How Burns' rival took us for a ride

Published on Tuesday 25 January 2005 12:29

ALL TOO often Robert Burns has been read as a kind of "tradition-bearer", rather than a great imaginative artist. He is seen as someone merely transmitting local legend and culture, rather than inventing stories.

There is no more telling case of this than in Burns’ masterpiece Tam o’ Shanter (1790), which has been surrounded by various tales of solid sources in real-life and in the supernatural legend of the south-west of Scotland.

The reality is, however, that these legends sprang up after Burns’ poem became a hit.

The notion of Tam o’ Shanter being based upon a popular tale has dogged the work. Apart from the "wild ride" aspect of the tale, found rather widely in folk tales, it is far from clear what particular source, if any, Burns had in mind for his poem.

In a letter to Francis Grose during the summer of 1790, Burns provided several stories of diabolic doings surrounding Alloway Kirk.

These loosely inform Tam o’ Shanter, but do not point to any very firm local folk legend before Burns’ composition of his poem.

No doubt the ruins of Alloway Kirk did excite local superstition, but Burns was, in a sense, playing to the gallery.

The poem appears in its first published form in the Edinburgh Magazine for March 1791 and, more importantly, a month later in volume two of Captain Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland. In the second of these places, it is part of a rather odd item. Amidst a survey of the much more splendid ruins of abbeys and castles in the book, Alloway Kirk is very small beer.

Its insertion in the book as a location of historical curiosity is really an excuse for Grose’s drinking crony, Burns, to parade his fine poem. Grose provides a very short and vague description of the ruin of Alloway Kirk, the most "important" point of which is to say "it is one of the eldest parishes in Scotland", which is to say nothing really at all.

WHEN one actually looks at Grose’s book, one realises that the text of Tam o’ Shanter is, in fact, a very large and odd-looking footnote to Grose’s waffle about Alloway Kirk.

It amounts to a kind of joke between Grose and Burns against dry historical commentary, which was all the rage at that time. The pair enjoy themselves as they "invent" history.

A very curious thing happens, however, in 1828 in John Gibson Lockhart’s biography of Burns.

"Honest" Allan Cunningham passes information to the biographer about the origins of Tam o’ Shanter, which Lockhart eagerly seizes upon.

Cunningham claims that an important source for the poem is the "Galloway" version of the tale. This has it that a traveller had stumbled on and been assaulted by participants in a pagan love feast in the countryside and had only narrowly escaped.

The minor damage he had suffered was the loss of a bit of his horse’s tail. The next day, the wife of a local farmer was found in bed with some horsehair in her hand. Her involvement being discovered, she was then burnt as a witch at the Solway Firth.

The problem with this story is that it is conservative and one-dimensional, with the message: "Be scared of women. They are deceitful."

Burns’ Tam o’ Shanter, though, is actually a poem that points out the failure of the male psyche, rather than sounding the alarm about women.

Rather than go home to his perfectly good wife, Tam o’ Shanter stays in the pub, fancying the barmaid.

When he does go out into the night, he is assaulted by the elements, or Mother Nature, and he has a vision of a pretty witch, Cutty Sark, who both attracts and frightens him. Pursued by the witches, there is a mock castration scene, as the tail is pulled from Tam’s female horse, Maggie.

Amidst the comedy and the welter of dizzying feminine delight and danger, we should realise that Tam is not a man with a very well-adjusted or mature attitude to women.

As so often in his poetry, Burns has the male number. This is the man who sees male stupidity and who once wrote in Green Grow the Rashes of Nature, or God: "Her (ap)prentice han’ she tried on man,/An’ then she made the lasses, O."

So, why did Lockhart highlight the "Galloway" story? Lockhart was the son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott, and was something of a snob. Lockhart admired Burns, but thought that Scott was the true Scottish writer of the Romantic period.

SCOTT was a gentleman and Burns was a peasant. Scott had a huge imagination and Burns had certain qualities as a writer and storyteller, but to some extent, these were drawn from his real-life culture rather than from within.

Walter Scott was the "Wizard of the North" and Burns was a "ploughman poet". There was no doubt, then, in Lockhart’s mind as to who had the biggest imagination.

The use he makes of the Galloway version of Tam o’ Shanter is an attempt by Lockhart to neutralise Burns’ imagination, to make it less original than it actually was.

There is a political agenda, too. Lockhart, the Tory, didn’t wish to concede anything "riotous", even if this was just the riotous imagination of a man from the lower orders.

And this at a time in the early 19th century when many in authority were scared that the lower orders were all too ready to break out into actual riot and revolution.

• Dr Gerard Carruthers is based in the Department of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow