SIR WALTER SCOTT

Scott was a great writer, the author of the first historic fiction, of best selling poetry, lyrics and short stories, as well as works of history. With the fame he found, he became so much more...

Seven facts about Sir Walter Scott that may surprise you…

❖ Edinburgh’s Waverley station is the only railway station in the world named after a novel, sitting at a crucial junction between the Old and New Towns of Scotland’s capital. It has been known by the name of Scott’s first novel since its construction in 1868. The name is a legacy inherited from three former stations in the city that became collectively known as the Waverley stations in the 1850s.

❖ Sir Walter Scott’s ‘Hail to the Chief’ is played to usher in every US President. It is from the Boat Song of Scott’s narrative poem The Lady of the Lake, published in 1810. First played in association with the US President at a celebratory event in 1815, by the 1840s it was cemented as the official piece of music marking the President’s arrival at an event or function.

❖ The Scott Monument on Princes Street in Edinburgh was the largest structure dedicated to a writer anywhere in the world for over a century until it was superseded by the José Martí Memorial in Havana, Cuba, in 1958. Scott’s remarkable Edinburgh landmark towers over 200ft high and boasts seventy statues.

❖ Walter Scott led the campaign to restore the famous cannon Mons Meg to Edinburgh Castle in 1829. Perhaps the most famous cannon in the world, this six-tonne siege gun was gifted to James II of Scotland in 1454. Three hundred years later, it was removed to the Tower of London, where it stayed for seventy-five years until it was permitted to return to its rightful home at Edinburgh Castle. Citizens lined the streets to see the procession pass by.

❖ Walter Scott was one of a small group of dedicated people responsible for establishing the River Tweed Commission in 1807, believed to be one of the oldest river fishery protection boards in the world. His understanding of sustainable fishing and the importance of maintaining eco-systems feels just as fresh and relevant 200 years on.

❖ Scott helped to reinvent Highland tartan as both a national symbol and a fashion statement. Without the extraordinary impact and popularity of his Jacobite novels set in 18th-century Scotland and their adaptations on the stage in the early 19th century, it is difficult to imagine the international love affair with tartan that endures to this day.

❖ Scott helped popularise the genre of the historical novel, now so phenomenally popular in books, games and films. Waverley was a record-breaking novel when it was published in 1814, selling more copies than all other novels combined that year. The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction is the UK’s biggest accolade for modern authors of historical fiction, now managed by The Abbotsford Trust, the charity that cares for Walter Scott’s former home and estate.

❖ The writer George R.R. Martin has claimed that Scott’s novels and historical studies were a major influence on the A Song of Ice and Fire series, known to fans around the world as Game of Thrones. In Scott’s novel Ivanhoe, readers will discover jousting tournaments, champion knights in disguise, a kingdom in turmoil and characters accused of witchcraft, whilst Scott’s historical accounts of bloody events such as The Black Dinner of 1440 would inspire Martin’s infamous Red Wedding episode and the betrayal of House Stark.    

Scott was born in Edinburgh’s Old Town of Edinburgh in 1771.

His father was a successful lawyer, his mother the daughter of a Professor of Medicine at Edinburgh University. He was descended from some of the oldest families of the Scottish Borders, and after suffering polio in 1773, was sent to his grandfather's farm at Sandyknowe in Roxburghshire, below the historic Borders keep of Smailholm and looking over the Eildon Hills. Living here until 1775, and listening to stories from his grandfather and others, the young Scott developed his life-long love of Border history and folklore.

On returning to Edinburgh, he attended the High School and Edinburgh University. In 1792, he became an Advocate, and was appointed Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire in 1799. This allowed him to travel across Scotland in search of history and material to use in his poetry and fiction, eventually publishing his monumental Minstrelsy of the Scottish Borders in 1802.

It was in the Borders that Scott was happiest and, after initially renting a cottage at Lasswade, he and his wife Charlotte moved into a more substantial country house at Ashestiel near Selkirk in 1804. It was there that he wrote the great epic poems The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808) and Lady of the Lake (1810). With his fame, fortune and family growing, Scott turned to creating Abbotsford, which was completed in 1824.

As his great friend and rival Lord Byron’s success as a poet grew, Scott decided to concentrate on new literary ventures, blending fictional dialogue with historical fact to an extraordinarily successful degree. Scott is regarded as having created the historical novel on the publication of Waverley in 1814, which is the only book in the world to have a train station named after it. Along with Guy Mannering (1815) and The Antiquary (1816), each of Scott’s first three novels is set at a time of national crisis and are studies in the evolution of modern Scotland. The Tale of Old Mortality (1816) examines the creation of a political middle ground between opposing fanaticisms. The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) is a Romeo and Juliet tragedy with an emphasis on the political context that destroys the lovers. The Heart of Midlothian (1818) is an extended but unresolved debate on the nature of justice, while Ivanhoe (1820), the first novel to be set outside Scotland, fashions a moral tale on male power and the abuse of women and racial minorities.

Sir Walter Scott is one of the most successful authors of all time and is the second-most quoted writer in the Oxford English Dictionary after William Shakespeare. Scott’s creativity, wit and understanding of human nature remain on display in his works, but it is only through visiting Abbotsford that one can truly understand the man himself.