Walter Scott, ‘The Pirate’ (1821)
The Pirate (published late 1821, though the first edition has 1822 on the title page) is a strange novel, the first actual misfire in the Waverley sequence. The twofer of The Monastery and The Abbot (1820) make for a baggy and sometimes odd read, but they don’t crash and flail like this novel does. And before that, the series really had gone from strength to strength, enjoying extraordinary and unprecedented success as it did so. First: Waverley (1814), then Guy Mannering (1815), The Antiquary (1816) and Old Mortality (1816) — brilliant novels all. Then the perennial favourite Rob Roy (1817), followed by perhaps Scott’s single finest novel, The Heart of Midlothian (1818). Then the shorter, more Gothic The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), adapted into the celebrated opera, Lucia di Lammermoor; then Ivanhoe (1819) of many stout-hearted-historical-film-adaptations fame, and Kenilworth (1821) — this latter the first ‘triple decker’ and in its day one of Scott’s biggest hits. Such a sequence was, perhaps, bound to hit the wall sooner or later, and in The Pirate it dashes hard, making quite the clatter as it does so.
Walter Allen talks about how the first halves of Scott’s novels are so often so much better than the second halves (‘the first halves of these novels are often superb … and then how mechanically their author solves the riddles he has perfunctorily set himself’ [Allen, The English Novel (1954), 121]). Of no book is that fact more balefully true than this one.
We’re in Shetland (or ‘Zetland’ as the novel calls it) and Scott does interesting work delineating the dual heritage of the island community, prominent citizens generally identifying as Scandinavian and harking back to the glories of their Viking ancestors, and many others on the island identifying rather with their Scottish roots. Scotland is the future, we might say, in the novel’s Lukacsian dialectic. The island’s chief citizen is its udaller, Magnus Troil, a hearty old fellow who enjoys feasts and song and provides a vague kind of leadership to his folk. He has two beautiful, eligible daughters, Brenda and Minna, who are (basically) Sense and Sensibility respectively. We’re also introduced to the stern, distant figure of Basil Mertoun, who has purchased an estate on the island and retired there to misanthropic seclusion, and also to his son, the handsome and dashing Mordaunt Mertoun, the novel’s hero, more or less. Mordaunt is often a guest at Magnus Troil’s house, and everyone assumes that he is wooing one or other of the two daughters. But which one? (His father asks him directly which he favours and Mordaunt evades answering).
There are various minor characters, including the Scot Triptolemus Yellowley, an eccentric individual obsessed with ancient bucolic poetry who is trying, and failing, to modernise agriculture on Zetland — and the pythoness, or Norse prophetess, ‘Norna of the Fitful Head’. The ‘Fitful Head’ is where she lives, a precarious habitation on top of a cliff, containing the paraphernalia of alchemic and prophetic arts, where she is attended by a grotesque, tongueless dwarf.
Norna sweeps about the island, appearing when least expected to offer prophetic verses, warnings, admonitions and generally adding Gothic-y flavour and weirdness to the mix. Contemporary critics of the novel accused Scott of a failure of invention with Norna, taking her as a mere retread of Guy Mannering’s Meg Merrilies, although she seems to me a very different sort of character. I’ll come back to her.
For a while the novel trundles nicely along, filling-out its world. Which daughter will Mordaunt finally marry? What do Norna’s gnashing, doom-y predictions mean? And strikingly there are, for a long time, and despite the novel’s title, no pirates at all. The Zetlanders augment their husbandry by picking up flotsam and jetsam washed ashore from shipwrecks, operating by a kind of finders-keepers legal principle. They also, Scott tells us, refuse to rescue floundering sailors, believing that once such people have been shipwrecked they are the sea’s, and that it would be terribly bad luck to assist them. Then, in chapter 7, Mordaunt, who is too gallant to abide by any tradition so heartless, rescues one such floundering man. This is Clement Cleveland, a handsome young sea-captain. The Zetlanders are not pleased by this, but Norna tells them all to back off.
Cleveland goes to stay with Magnus Troil, where he insinuates his way into the family and — as Mordaunt believes — poisons their minds against Mordaunt Mertoun. From being spoilt for choice between the two daughters, Mordaunt is now shunned by both. But still — no pirates! None!
Then a party is thrown at Magnus Troil’s house of Burgh Westra to which the whole island is invited except, rather pointedly, Mordaunt. He goes anyway and is coldly received; and whilst there he observes that Captain Cleveland has won the heart of the imaginative, inexperienced Minna. The sea-captain is as handsome and dashing as Mordaunt, but he has the added advantage of a colourful past sailing the seven seas where Mordaunt has only been knocking about this one small island all his life. At any rate, Minna is smitten. A few days later a whale appears offshore, and the islanders try to harpoon it. In the course of this Mordaunt nearly drowns, but Cleveland saves him, thereby (we might think) repaying him for Mordaunt’s earlier saving of him.
The plot potboils a little further, with Norna of the fitful head popping up every now and again to utter doomful predictions and generally boss people about. Mordaunt and Cleveland become increasingly quarrelsome with one another until one night Minna overhears the two having a fight. Mordaunt disappears and the worst is feared: that he has been slain. Cleveland does a runner, abandoning Minna and leaving her deeply depressed. We’re two thirds of the way through the story now and we still haven’t encountered any actual pirates. No pirates here, sir. No sir.
Then, with the wrenching sound of badly meshed gears being changed, the novel is suddenly all pirates, all the time. We readers have suspected for a while that Cleveland is not the civilian sea-captain he claimed to be, but is in fact a pirate in disguise, and so it transpires. He is actually the infamous Pirate Vaughan, and in the third volume he reunites with his crew — who, slightly confusingly, have not been shipwrecked, and who enthusiastically receive him back aboard their pirate ship. This crew includes Cleveland’s (or Vaughan’s) faithful lieutenant John Bunce, a one-time London actor, now pirate, who doesn’t think the name ‘Bunce’ piratical enough and so goes by the alias Frederick Altamont. There’s also the stout, growly pirate Captain Goffe, who has been commanding in Cleveland-Vaughan’s absence and various yaar! and arrr! others.
Norna reveals her tragic history — she was seduced and had a child who was taken away, and who might be dead, or might have grown up to be a pirate. The pirates kidnap the two girls Minna and Brenda, and there’s some tension as to whether they will be raped, although Bunce/Altamount intervenes to assure the girls that they’ll be left alone.
Now Mordaunt pops up again: not dead, only wounded in his earlier duel with Cleveland. He has been nursed back to health by Norna of the Fitful-Head, who now insists that he, Mordaunt, is her long-lost son. There’s a stand off between the town, who want the hostages back, and the pirates, who want the town to provision them so they can go on their way. Then Mordaunt’s misanthropic Dad, Basil Mertoun, turns up.
In what Scott presumably intended as a devastating plot-twist, but which reads as maddeningly random and disorienting, Basil reveals that he is also a pirate, or rather that he was — and moreover that his name is also Pirate Vaughan. Although he has raised Mordaunt as his son, in fact his son is Cleveland, fathered on Norna, and spirited away. A tangle of backstory is dropped unceremoniously in at this point in the denouement: Basil fled, years later married a Spanish woman, who already had a young son: Mordaunt. She died, by which time Cleveland had grown-up and run off to do pirate things, so Basil raised young Mordaunt, though all his associations with the lad were painful (hence his grumpy and misanthropic attitude towards him, and everyone else). This means that Mordaunt is much too young to be Norna’s son, a detail she would surely have noticed, but Scott has Basil wave this objection away, with rather superb, if quite unconvincing, nonchalance: ‘“Away, away!” said Norna, with a laugh, when she had heard the story to an end, “this is a legend framed by the old corsair … How could I mistake Mordaunt for my son, their ages being so different?” “The dark complexion and manly stature may have done much,” said Basil Mertoun; “strong imagination must have done the rest.”’ [ch 41]
Well alright then!
With some haste Scott now wraps-up his tale. The hostages are freed, the provisioned pirates try to make a run for it but are intercepted by HMS Halycon, which suddenly hoves into the story under the command of Captain Weatherport. Rather than suffer the ignominy of being hanged, the pirates blow their ship to smithereens — or they try to, although in the event they miscalculate the amount of gunpowder needful and are all captured after all. The yardarm beckons, but Scott exes his deus from his machina. Out of nowhere we learn that, years ago, Cleveland had intervened to prevent some other pirates from doing unspeakable piratical things to two women.
“Listen to me a moment,” added [Captain Weatherport], addressing the younger Vaughan, whom we have hitherto called Cleveland. “Hark you, sir, your name is said to be Clement Vaughan — are you the same, who, then a mere boy, commanded a party of rovers, who, about eight or nine years ago, pillaged a Spanish village called Quempoa, on the Spanish Main, with the purpose of seizing some treasure?”
“It will avail me nothing to deny it,” answered the prisoner.
“No,” said Captain Weatherport, “but it may do you service to admit it. — Well, the muleteers escaped with the treasure, while you were engaged in protecting, at the hazard of your own life, the honour of two Spanish ladies against the brutality of your followers. Do you remember any thing of this?”
“I am sure I do,” said Jack Bunce; “for our Captain here was marooned for his gallantry, and I narrowly escaped flogging and pickling for having taken his part.”
“When these points are established,” said Captain Weatherport, “Vaughan’s life is safe — the women he saved were persons of quality, daughters to the governor of the province, and application was long since made, by the grateful Spaniard, to our government, for favour to be shown to their preserver. [ch 42]
Good job they were ‘women of quality’ and not just regular girls, I suppose! The local Provost pardons Cleveland/Vaughan Junior and his crew and they all vow to give up pirating and turn to honest sailor-work instead, which they then do.
Cleveland, now that his wicked past has been exposed, begs Minna to allow him to prove himself worthy of her, but she sends him on his way with a melodramatic speech about the impossibility of their ever marrying, and ever afterwards lives and pure and virgin life (we’re told in passing that Cleveland later dies heroically ‘leading the way in a gallant and honourable enterprise’). Her sister Brenda marries Mordaunt and lives happily ever after.
What to make of all this? The marine stuff is, famously, bobbins — Scott really had no idea what he was writing about when it came to ships and the sea (Fenimore Cooper was so annoyed by Scott’s various nautical malapropisms that he wrote 1824’s The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea to show how it ought to be done). The denouement is cluttered and rushed, plot strands not so much tied-up as heaved together with a pitchfork. The first two-thirds build in an absorbing if rather over-leisurely way to a portrait of the unusual community of Zetland, blended of Scott’s rich Scottish vernacular and specific detail and a beguiling mythic dimension of Norse customs and identities, including (especially whenever Norna of the Fitful Head pops up) quite a lot of Norse ballads, saga, mythology and monuments. This is fascinating, not least in the way it anticipates — to some extent itself feeds — our later widespread interest in Norse Myths and its Tolkien-et-al fantastical offshoots.
But Scott, not to put too fine a point on it, pisses all this away in his final act.
The big reveal (though it is telegraphed from earlier) is, we might say, that pirates are everywhere, hidden among us. Hidden in plain sight. There might be something interesting in this, if Scott hadn’t succumbed to his sentimental ‘and they all lived happily ever after’ ending. And though some of the minor characters here are entertainingly rendered — Magnus Troil is jolly; Triptolemus Yellowley and his extraordinarily miserly sister and housekeeper Barbara (Baby) Yellowley are amusing, and there’s some if more strained entertainment in the pedlar Bryce Snailsfoot and the pedantic bard Claud Halcro — the main characters are all more or less inert.
The biggest failing, characterisation-wise, is Minna Troil. Earlier I described Brenda and Minna as ‘Sense and Sensibility’, but there is nothing believable about Minna in the way that there is in Austen’s expert characterisation of Elinor Dashwood. Despite growing up in a remote, primitive island community, without books or schooling, Minna somehow develops an exquisite and supersensitive imaginative sensibility such that, when Clement Cleveland comes to stay, she falls for the romantic projection of his adventurous and gallant lifestyle she has constructed in her mind. When Cleveland’s true nature is revealed she sinks into a depression, but she rouses from this towards the end to berate him in the manner of a stage heroine out of a Princess Theatre melodrama:
Cleveland approached within two yards of Minna, and bent his head to the ground. There was a dead pause, until Minna said, in a firm but melancholy tone, “Unhappy man, why didst thou seek this aggravation of our woe? Depart in peace, and may Heaven direct thee to a better course than that which thy life has yet held!”
“Heaven will not aid me,” said Cleveland, “excepting by your voice. I came hither rude and wild, scarce knowing that my trade, my desperate trade, was more criminal in the sight of man or of Heaven, than that of those privateers whom your law acknowledges. I was bred in it, and, but for the wishes you have encouraged me to form, I should have perhaps died in it, desperate and impenitent. O, do not throw me from you! let me do something to redeem what I have done amiss, and do not leave your own work half-finished!”
“Cleveland,” said Minna, “I will not reproach you with abusing my inexperience, or with availing yourself of those delusions which the credulity of early youth had flung around me, and which led me to confound your fatal course of life with the deeds of our ancient heroes. Alas, when I saw your followers, that illusion was no more! — but I do not upbraid you with its having existed. Go, Cleveland; detach yourself from those miserable wretches with whom you are associated, and believe me, that if Heaven yet grants you the means of distinguishing your name by one good or glorious action, there are eyes left in those lonely islands, that will weep as much for joy, as — as — they must now do for sorrow.”
“And is this all?” said Cleveland; “and may I not hope, that if I extricate myself from my present associates — if I can gain my pardon by being as bold in the right, as I have been too often in the wrong cause — if, after a term, I care not how long — but still a term which may have an end, I can boast of having redeemed my fame — may I not — may I not hope that Minna may forgive what my God and my country shall have pardoned?”
“Never, Cleveland, never!” said Minna, with the utmost firmness; “on this spot we part, and part for ever, and part without longer indulgence. Think of me as of one dead, if you continue as you now are; but if, which may Heaven grant, you change your fatal course, think of me then as one, whose morning and evening prayers will be for your happiness, though she has lost her own. — Farewell, Cleveland!” [ch 40]
Does this sound like the rural, unschooled, teenager daughter of a local island udaller to you? The novel ends on Scott’s panegyric to the repudiation and self-denial that characterises the remainder of Minna’s life:
Mordaunt and Brenda were as happy as our mortal condition permits us to be. They admired and loved each other — enjoyed easy circumstances — had duties to discharge which they did not neglect; and, clear in conscience as light of heart, laughed, sung, danced, daffed the world aside, and bid it pass.
But Minna — the high-minded and imaginative Minna — she, gifted with such depth of feeling and enthusiasm, yet doomed to see both blighted in early youth, because, with the inexperience of a disposition equally romantic and ignorant, she had built the fabric of her happiness on a quicksand instead of a rock, — was she, could she be happy? Reader, she was happy, for, whatever may be alleged to the contrary by the sceptic and the scorner, to each duty performed there is assigned a degree of mental peace and high consciousness of honourable exertion, corresponding to the difficulty of the task accomplished. That rest of the body which succeeds to hard and industrious toil, is not to be compared to the repose which the spirit enjoys under similar circumstances. Her resignation, however, and the constant attention which she paid to her father, her sister, the afflicted Norna, and to all who had claims on her, were neither Minna’s sole nor her most precious source of comfort. … while the eyes which she lifted up were streaming with tears, that the death of Cleveland had been in the bed of honour; nay, she even had the courage to add her gratitude, that he had been snatched from a situation of temptation ere circumstances had overcome his new-born virtue; and so strongly did this reflection operate, that her life, after the immediate pain of this event had passed away, seemed not only as resigned, but even more cheerful than before. Her thoughts, however, were detached from the world, and only visited it, with an interest like that which guardian spirits take for their charge, in behalf of those friends with whom she lived in love, or of the poor whom she could serve and comfort. Thus passed her life, enjoying from all who approached her, an affection enhanced by reverence; insomuch, that when her friends sorrowed for her death, which arrived at a late period of her existence, they were comforted by the fond reflection, that the humanity which she then laid down, was the only circumstance which had placed her, in the words of Scripture, “a little lower than the angels!” [ch 42]
It’s a shame to allow my decorum to slip in terms of expressive register in this post, but with respect to this — the very last paragraph of the novel — I really find myself moved to say: oh fuck off.
Alright, I’m being unfair. I think I see what Scott is doing here, and (obviously) it’s not aiming for, as it might be, psychological coherence or any quasi-realist verisimilitude of characterisation. Instead he is aiming for something distinctly Scottian: he is taking an ordinary (a common) individual, and parleying them into something more ‘common’ in another sense, a spokesman for some more fundamental human dignity. In this I am appropriating the terms from G K Chesterton’s (still brilliant, indeed frankly still un-superseded) critical analysis. It is what Chesterton takes as Scott’s fundamentally democratic aesthetic and ethos. This is a lengthy quotation from Chesterton’s book, but it is certainly worth your time in the reading:
Of all these nineteenth-century writers there is none, in the noblest sense, more democratic than Walter Scott. As this may be disputed, and as it is relevant, I will expand the remark. There are two rooted spiritual realities out of which grow all kinds of democratic conception or sentiment of human equality. There are two things in which all men are manifestly and unmistakably equal. They are not equally clever or equally muscular or equally fat, as the sages of the modern reaction (with piercing insight) perceive. But this is a spiritual certainty, that all men are tragic. And this, again, is an equally sublime spiritual certainty, that all men are comic. No special and private sorrow can be so dreadful as the fact of having to die. And no freak or deformity can be so funny as the mere fact of having two legs. Every man is important if he loses his life; and every man is funny if he loses his hat, and has to run after it. And the universal test everywhere of whether a thing is popular, of the people, is whether it employs vigorously these extremes of the tragic and the comic. Shelley, for instance, was an aristocrat, if ever there was one in this world. He was a Republican, but he was not a democrat: in his poetry there is every perfect quality except this pungent and popular stab. For the tragic and the comic you must go, say, to Burns, a poor man. And all over the world, the folk literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its happy tales are of broken heads.
These, I say, are two roots of democratic reality. But they have in more civilised literature, a more civilised embodiment of form. In literature such as that of the nineteenth century the two elements appear somewhat thus. Tragedy becomes a profound sense of human dignity. The other and jollier element becomes a delighted sense of human variety. The first supports equality by saying that all men are equally sublime. The second supports equality by observing that all men are equally interesting.
In this democratic aspect of the interest and variety of all men, there is, of course, no democrat so great as Dickens. But in the other matter, in the idea of the dignity of all men, I repeat that there is no democrat so great as Scott. This fact, which is the moral and enduring magnificence of Scott, has been astonishingly overlooked. His rich and dramatic effects are gained in almost every case by some grotesque or beggarly figure rising into a human pride and rhetoric. The common man, in the sense of the paltry man, becomes the common man in the sense of the universal man. He declares his humanity. For the meanest of all the modernities has been the notion that the heroic is an oddity or variation, and that the things that unite us are merely flat or foul. The common things are terrible and startling, death, for instance, and first love: the things that are common are the things that are not commonplace. Into such high and central passions the comic Scott character will suddenly rise. Remember the firm and almost stately answer of the preposterous Nicol Jarvie when Helen Macgregor seeks to browbeat him into condoning lawlessness and breaking his bourgeois decency. That speech is a great monument of the middle class. Molière made M. Jourdain talk prose; but Scott made him talk poetry. Think of the rising and rousing voice of the dull and gluttonous Athelstane when he answers and overwhelms De Bracy. Think of the proud appeal of the old beggar in the Antiquary when he rebukes the duellists. Scott was fond of describing kings in disguise. But all his characters are kings in disguise. He was, with all his errors, profoundly possessed with the old religious conception, the only possible democratic basis, the idea that man himself is a king in disguise.
In all this Scott, though a Royalist and a Tory, had in the strangest way, the heart of the Revolution. For instance, he regarded rhetoric, the art of the orator, as the immediate weapon of the oppressed. All his poor men make grand speeches, as they did in the Jacobin Club, which Scott would have so much detested. And it is odd to reflect that he was, as an author, giving free speech to fictitious rebels while he was, as a stupid politician, denying it to real ones. But the point for us here is this that all this popular sympathy of his rests on the graver basis, on the dark dignity of man. “Can you find no way?” asks Sir Arthur Wardour of the beggar when they are cut off by the tide. “I’ll give you a farm . . . I’ll make you rich.” . . . “Our riches will soon be equal,” says the beggar, and looks out across the advancing sea.
Now, I have dwelt on this strong point of Scott because it is the best illustration of the one weak point of Dickens. Dickens had little or none of this sense of the concealed sublimity of every separate man. Dickens’s sense of democracy was entirely of the other kind; it rested on the other of the two supports of which I have spoken. It rested on the sense that all men were wildly interesting and wildly varied. When a Dickens character becomes excited he becomes more and more himself. He does not, like the Scott beggar, turn more and more into man. As he rises he grows more and more into a gargoyle or grotesque. He does not, like the fine speaker in Scott, grow more classical as he grows more passionate, more universal as he grows more intense.
This, I think, is what Scott is doing, or trying to do, with Minna Troil: that is, he is trying to have her rise, in her character — trying to shift the common woman, in the sense of the paltry woman, into the common woman in the sense of the universal woman, declaring her humanity. I don’t think it works. I don’t think it works because it seems to me clumsily and priggishly done, and I don’t think it works because I and mine don’t share the restrictive sexual morality that Scott is here treating as universal. It seems to me that Minna would have been better off shagging Cleveland’s brains out, and then, assuming she fancied it, moving on to a more reliable man. This I of course accept is the local morality of my era and caste; but so is Scott’s frigid performative sexual moralising and valorisation of chastity and purity the local morality of his era and caste. My issue is: he is, in this histrionic conclusion, pretending it is a universal morality, of the kind Chesterton so convincingly argued. Death and comedy, tragic dignity and variety, are universals, I think. This business isn’t. And, actually, it is (to follow-through on the Chestertonian point about Dickens) something to which Dickens was also prone.
I’ve gone on long enough, but I wanted to jot something down about the supernatural aspect of the story, or to be more precise the Scooby-Doo tease by which supernatural elements are introduced only to have them explained away.
It turns out Norna of the Fitful-Head doesn’t have mystical gifts of prophecy and divination; she’s just a mad old woman, driven from her wits by two events from her youth: losing her father (he burned to death in an accidental fire, but Norna blames herself) and her seduction and abandonment by Basil Mertoun. In an endnote attached to chapter 13, Scott says: ‘The character of Norna is meant to be an instance of that singular kind of insanity, during which the patient, while she or he retains much subtlety and address for the power of imposing upon others, is still more ingenious in endeavouring to impose upon themselves.’ The idea, in other words, is that Norna is mad, but in a very particular way, one that is believed by many of the characters in the novel (though not all: Mordaunt, for instance, is never fooled) to be magic, actually. There is something potentially interesting her, to do with writing a story about ‘double-consciousness’, but the madness angle is the wrong vehicle for it. Scott goes on:
Indeed, maniacs of this kind may be often observed to possess a sort of double character, in one of which they are the being whom their distempered imagination shapes out, and in the other, their own natural self, as seen to exist by other people. This species of double consciousness makes wild work with the patient’s imagination.
But he’s not talking about sanity and madness here, not really. He’s talking about regular human subjectivity; he’s anticipating (although derailing his own anticipation) Freud. Except that he’s not: he’s sawing off the bough on which he himself is sitting. Norna’s appearances earlier in the novel, though fruity and operatic, are effective. Imposing this reveal on his readers — no, actually she’s just a nutter — is Scott not understanding the potential of what he has.
I don’t wish to perpetrate the solecism of twitting Scott for not writing the novel I would have written, but it would have been much better for him to embrace the Gothic-supernatural aspect here, not only because it would reinforce instead of arbitrarily cancelling the earlier episodes in which Norna surely seems to cathect magical sublimity and Ossianic majesty. She augments her income by selling favourable winds to mariners. How cool is that? One of the first times Mordaunt sees her, she is performing a theatrically magnificent set-piece:
Having looked on the sky for some time in a fixed attitude, and with the most profound silence, Norna at once, yet with a slow and elevated gesture, extended her staff of black oak towards that part of the heavens from which the blast came hardest, and in the midst of its fury chanted a Norwegian invocation, still preserved in the Island of Uist, under the name of the Song of the Reimkennar, though some call it the Song of the Tempest: —
1.
“Stern eagle of the far north-west,
Thou that bearest in thy grasp the thunderbolt,
Thou whose rushing pinions stir ocean to madness,
Thou the destroyer of herds, thou the scatterer of navies,
Thou the breaker down of towers,
Amidst the scream of thy rage,
Amidst the rushing of thy onward wings,
Though thy scream be loud as the cry of a perishing nation,
Though the rushing of thy wings be like the roar of ten thousand waves,
Yet hear, in thine ire and thy haste,
Hear thou the voice of the Reim-kennar.
2.
“Thou hast met the pine-trees of Drontheim,
Their dark-green heads lie prostrate beside their uprooted stems;
Thou hast met the rider of the ocean,
The tall, the strong bark of the fearless rover,
And she has struck to thee the topsail
That she had not veiled to a royal armada;
Thou hast met the tower that hears its crest among the clouds,
The battled massive tower of the Jarl of former days,
And the cope-stone of the turret
Is lying upon its hospitable hearth;
But thou too shalt stoop, proud compeller of clouds,
When thou hearest the voice of the Reim-kennar.
3.
“There are verses that can stop the stag in the forest,
Ay, and when the dark-coloured dog is opening on his track;
There are verses can make the wild hawk pause on the wing,
Like the falcon that wears the hood and the jesses,
And who knows the shrill whistle of the fowler.
Thou who canst mock at the scream of the drowning mariner,
And the crash of the ravaged forest,
And the groan of the overwhelmed crowds,
When the church hath fallen in the moment of prayer,
There are sounds which thou also must list,
When they are chanted by the voice of the Reim-kennar.
4.
“Enough of woe hast thou wrought on the ocean,
The widows wring their hands on the beach;
Enough of woe hast thou wrought on the land,
The husbandman folds his arms in despair;
Cease thou the waving of thy pinions,
Let the ocean repose in her dark strength;
Cease thou the flashing of thine eye.
Let the thunderbolt sleep in the armoury of Odin;
Be thou still at my bidding, viewless racer of the north-western heaven,
Sleep thou at the voice of Norna the Reim-kennar!”
This, though, is not the novel Scott wanted to be writing. The tug towards the respectable bourgeois lowland ethos increased in him as he aged, unbalancing the more carefully poised alternate appeal of the romantic, feudal highland ethos. It’s one of the things that goes off with his novel-writing as the Waverley novels proceed.
Scott himself addressed this ungrokk-ness in The Pirate’s construction when he came to write the preface to the 1831 ‘Magnum Opus’ collected edition. In a nutshell, we was worried by the ‘improbability’, by (that is) the danger of bouncing his reader out of believing in the tale. Even a writer as accomplished as Anne Radcliffe, committing herself wholeheartedly to this kind of thing, runs the risk of it.
In other news, Absolute Goblin Narrative is the name of my new band.
