Introduction: Scotland in the Margins

This chapter examines how Robert Burns and Walter Scott record and translate marginalized aspects of Scottish language, history and culture in the marginal spaces of their texts. Burns's Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) is a collection of poems mainly written in Scots and Scott's Waverley (1814) is a historical novel. While these works differ markedly in genre, their margins demonstrate a shared fascination with the vernacular traditions of Scottish folk culture. In their notes and glossaries, both writers translate Scots and Gaelic dialect terms, collect, display and remake materials from Celtic and Pictish folk traditions, and gather and interpret anthropological information about Highland and Lowland communities. Like Edgeworth's and Owenson's annotations, these eclectic, anthropological paratexts cross the boundaries between a dominant, Anglicized culture and a marginalized, indigenous one, recording the way of life of communities threatened with annihilation by agricultural enclosure, industrial modernization and British internal colonialism.

By including this extensive ethnographic annotation, both Poems and Waverley draw on distinctive features of Scottish writing from a range of different genres. As I will show, Burns's glossary, translating his Scots terms into English, follows similar paratextual apparatuses created by earlier Scots writers such as Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson. And by placing Highland culture in the margins Scott's annotation echoes James Macpherson's extensive footnotes for his fabricated Ossian poems, as well as Scott's own earlier writing: from his edited collection Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–3); to his annotated poetic epics, such as The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805).