Gang aft agley
Jan. 10th, 2022 05:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileThe book that initially won my “big book to read over the course of the year” poll was Magnus Magnusson’s Scotland: The Story of a Nation, a 700-page tome that I picked up at a Harvard Book Store Warehouse sale in 2015. Much like with last year’s Sagas of the Icelanders, I took this as a challenge to read it over the week between Christmas and New Years, so I could start the New Year off already having logged a deceptive number of pages, and read a different book in the poll for the year (this year I’m doing Capital, Volume 1). Unfortunately for me I only got about 300 pages through the book at the time the New Year started, so I’m 10 days and 2 other books in and have just finished it. I could knock out 100 pages a day on the days I had literally nothing else to do, but January hasn’t had very many of those.
The book is in most ways a pretty traditional big old history of wars and kings and parliaments told in chronological order, starting in prehistory to the best of its ability, with most of the page time going to the medieval and early modern periods. One fun thing it does is use a different history of Scotland as a framing device, walking us through the comparison between modern historical understandings of Scotland and that displayed in Sir Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather, a very popular and romanticized account that became an instant classic, shaping young Scots’ understandings of their own history for most of the past two centuries.
I know a decent amount of English history and a decent amount of Irish history, but very little about Scottish history except what winds up being peripherally important to English and Irish history, plus a little highly dramatized nonsense about the 1745 Jacobite uprising. So I was very happy to have a “survey course” type book to give an overview of the whole thing, or at least the whole thing up through Sir Walter Scott’s life, and then a lengthy epilogue covering from the 1830s all the way up through the establishment of the devolved Scottish parliament in 1999. I honestly think this should have just been a regular chapter–the bumbling but nevertheless successful heist of the Stone of Scone from Westminster in the 1950s has no business being stuck in an epilogue–but other than that it’s a very straightforwardly organized read. Magnusson also mostly brings a good authorial sensibility to it; there’s not too much editorializing, but he brings the occasional bit of dry humor, and a bit of a personal touch as someone who’s personally been involved in a lot of Scottish heritage work (apparently he was also a well-known TV commentator; in one footnote he notes that he was banned from political commentating on the BBC for a year after he got a little too excited about an upset SNC by-election win in 1967).
I’m not quite sure what to say about Scottish history itself except that in true history fashion it is often quite bonkers. People really have always been getting up to some shenanigans. Scotland also has a number of very funny place-names, some of which is because those names have then become the names of other things (like the river Tweed), but some just because that’s what you get when you goofily Anglicize Gaelic names, or when Scots words wind up identical to English words but meaning something different (I’m not sure what kind of geographical feature a “law” is but it makes Such-and-such Law a weird place-name). And do not get me started on the Stone of Scone (or, for that matter, the Scone of Stone).
It must also be said that in the past handful of centuries or so, Scotland seems to have had quite a cinematic run of bad luck–its being smaller and less populated and less wealthy than its English neighbor obvious had quite a bit to do with its inevitable subsumation under the English–sorry, British–crown, but there are also quite a number of key instances where they could have come out on top if only something hadn’t gone oddly wrong.
Much like Iceland, Scotland is also a good country to read big fat books about in the dead of winter when everything is cold and gray and unpleasant, but you’re inside and have books and whiskey (or something else, if you’re doing Dry January) and like, oatmeal. Maybe I’ll make oatmeal scones next weekend.
The book is in most ways a pretty traditional big old history of wars and kings and parliaments told in chronological order, starting in prehistory to the best of its ability, with most of the page time going to the medieval and early modern periods. One fun thing it does is use a different history of Scotland as a framing device, walking us through the comparison between modern historical understandings of Scotland and that displayed in Sir Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather, a very popular and romanticized account that became an instant classic, shaping young Scots’ understandings of their own history for most of the past two centuries.
I know a decent amount of English history and a decent amount of Irish history, but very little about Scottish history except what winds up being peripherally important to English and Irish history, plus a little highly dramatized nonsense about the 1745 Jacobite uprising. So I was very happy to have a “survey course” type book to give an overview of the whole thing, or at least the whole thing up through Sir Walter Scott’s life, and then a lengthy epilogue covering from the 1830s all the way up through the establishment of the devolved Scottish parliament in 1999. I honestly think this should have just been a regular chapter–the bumbling but nevertheless successful heist of the Stone of Scone from Westminster in the 1950s has no business being stuck in an epilogue–but other than that it’s a very straightforwardly organized read. Magnusson also mostly brings a good authorial sensibility to it; there’s not too much editorializing, but he brings the occasional bit of dry humor, and a bit of a personal touch as someone who’s personally been involved in a lot of Scottish heritage work (apparently he was also a well-known TV commentator; in one footnote he notes that he was banned from political commentating on the BBC for a year after he got a little too excited about an upset SNC by-election win in 1967).
I’m not quite sure what to say about Scottish history itself except that in true history fashion it is often quite bonkers. People really have always been getting up to some shenanigans. Scotland also has a number of very funny place-names, some of which is because those names have then become the names of other things (like the river Tweed), but some just because that’s what you get when you goofily Anglicize Gaelic names, or when Scots words wind up identical to English words but meaning something different (I’m not sure what kind of geographical feature a “law” is but it makes Such-and-such Law a weird place-name). And do not get me started on the Stone of Scone (or, for that matter, the Scone of Stone).
It must also be said that in the past handful of centuries or so, Scotland seems to have had quite a cinematic run of bad luck–its being smaller and less populated and less wealthy than its English neighbor obvious had quite a bit to do with its inevitable subsumation under the English–sorry, British–crown, but there are also quite a number of key instances where they could have come out on top if only something hadn’t gone oddly wrong.
Much like Iceland, Scotland is also a good country to read big fat books about in the dead of winter when everything is cold and gray and unpleasant, but you’re inside and have books and whiskey (or something else, if you’re doing Dry January) and like, oatmeal. Maybe I’ll make oatmeal scones next weekend.