BBC Radio Scotland FM

A History of Scottish Literature

A History of Scottish Literature: Episode 3: The Solace of Mankind

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Factual: History

The Mason Word

Episode 3

Episode 3: The Solace of Mankind

The Solace of Mankind

BBC Radio Scotland - A History of Scottish Literature, The Solace of Mankind

Billy Kay explores the ballads and the Scots revival led by Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns.

Billy Kay traces Scottish literature from its origins to the present. He explores the influence of ballads and folk tales in the 17th century and the 18th-century literary revival.

After 1603 and the disappearance of royal patronage for poetry, we celebrate the great Ballad tradition and the influence of folklore on the literature. This gains momentum in the 18th century when the writers react against the anglicisation process following the Union of 1707, to initiate a Vernacular Revival.
Contemporary writers such as Janice Galloway and Val McDermid testify to the power of Scots song growing up, while Kirsteen McCue of Glasgow and Penny Fielding of Edinburgh University reveal the vogue for Scots song and poetry in England through the influence of Alan Ramsay's musical play The Gentle Shepherd. Ramsay was a nationalist and Jacobite, and published the older Scots poems of the Makars as well as writing new ones, and his cultural endeavour was matched in the collections by Watson, Ruddiman and Hamilton of Gilbertfield. Many of these prime movers were Jacobites....and this was a period when Scots and Gaelic culture crossed over. One of the ironies is that Duncan Ban Macintyre joined the City Gaird of Edinburgh which Robert Fergusson called the Black Banditti - because of their reputation for police brutality. So the greatest Gaelic and Scots poets of the age possibly confronted each other on the steering streets o auld reikie.
We celebrate what Robert Louis Stevenson called the "fizzing vitality" of Fergusson' poetry and hear James Robertson's poem in praise of his statue in the Canongate. Burns recognised his debt to Fergusson when he paid for his headstone and described him as "my elder brother in misfortune, by far my elder brother in the muse." We hear how Burns took up the Scots tradition and gave birth to a world wide cult - the American writer Ralph Waldo Emmerson saying that his songs were "the property and solace of mankind.".

BBC Radio Scotland

Billy Kay celebrates Scottish literature and its importance to national identity.

Billy Kay traces Scottish literature from its origins in Celtic myths to its role in creating national identity.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

A History of Scottish Literature

Episode 3: The Solace of Mankind

Genres

Series

BBC Radio Scotland FM

About BBC Radio Scotland