang der Norma (from Pirat).

Many are the films and television series based on the works of Walter Scott. The best known are:

• Ivanhoe (1952). Directed by Richard Thorpe, with Robert Taylor as Ivanhoe, and Elizabeth Taylor on Rebecca's role.
• King Richard and the Crusaders (1954). Film directed by David Butler, with Rex Harrison in the role of Saladin, Virginia Mayo as Lady Edith Plantagenet and George Sanders (Rey Ricardo I of England). It's based on the novel. The talisman.
• Ivanhoe (1982). Television series directed by Douglas Camfield, with Anthony Andrews (Wilfred of Ivanhoe) and Olivia Hussey (Rebecca); stand out sideways of the size of James Mason (Isaac of York) and Sam Neill (Brian of Bois-Guilbert).