Finding Hoards

In literature, folklore, and popular culture, coins have a powerful association with buried treasure. That association often includes, of course, a colorful array of dragons, elves, leprechauns, and pirates. This chapter examines coin hoards as they appear in the works of Aristophanes, Plautus, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot, J.R.R. Tolkien, and others. Among historical hoards are those reported by Cicero, Samuel Pepys, and a curious testimonial involving a witch in a medieval manuscript from 1366. Modern discoveries of ancient and medieval coin hoards number in the tens of thousands; this chapter examines some notable examples from Pompeii, Herculaneum, Britain, and Afghanistan.

Media Tourism and Its Role in Sustaining Scotland’s Tourism Industry

Popular media, including films, television, comics, videogames, and books, are an increasingly important aspect of contemporary tourism. This is especially the case in Scotland, where popular culture led to the development of Scotland’s tourism industry. In this article, we will describe the phenomenon of media-related tourism in Scotland with respect to three selected case studies within Scotland: First, Glenfinnan Viaduct, made famous by the Harry Potter film series; Second, Doune Castle, used as a set for Monty Python, Game of Thrones and more recently, Outlander; Third, Abbotsford, home of Sir Walter Scott, a classical novelist now celebrating his 250th Birthday Anniversary. In examining these case studies, the article will consider how sustainable media tourism is. This approached is from the lens of media tourism and its impact on rural communities, concerns over local infrastructure, wider understandings of media tourism as a growing sub-sector, and the sustainability of the wider Scottish tourism industry in relation to the coronavirus pandemic.

Travels in Scottland: Poems for Walter Scott @250

Welcome to the fifth collection by Wyvern Poets, in collaboration with the University of Dundee. 2021 marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), father of the historical novel and, effectively, of a new kind of mass ‘time travel’. Scott’s prolific output exported an image of his homeland with global appeal, if not always scrupulous authenticity. Stuart Kelly’s 2011 biography, Scott-land, is subtitled The Man Who Invented a Nation, perhaps without too much exaggeration. Scott’s antiquarian vision transformed a turbulent past into a pre-industrial landscape for the Romantic imagination, virtually overwhelming its place of origin or at least melding with it, as he rapidly became one the best-selling authors on earth. John Davidson’s ‘The Salvation of Nature’ (1891), fantasised a future Scotland bought out by an entertainment conglomerate. The World’s Pleasance Company, Ltd. demolishes anything built after 1700, ‘rewilding’ Scotland into a kind of neo-medieval theme park re-staging the past for tourists. Davidson’s story was both satirical exaggeration and backhanded tribute to Scott’s work for bringing history to life in a certain form. Hence this collection considers the many ways in which Scott’s evocative, but also problematic reimagining of his homeland remains relevant to our time and beyond.

Early Russian Reception of James Hogg (1830s)

The early Russian reception of the Scottish writer James Hogg (1770—1835), known in his homeland as an interpreter of folk ballads and the author of “The Confession of a Justified Sinner” (1824) — a complex work, which laid the foundation for the theme of multiple personality disorder in English literature is comprehended in the article for the first time. It has been suggested that the first Russian to hear about Hogg and his works was A. I. Turgenev, who visited W. Scott in Abbotsford in August 1828. The materials of the Russian periodicals of the 1830s (“Library for reading”, “Northern Bee”, “Telescope”, “Moscow Observer”), which reported facts about the life and work of Hogg, were comprehended. It is noted that the authors of a number of articles (most of them published without a signature and under kryptonyms) were significant critics and publicists of the era — O. I. Senkovsky, N. A. Polevoy, N. I. Nadezhdin. It was established that in the 1830s, fragments from Hogg’s memoir about the life of W. Scott in Abbotsford “The Domestic Manners and Private Life of Sir Walter Scott” (1834), as well as a fragment from the book “Noctes Ambrosianae” (1802—1835), attributed to Hogg, but in reality a collective work of J. Wilson, J. G. Lockhart, Hogg and W. Maginn were translated into Russian. The analysis of publications about Hogg in periodicals and in the fourteenth volume of the Encyclopedic Lexicon (1838) revealed inaccuracies in the presentation of biographical facts, the tendency of Russian publicists to uncritically perceive the subjective assessments of the Hogg-memoirist, largely due to his desire to emphasize his own literary significance. It is noted that, introducing Hogg as a follower of Burns and a friend of Scott, the authors of articles in Russian periodicals did not pay due attention to Hogg’s creative individuality, the originality of his creative heritage, as a result of which the late period of his literary biography (late 1810s — mid-1830s), associated with the creation of “The Confession of a Justified Sinner” and a number of other significant works, remained unnoticed against the background of early works associated with reliance on folk songs.

Sir Walter Scott and the All the Talents Cabinet

The year 1806–7 marked a critical juncture in British politics. The death in January 1806 of William Pitt, prime minister for nearly a generation, threw Westminster into disarray and brought the Foxite whigs into power for the first time since December 1783. For Scottish adherents of Pitt, the damage was compounded by the impeachment about to begin in April 1806, of Henry Dundas, Lord Melville, the kingpin of Scottish patronage at Westminster. For Walter Scott (1771–1832), who had just become famous after the publication of The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), this meant a last-minute journey to London in January 1806 to save a political appointment that would allow him to make literature his vocation. The death of Pitt and the vanquishing of Melville represented a personal catastrophe for the ambitious thirty-four-year-old Scott, and he moved quickly to secure the appointment about to be lost to him. My article looks at the negotiations of Scott, and more broadly those of Pitt's followers behind the scenes, as the All the Talents cabinet was being assembled and as Scottish patronage entered a new era after the fall of Melville. Scott proved to be a skilled negotiator at Westminster: he would eventually go on in 1822 to preside over the first visit of a Hanoverian monarch to Scotland. Culturally speaking, he was to take over where Melville had left off, and through his poetry and novels bring recognition to Scotland's role in Britain.