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The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History | 
 enlarge | Author: Hugh Trevor-roper
Publisher: Yale University Press
Category: Book
List Price: £18.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 13701
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.7 x 1.5
ISBN: 0300136862
Dewey Decimal Number: 941.10072
EAN: 9780300136869
ASIN: 0300136862
Publication Date: May 31, 2008
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A Parcel of Rogues All July 20, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Thirty years ago scottish officials engaged a team of historians to unearth a link - any link, however tenuous - which would allow them to claim William Shakespeare for their own. TWH Crosland's 'daw with a peacock's tail of his own painting' will be unimproved by this brisk corrective to native impertinence. Whether we English learn from it remains to be seen.
Ironically my nationalist sympathies oblige me to defend a people who wouldn't dream of returning the compliment, who rejoice in vainglory and rancour and who we consistently fail to see for the wrenching, grasping, lying, covetous breed they are. I've given the book five stars because telling the truth from an admirer's perspective resists allegations of bias.
Scotland's dalliance with romantic nationalism has parallels with pre-war Germany according to the author, who fears it threatens the Act of Union he wishes to preserve. Believing local culture heavily influenced by myth Roper describes how fellow unionist Sir Walter Scott used literature to try to reconcile Highland and Lowland life to a mythological, romantic vision of national unity that would make the 1707 Act an easier pill to swallow.
He argues that scotland invented and added to a purely local past, steering clear of the racial supremacism that set German nationalism, Germanic myth-making, on a path to war. Personally I doubt the cases are commensurable. Scottish 'nationalism' is a fraud. It is wedded to Brussels and the public teat. Nationalism, furthermore, is not a synonym for nazism.
Roper admires his subjects' ability to invent and re-invent their past (sometimes known as 'lying'). Perhaps that's why he fails to challenge the 'celtic' pre-migration identity of the British Isles when the very origin of that word should give pause to a professional academic. He also fails to emphasize the profoundly English roots of Lowland scotland.
England ran to the Highland Line for centuries - from long before Athelstan or Eadgar (943-75), who foolishly gave Lothian to scotland, until the early 1300s and intermittently thereafter until the late fifteenth century. Even today Highlanders know Lowlanders as 'English'. Scottish philosopher David Hume is unequivocal: "...all the lowlands....were peopled in great measure from Germany....'
The language of Burns - 'lallands' or 'scots' - is pure Anglo Saxon. The kilt, a garment quite unrelated to that worn by Irish clan chiefs, was invented by a humble English Quaker named Rawlinson. Tartan, too, we learn, is English. The enterprising (and brilliant) Allen brothers, related to the compiler of a still highly regarded history of the county of Surrey, hailed from Godalming.
Almost half 'scottish' clans are Anglo-norman. England may even have introduced the bagpipe. Research elsewhere reveals the earliest written references to bagpipes occur south of the border, pre-dating anything in scotland by 150 years (bagpipes are neither scottish nor irish and were popular throughout mediaeval Europe). More intriguing is that some of the earliest scottish references to the instrument identify them as 'Inglis' (English).
Scottish history is a lie - a Victorian romance got up to emphasize the indispensability of our neighbour at a time of vital imperial expansion. Scottish - not English - pressure initiated union. Indeed for all the book's virtues Lord Dacre's motive for writing it, a conviction that both countries benefit from the arrangement, seems wildly misconceived given current events.
Scotland accepts enormous English subsidies yet few of her burdens. Under EU law she votes herself English tax revenues without the contributor having any say in the matter. Her roads are better maintained. Her health service is better provided for by some way.
Other exceptions neither union nor membership of the EU can explain. In thirty years since the first black footballer donned an England jersey not a single black or asian sportsman has been selected to play for 'proudly multicultural scotland' at anything. Was it to preserve this state of affairs that government secretly closed all scotland's asylum offices in 2004?
Either scotland has them to select and a breach of law is being committed or an immigration war is being waged against the English. Why else is a country with few ethnics and a declining population allowed to restrict its search for new blood to all-white eastern Europe?
Newspapers say nothing. Broadcasters won't touch the subject. I know. I've asked. While English TV imposes ethnic quotas scottish programmes - Taggart, Monarch of the Glen, Rebus - observe no such restrictions. Is it a masonic thing?
Walter Scott denounced the Allens as liars but died, leaving them a free hand. Macaulay, the great historian and a genuine Highlander, who knew well the privations and not-so-romantic realities of life in the far north, simply gave up in defeat, attributing the entire Highland nonsense to Scott's poetry, which created a vision of the past so real it allowed literature to supersede the most obstinate truths of history.
Good. Nationhood is about more than 'scholarship' (etymologically 'nation' implies family connections, ties of blood, not simply an address), and truth is not always the best choice where harm is potentially irreparable. So what if scots tell themselves what they want to hear? It would be none of our business but for this infernal union of the unwilling.
C.S. Lewis denounced myth as 'lies'. Tolkien knew better ["Yes! 'wish-fulfilment dreams' we spin to cheat our timid hearts and ugly Fact defeat!"]. After all it was partly to restore to England something of what she'd had taken from her after 1066 with the importation of a lot of French nonsense about arthurian knights that the great man wrote Lord of The Rings.
What this book says needed saying years ago. But is it really such a bad thing if the mythopoeic instinct it questions appeals to imagination in ways rationalism and scholarship never can? Myth is a cultural anchor. It renders the whole infinitely larger than the sum of its parts by fulfilling our need to feel we belong to something greater than ourselves.
Carlyle said 'history [is but] a distillation of rumour'. If so truth must always come second to cultural preservation. Survival matters. As nations continue to yield before internationalist pressures it's probably the only thing that does.
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