Glenfinlas (poem)
“Glenfinlas” opens with a lament on the passing of the Highland chieftain Lord Ronald, before moving on to the describe the visit paid to him by Moy, another chief from distant Scottish islands, who we are told has studied the occult and has the second sight.
Unearthly laughter is heard overhead, then there falls first a rain of blood, then a dismembered arm, and finally the bloody head of Ronald.
Finally we are told that Glenfinlas will forever after be avoided by all travellers for fear of the Ladies of the Glen, and the poet returns to his initial lament for Lord Ronald.
In 1797 the popular novelist and poet Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis was shown copies of Scott's “Lenore” and “The Wild Huntsman”, both translations from Bürger, and immediately contacted him to ask for contributions to a collection of Gothic poems by various hands, provisionally called Tales of Terror.
[4][5] Scott himself summarised the legend thus: While two Highland hunters were passing the night in a solitary bothy (a hut built for the purpose of hunting) and making merry over their venison and whisky, one of them expressed a wish that they had pretty lasses to complete their party.
Though the reviews of Matthew Lewis's Tales of Wonder were largely unfriendly, he noted that “Amidst the general depreciation…my small share of the obnoxious publication was dismissed without censure, and in some cases obtained praise from the critics”; the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border was ringingly applauded for both its traditional and original ballads.
[12][13] To the poet Anna Seward, who expressed her delight with “Glenfinlas”, Scott reported that “all Scotchmen prefer the 'Eve of St. John' to 'Glenfinlas', and most of my English friends entertain precisely an opposite opinion”.
Among Scott's biographers, John Buchan thought it “prentice work, full of dubious echoes and conventional artifice”,[20] S. Fowler Wright found the ballad unsatisfactory because the original story has too little variety of incident,[21] and Edgar Johnson thought the poem too slow, its language sometimes over-luscious, and the intended horror of its climax unachieved.
[22] Recently the critic Terence Hoagwood complained that the poem is less vivid than “The Eve”, and its morality (like that of “Christabel” and “La Belle Dame sans Merci”) is misogynistic.
