Student Response: The Highlands in Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley

Student Response: The Highlands in Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley

Fernando L. Olmo
1

In the novel Waverley Sir Walter Scott introduces the Scottish Highlands through the experiences of his hero Edward, Waverly. Edward Waverley’s uncle who was concerned about his nephews bookish education decided to send Waverley to Scotland, to harden him by making him learn through experience while at the same time influencing his political thinking in favor of the exiled Stuart family. Edward, willing, departed on the journey, even though he had no choice in the matter.

He saw it as an opportunity to live out his romantic dreams, to play the romantic hero. The Highlands represented a backdrop to his romantic fantasies, an unknown landscape, mysterious and exotic with its people of different customs and a different language. It is a frontier where anything can happen and ignited further his imagination. Scotland would later prove to be just that, a wild, mysterious, chaotic world within the “well ordered island of Great Britain” (130).

The further north Edward went the wilder the landscape and the people were.Edward sets out on his expedition from London.London is not described as Charles Dickens might have a few decades later in many of his novels; Sir Walter Scott presents London as the center of conventional society, a world of politics law and order. Perhaps Walter Scott chooses to leave off details of London and Edwards home surroundings in order to give the reader the image of London and Edwards’s home as an authoritative environment. To the romantic like Edward his home and London represented a limiting and predictable world, which he sought to escape from through his books.

Upon entering Scotland on his way at Tully-Veolan Edward encounters the people of the Scottish Lowlands.Sir Walter Scott describes poverty of the Lowlanders, their decrepit homes and barren landscape. The children are scantily dressed barefooted and dirty, roamed freely like orphans. The people are peasant like and their homes were shabby “especially to an eye accustomed to the smiling neatness of an English cottages” (74). The large population of dogs running about freely, chasing every horse that rode by emphasized the disorderliness of the village. The village also lacked natural resources and the villagers used their little bit of property to produce what little they can.

The lowland Scots at Tully-Veolan were described as impolite, temperamental, disorderly, irrational and suspicious of the English. But to Edwards surprise they were not too different from the English in the way they dressed, although simple, and his host the baron of Bradwardine was a well educated man who spoke many languages, Latin, French, and English except for Gaelic. The Lowlanders described their neighboring Highlanders as beggars, blackmailers“lawless thieves, limmers, and broken men” (129).

It was during Edward’s stay at Tully-Veolan that the Highlands begin to unfold exciting his curiosity enough to venture into the “land of romance,” the Highlands, and meet a powerful chieftain Fergus Mac-Ivor. It is here that civilization is absent and anything is possible.The rough natural landscape reflected on its people, “the wilderness in which he dwelt- the wild warrior-forms that surrounded him, were all calculated to inspire terror” (140).Fergus Mac-Ivor embodiment of the Highland spirit, one foot in the wild the other in civilization. The landscape seemed like a maze of jutting rocks, caves, rivers and lakes, birch forests and twisting pines; difficult to move through for an outsider but the Highlanders moved though them with ease.The forests are full of wild game and fish as well as lamb and beef, which found its way to their table in abundance. At the chieftains table ate all, the upper and lower class and all seem to respect and worship their chief Fergus Mac-Ivor.

Fergus Mac-Ivor takes on the role of the romantic hero in this romantic backdrop. To Edward he was everything he had hoped to find and more. Through Waverley’s companionship with Fergus his romantic notions of the Highlands came to life. Fergus is“a gentleman of great honour and high pedigree”(139), a patriarchal figure treated and respected similar to a king. He is charismatic, “polite handsome man”, and virtuous valuing hospitality, loyalty and bravery unlike Waverly’s first image of him as a wild native. He has the characteristics of a chivalric hero. Fergus countenance is a balance of power, kindness and good humor, described as being similar to a “smiling summer’s day”(154), unpredictable. He is so powerful; he has the ability to mobilize a well-disciplined and skilled militia of his clansmen with a nod. Fergus’s power comes from the loyalty of his clansmen, which he obtains, not only by his charismatic personality and bravery but also through his money and property with which he is able to provide for his clansmen with a food and shelter.It was through this power that Mac-Ivor chose to return to his land and lead his people. His sister Flora, on the other hand, has a deep love for her Highland culture and the land, a love she acquired through her studies in the poetry of the Highland growing up in France.The Highland landscape in her eyes is a romantic wilderness where “Celtic muse is in the mist of the secret and solitary hill, and her voice is in the mist of the secret and solitary hill, and her voice in the murmur of the mountain stream” (177).

The Highlands have satisfied in its beauty and it wildness Edward insatiable hunger for the romantic. Added to the backdrop the Mac-Ivors have provided Edward with two romantic figures.The Scottish Highland represents an exotic foreign world within the supposedly overcrowded island of Great Britain during a time in which Britain is expanding its frontiers across the Atlantic. Yet within its own borders there is this piece of undiscovered and misunderstood world in Scotland. Edward has always sought an escape, within his book, from the controlling and conventional world of England; he did not have to go far to find exactly that.The Highlands gave him the spirit to be free, free from his uncle and father, free from his military obligations and freedom from the pressures of the public life and politics of London.