Louise Yeoman, National Library of Scotland. Reportage Scotland: History in the Making. Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2000. xv + 489 pp. $19.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-946487-61-5.
Reviewed by Christopher Harvie (Seminar für Englische Philologie, University of Tübingen)
Published on H-Albion (November, 2001)
As someone who has been struggling to write a compact history of Scotland for sixth-formers, students and the more enlightened sort of tourist, Reportage Scotland comes as pure joy. I briefly mulled over providing cross-references in my bibliography--"particularly useful for the events dealt with on pages 56, 73, 99^Å," and so on. It wouldn't really work. Documents have to be included in any history--the Declaration of Arbroath, First Book of Discipline, National Covenant, etc.--which are "static," not covered by reporters, but whose meaning has to be teased out by historians. Louise Yeoman's definition is "news being made," with that old News of the World boast lurking somewhere in the background: "All Human Life is There!"
That said, the book is a great value: for GBP 10 you get nearly 500 pages of accounts, from Tacitus on Calgacus facing Agricola's troops at Mons Graupius in 84 AD--"They create a desolation, and call it peace"--to the Guardian's Matthew Engel (an inspired choice: he really can write like one) on the opening of the Edinburgh parliament on 1 July 1999. As Professor David Stevenson says in his introduction, the effect is like having shots of good malt whisky, from the enlightening to the plain addictive. And Yeoman is the most helpful of editors, not interfering with the originals but providing interlined translations of medieval Scots and separate translations of Gaelic.
I rather wished she had provided the original Latin in some cases: in my own book I used part of the Epithalamium George Buchanan wrote for the betrothal of Mary Queen of Scots to the French Dauphin and was enchanted by the pure classicism of Buchanan's style as well as his uncompromising republicanism. Christopher Smout's dismissal of him as some sort of cultural throwback in A History of the Scottish People (1969) is a serious flaw in that otherwise remarkable book.
One can quibble about Yeoman's policy on inclusions: the Reformation, the Civil War and the Forty-Five do well; the Union of 1707 (despite the centrality of superscribe Defoe), industrialization, and Victorian politics (no Gladstone, Rosebery, or Crofter MPs) are somewhat thinly covered. The rather bald account of the Disruption of 1843--the split in the Kirk which was the greatest event in nineteenth-century Scots politics--comes from the Whig Henry Cockburn, who stuck with the Auld Kirk, not from the Free Kirk's Hugh Miller, although Yeoman recognises him as "the greatest journalist of the age." No Burns either, though "The Holy Fair"--the Bard's sly piece on an Ayrshire mass communion which, for the young folk, ended up rather differently in "houghmagandie" (or copulation)--serves to rank along with William Dunbar's splenetic attack around 1500 on the charlatan Father Damian, who claimed to be able to fly.
The rendering of Dunbar presents another problem that I've been confronted with. Is it better to give the original Scots, and beside it a bald non-rhyming translation, as Yeoman does, or to modernize as sensitively as one can Dunbar's vocabulary, in order to keep the power and meaning of his verse? My "modernized" version of a stanza runs:
Some held he had been Daedalus, Some the Minotaur marvellous, Some Mars's blacksmith Vulcanus And some old Saturn's cook. And ever the peewits at him tuggit, The rooks him rent, the ravens him druggit, The hoodie craws his hair forth ruggit, That heaven might not him brook.
This doesn't depart much from the original (like Nevil Coghill's Chaucer) but seems more memorable than Yeoman's
Some thought he was Daedalus, some the marvellous Minotaur, some the God of War's blacksmith Vulcanus, and some thought him Saturn's cook ^Å
Yeoman's notes on the extracts are brief, giving only the baldest of contextualizations. This is prudent. Reportage Scotland will certainly be used as a teaching resource, and one should never give away in advance the questions to be asked of students. But a brief study is also needed of the generation, transmission, and acceptance of news in Scotland, over time. The Declaration of Arbroath (1320) doesn't figure here, quite rightly, because it was never news. It reads splendidly--"For we fight not for honour nor for glory but for freedom, which no good man gives up but with his life." But its addressee, the Pope, forgot about it, and it vanished for 300 years, eventually being dug out by Stewart political theorists, of all people. It's important to differentiate between "news stories" and "sleepers," and it's the art of gifted reporters, a bunch not all that well-served by Yeomans, but including James Margach, James Cameron, and Andrew Marr or Andrew O'Hagan in our own day, to bring the latter sort out. Perhaps a future edition could include this.
Finally, the book is perfect-bound. By not being stitched, it will consequently fall to bits pretty soon, after the hard wear that it's bound to get.
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Citation:
Christopher Harvie. Review of Yeoman, Louise; National Library of Scotland., Reportage Scotland: History in the Making.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
November, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5642
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