Inventing Scotland

Hugh Trevor-Roper, the late Regius professor of modern history at Oxford, liked to speak from the chair. His fondness for declaration didn't always serve him well, and he stumbled badly in authenticating the so-called Hitler Diaries, deciding against the evidence that these forgeries were genuine. This credulous habit persisted, and in his last book, The Invention of Scotland, he foists it on his neighbors over the border. (He grew up twenty miles below Scotland in Northumberland.) The book appeared after his death; and, had more time been given him, he might have managed better than a slash-and-burn polemic. That is the kindest thing one can say of him.

His whimsical title suggests what he is up to, arguing archly that Scotland's history, its literature, in fact its entire civilization, insofar as it had one, is a fiction. Exploring "the interaction of myth and history in Scotland," he sees the former, a tissue of lies, displacing the dowdier truth. Three myths are decisive in forwarding this sleight-of-hand. The political myth gives Scotland an autonomous past, the literary myth endows it with a body of great poetry, and the sartorial myth clothes its people (T-R's naked barbarians) with an ancient costume—the kilt. At least it covered their loins.

But the kilt turns out to be a recent import, the brainstorm of an eighteenth-century ironmaster, in fact an Englishman, who needed to suit up his Scottish laborers in a less cumbersome outfit than their everyday garment, the plaid. The political myth comes from the fertile brain of a sixteenth-century historian, Hector Boece, with an important assist from the Latin humanist George Buchanan. Boece's incendiary dialogue on the tenure of kings, De Jure Regni apud Scotos, subjects them to popular approval, a radical adjustment of the status of royals that resonates well into the Scottish Enlightenment. It was Buchanan who elaborated the tale of Scotland's venerable constitution, bolstering her claim to legitimate nationhood, and freeing her from English rule. T-R, who scoffs at the claim and rejects its corollary, enjoys himself in knocking both of them into a cocked hat.

The literary myth, sponsored by James Macpherson after the failure of '45, conjured up a prehistoric bard, Ossian, bearded, and blind as such a personage should be. "It was natural," says T-R, "that Scots, seeking compensation for the end of their independent history and politics, should turn to . . . their native literature." "There was none," however. Macpherson filled the gap with fake-antique poetry, probably of his own devising, while turning up some poetry that was real. In this specimen of the latter, the bard sings the death of the hero Cuthullin: "Night comes rolling down. The face of ocean falls. The heath-cock's head is beneath his wing. The hind sleeps with the hart of the desert. They shall rise with morning's light, and feed by the mossy stream. But my tears return with the sun. My sighs come on with the night." Trevor-Roper calls lines like these "vapid rhetoric." Hurrying to judgment, he doesn't distinguish between Macpherson's Wardour Street imitations and his fragments of authentic Gaelic verse. All were lumped together: "of inexpressible tedium," the whole "totally unreadable."

But Thomas Gray, an authentic poet, thought otherwise, and so, subsequently, did Lord Byron, Burns, Blake, Coleridge, Tennyson, and Goethe. The list goes on. It is easy, common, and erroneous to fall in with T-R's strictures and discredit the entire story. One review I've read (in the Wall Street Journal) does this, reporting that Ossian was nothing more than a hoax. But an ancient oral tradition did exist in Scotland telling of "old, unhappy far-off things, and battles long ago." Sir Walter Scott tapped it famously in his Scottish Border Minstrelsy (1802-3), tugging into shape the primitive but often thrilling material he had uncovered out in the country. This oral poetry can be likened to Plato's...