Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border

It includes many of the most famous Scottish ballads, such as "Sir Patrick Spens", "The Young Tamlane", "The Twa Corbies", "The Douglas Tragedy", "Clerk Saunders", "Kempion", "The Wife of Usher's Well", "The Cruel Sister", "The Dæmon Lover", and "Thomas the Rhymer".

[2] As a ten-year-old he began collecting the broadsheet ballads that were still being sold on the streets,[3] and his interest was further stimulated by his discovery, at the age of 13, of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.

[5] In 1792 Scott turned to field research, making an expedition into the wilds of Liddesdale, in southern Roxburghshire, and taking down the words of traditional ballads from villagers, farmers and herds wherever he could find any who still remembered them, and in the next seven years he repeated these "raids", as he called them, seven times.

[7][8] This would satisfy his patriotic feelings in various ways, not just displaying the typographical prowess of a little-known Border town, but also preserving the folk-poetry of his beloved Scotland for the admiration of the world at large.

He gained access to several manuscript collections originating from the Borders and from north-east Scotland, notably those of Mrs Brown of Falkland, David Herd and Robert Riddell.

This approach would now be considered unscholarly, but Scott wanted his book to appeal to a general reading public which had little regard either for scholarship or for ballad texts in the raw state.

[19] J. G. Lockhart took his claims at face value,[20] but later commentators, from Francis James Child onwards, took a different view, so that it became commonplace to accuse him of writing not just lines of his own but even entire stanzas.

[19][21][22][23] However, more recent analyses of the texts by Keith W. Harry, Marryat Ross Dobie and Charles G. Zug have largely vindicated Scott's claims, showing that he was probably responsible for nothing more than an occasional word or phrase.

[25][26] For some while Scott intended to include the Middle English romance Sir Tristrem among the romantic ballads, convinced as he was that it was a Scottish production, but it proved so difficult and time-consuming to edit that he had to publish it separately in 1804, two years after the Minstrelsy had appeared.

[37][23][38] James Hogg's mother Margaret was outraged by the Minstrelsy, and is said to have told him that the ballads she had recited for him "war made for singing an' no for reading; but ye hae broken the charm now, an' they'll never be sung mair".

Poetical merit, it judged, "is here attained in a very eminent degree", while warning that "We are not...to view these poems as...highly-polished and elaborate specimens of art; but as exhibiting the true sparks and flashes of individual nature".

He had little time for rude and unpolished Scottish ballads, protested that "the taste of the age calls for models more correct and refined", and lamented that "it was decreed that Mr. Scott should publish these volumes, and that Reviewers should be doomed to read them".

"[47] In the 20th century the Minstrelsy had a controversial reputation among academic writers on the folk tradition because of its failure to meet modern standards of scholarship,[48] but they have nevertheless acknowledged the ability of Scott's editorial method to capture something of the essence of the Scottish ballad.

[49] Jane Millgate admired "his ability not only to draw on the skills of very different men and organize the most diverse kinds of material but also to appear, almost simultaneously, in several guises – as antiquarian, scholar, historian, critic, and poet".

[54][55] It also furnished him with abundant subject-matter, and indeed Lockhart claimed that "In the text and notes of this early publication, we can now trace the primary incident, or broad outline of almost every romance, whether in verse or in prose" of his career as a creative writer.

[53] With the publication of the Minstrelsy, the ballad finally became a fashionable and respectable form, increasingly displacing the Burnsian type of lyric poem in literary favour.