{"id":604,"date":"2015-03-18T10:42:07","date_gmt":"2015-03-18T10:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=604"},"modified":"2015-03-18T10:42:07","modified_gmt":"2015-03-18T10:42:07","slug":"five-questions-alison-lumsden-on-the-edinburgh-edition-of-walter-scotts-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=604","title":{"rendered":"Five Questions: Alison Lumsden on the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott’s Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"NPG<\/a>Walter Scott, by Charles Picart, published by T. Cadell & W. Davies, after William Evans, after Sir Henry Raeburn; stipple engraving, published 21 December 1811; NPG D16117; used under a Creative Commons licence (CC-BY-NC-ND)<\/em><\/p>\n

Alison Lumsden holds a Chair in English at the University of Aberdeen<\/a>.\u00a0 She has published widely on authors including Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alasdair Gray, Nan Shepherd, Jackie Kay, and Robert Burns, but Walter Scott is the writer who lies at the heart of her research.\u00a0 Her monograph Walter Scott and the Limits of Language<\/em><\/a> was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2010 and she has edited or co-edited five volumes of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels (EEWN): The Pirate;<\/em> The Heart of Mid-Lothian<\/em>; Reliquiae Trotcosienses: or The Gabions of the Late Jonathan Oldbuck Esq. of Monkbarns<\/em>; Peveril of the Peak <\/em>and Woodstock<\/em>.\u00a0 She is currently building on this research through her role as Series Editor for the new Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott’s Poetry<\/a>, which we discuss below.<\/p>\n

1) How did you first become interested in Walter Scott’s poetry, and what made you want to embark on a new edition?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I first became interested in Walter Scott when I began a PhD in Scottish literature in the 1980s.\u00a0 It was the novels that really interested me then though, and I was looking at parallels between the \u2018post-modernism\u2019 of later twentieth century Scottish literature and the self-consciousness of the nineteenth century Scottish novel.\u00a0 However, I have also had a more personal interest in ballads, traditional Scottish culture and folklore since childhood and so I was fascinated by Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border<\/em> and Scott\u2019s poetry.\u00a0 When I completed the PhD I was immediately employed as a research assistant with the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels team and quickly realised that I loved working on manuscripts and thinking about the ways in which a text evolved during the creative process.\u00a0 When the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels was complete it seemed a natural next step to go back and edit Scott\u2019s poetry.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think anyone could have imagined that there would be a market for this when EEWN was initially proposed, but in the last thirty years our ideas about Scott and Romantic poetry more generally have evolved and the time now seems right to edit Scott\u2019s poetry.<\/p>\n

2) How did you go about securing a publisher and putting together a team of editors for the ten volumes?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels is published by Edinburgh University Press and they also publish the Stirling\/ South Carolina Edition of the Works of James Hogg and the New Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson.\u00a0 As such they are the foremost publisher of Scottish scholarly texts and seem the natural home for the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott\u2019s Poetry.\u00a0 The Poetry Edition is envisaged very much as a sister edition to EEWN and we hope that people will feel that it will complete their set of Scott\u2019s creative works, so we were delighted when EUP agreed to publish the poetry in a similar format.<\/p>\n

Putting together a good team is one of the key aspects of any scholarly edition, as the process is a collaborative one and one that does not suit all literary scholars.\u00a0 We had gathered a huge amount of expertise while editing the novels and I was keen to capture it and also to pass it onto a new generation.\u00a0 I was therefore delighted that Professor David Hewitt, Editor in Chief of the EEWN was willing to come on board as part of the team along with Professor Peter Garside who has vast experience as an editor for both the Waverley Novels and the Hogg edition.\u00a0 Dr Gillian Hughes of the Hogg edition was also keen to be involved and we were also extremely pleased to have her join us with the experience she could bring.\u00a0 In addition Dr Ainsley McIntosh had completed a scholarly edition of Marmion<\/em> as her PhD thesis at Aberdeen and as a pilot for the edition and she joined our team for the preliminary investigation and for the development of the early volumes.\u00a0 Not all volume editors have been assigned yet and we very much hope that once we have published some of the edition new editors will get involved so that we can pass on some of the expertise we have here.<\/p>\n

3) How different has the process of editing Scott’s poetry been from your previous work editing and co-editing volumes for the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are many similarities and our methodologies build on those of the EEWN but there are also sufficient differences to make this new project interesting.\u00a0 One of the most significant differences is that while Scott published the majority of his novels anonymously this was not the case with the poetry.\u00a0 As a result the creative evolution of the poems takes a very different form as readers engage in a dialogue with Scott about the poems both before and after publication and Scott at times responds to this when he writes or makes changes between editions.\u00a0 This presents new challenges when editing them. In addition, while the majority of notes were added to the novels as part of the 1829\u201332 Magnum Opus Edition, the notes are intrinsic to the poetry from the outset.\u00a0 The status and meaning of the notes thus has to be addressed, along with the fact that these tend to expand as the narrative poems go through later editions.<\/p>\n

4) What can we expect to find when we open the first volumes of the new edition?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our first volume will be Marmion<\/em> and the format of the edition will very much follow that of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels.\u00a0 Scott\u2019s poem and his own notes will take priority and this will be followed by an essay on the text explaining the evolution of the poem and how it has been emended for this edition.\u00a0 We will also provide an emendation list.\u00a0 An historical note and explanatory notes will follow that.\u00a0 One of the significant changes from earlier editions will be the inclusion of Scott\u2019s notes in a form that makes them readable; in the past they have often been lacking completely or in a font so small that they are virtually illegible.\u00a0 The new edition will make the significance of Scott\u2019s notes far more visible as they are clearly part of the longer narrative poems and not simply adjuncts to them.\u00a0 The Shorter Poems<\/em> will also be one of the volumes to come out early in the edition and this will, I think, significantly revise our understanding of Scott\u2019s role as a poet and put paid to the idea that he stopped writing poetry when he began to write novels.<\/p>\n

5) While there has been a recent revival of interest in Scott’s verse, it’s still relatively unfamiliar territory for many scholars and students of the Romantic period.\u00a0 Which poems would you particularly recommend to those wanting to begin an exploration of Scott’s poetic oeuvre?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I would always encourage students to start with The Lay of the Last Minstrel<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 It is the only one of the long narrative poems that you can read at one sitting and it engages with many concerns that we now recognise as central to Romanticism: the idea of the bard is at the heart of it and is linked to ideas of nationhood and the poem also incorporates elements of the supernatural along with wonderfully associative descriptions of landscape.\u00a0 Over the years I have taught it many times and students have always loved it.\u00a0 Marmion<\/em> is perhaps a more intellectually challenging poem and The Lady of the Lake<\/em> deals with the role of landscape and questions of political authority in truly innovative ways but as an entry poem into Scott\u2019s oeuvre I would recommend The Lay<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Walter Scott, by Charles Picart, published by T. Cadell & W. Davies, after William Evans, after Sir Henry Raeburn; stipple engraving, published 21 December 1811; NPG D16117; used under a… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=604"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":612,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604\/revisions\/612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}