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The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History | 
| Author: Hugh Trevor-roper
Publisher: Yale University Press
Category: Book
List Price: £18.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 10396
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.7 x 1.5
ISBN: 0300136862
Dewey Decimal Number: 941.10072
EAN: 9780300136869
ASIN: 0300136862
Publication Date: May 31, 2008
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| Customer Reviews:
 Oh dear oh dear oh dear October 21, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I read other reviews which said that this book was well-written and researched but I found it tedious in the extreme.
Possibly because the manuscript was left unfinished almost 30 years ago, it's not exactly the most up to date comment on Scottish history either so I'm afraid I cannot recommend it for any reason.
 What lies underneath? September 2, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
As the male youth of the modern world clamours for the kilt, be it tartan, black, or even pink and glitter as seen occasionally in civil partnership ceremonies, it is useful to muse on the findings of Hugh Trevor Roper in this erudite book with copious references attributed.
There is no shortage of websites devoted to the manufacture and selling of Highland dress - or "Highland Attire" as one solemnly attests it must be accurately labelled, perpetuating the myth, as that claim is clearly fatuous and plainly wrong, as indeed, are myths. Otherwise they would not be myths. As Burns had it in his poem, A Dream ... "Facts are chiels that winna ding."
Many of these websites are based in the US, from where supposed scholars of the tartan will avail a clansman of the correct (and various) setts from which a valued customer might choose in order to look his best at a wedding. And at a whopping price. Where a tux might be purchased for around 250, a prospective buyer of the full "Highland Attire" might have to re-mortgage his house.
So that's near the nub of it: where the Sobieski Stuarts and their charlatan ilk sought to improve their status by their propagation of the tartan myth, so did the manufacturers of such costumery profit, neither stopping to consider that the truth of the matter might be relevant to the notion of what it would mean for the young men of the future to be Scottish.
To confront some of these same young men now with these myths would, in some instances, be leaving oneself open to a sucker punch and 'a sore face' such as one might expect in Glasgow at least.
Yet The Invention of Scotland is a book which must be read by all Scots - and indeed our cousins in the rest of the UK - merely to set the record straight. It will surely instil in an intelligent person the quality that - warts and all, to summon up a terror of the Scots - we are what we are. And let's work on that.
 A Parcel of Rogues Indeed July 20, 2008
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
Just over thirty years ago scottish officials engaged a team of historians to unearth a link - any link, however tenuous - which would allow them to claim William Shakespeare for their own. TWH Crosland's 'daw with a peacock's tail of his own painting' will be unimproved by this brisk corrective to native impertinence. Whether we English learn from it remains to be seen.
Ironically my nationalist sympathies oblige me to defend a people who wouldn't dream of returning the compliment, who rejoice in vainglory and rancour and who we consistently fail to see for the wrenching, grasping, lying, covetous breed they are. I've given the book five stars because it tells the truth from an admirer's perspective, resisting the usual allegations of bias.
Scotland's dalliance with romantic nationalism has parallels with pre-war Germany which, according to the author, threaten the Act of Union he wishes to preserve. Believing local culture heavily influenced by myth he describes how fellow unionist Sir Walter Scott used literature to try to reconcile Highland and Lowland life to a mythological, romantic vision of national unity that would make the 1707 Act an easier pill to swallow.
He argues that scotland invented and added to a purely local past, steering clear of the racial supremacism that set German nationalism, Germanic myth-making, on a path to war. Myself I doubt the cases are commensurable. Scottish 'nationalism' is yet another fraud, being wedded to Brussels and the public teat. Nationalism is scarcely a synonym for nazism furthermore.
Roper clearly admires his subjects' ability to re-invent their past (sometimes known as 'lying'). This could be why he fails to challenge the 'celtic' pre-migration identity of the British Isles when the very origin of that word should give pause to a professional academic. He also neglects to emphasize the profoundly English roots of Lowland scotland.
England ran to the Highland Line for centuries - from long before Athelstan or Eadgar (943-75), who foolishly gave Lothian to scotland, until the early 1300s and intermittently thereafter until the late fifteenth century. Even today Highlanders know Lowlanders as 'English'. Scottish philosopher David Hume is unequivocal: "...all the lowlands....were peopled in great measure from Germany....'
The language of Burns - 'lallands' or 'scots' - is pure Anglo Saxon. The kilt, a garment quite unrelated to that worn by Irish clan chiefs, was invented by a humble English Quaker named Rawlinson. Tartan, too, we learn, is English. The enterprising (and brilliant) Allen brothers, related to the compiler of a still highly regarded history of the county of Surrey, hailed from Godalming.
Almost half 'scottish' clans are Anglo-norman. England may even have introduced the bagpipe. Research elsewhere reveals the earliest written references to bagpipes occur south of the border, pre-dating anything in scotland by 150 years (bagpipes are neither scottish nor irish and were popular throughout mediaeval Europe). More intriguing still is that some of the earliest scottish references to the instrument identify them as 'Inglis' (English).
Scottish history is fiction - a Victorian romance got up to emphasize the indispensability of our neighbour at a time of vital imperial expansion. Scottish - not English - pressure initiated union. Indeed for all the book's virtues Lord Dacre's motive for writing it, a conviction that both countries benefit from the arrangement, seems wildly misconceived given current events.
Scotland accepts enormous English subsidies yet few of her burdens. Under EU law she votes herself English tax revenues without the contributor having any say in the matter. Her roads are better maintained. Her health service is better provided for by some way.
Other exceptions neither union nor membership of the EU can explain. In thirty years since the first black footballer donned an England jersey not a single black or asian sportsman has been selected to play for 'proudly multicultural scotland' at anything. Was it to preserve this state of affairs that government secretly closed all scotland's asylum offices in 2004?
Either scotland has them to select and a breach of law is being committed or an immigration war is being waged against the English. Why else is a country with virtually no minorities and a declining population allowed to restrict its search for new blood to all-white eastern Europe?
Newspapers say nothing. Broadcasters won't touch the subject. I know. I've asked. While English TV imposes ethnic quotas scottish programmes - Taggart, Monarch of the Glen, Rebus - observe no such restrictions. Is it a masonic thing I wonder?
Walter Scott denounced the Allens as liars but died, leaving them a free hand. Macaulay, the great historian and a genuine Highlander, who knew well the privations and not-so-romantic realities of life in the far north, simply gave up in defeat, attributing the entire Highland nonsense to Scott's poetry, which created a vision of the past so real it allowed literature to supersede the most obstinate truths of history.
A good thing too. Nationhood is about more than 'scholarship' (etymologically 'nation' implies ties of blood, of kinship, not simply an address), and truth is by no means always the best choice where harm is potentially irreparable. So what if scots tell themselves what they want to hear? Let us learn from their example. We could do worse. It wouldn't even be any of our business but for this infernal union of the unwilling.
C.S. Lewis opposed myth as 'lies'. Tolkien knew better ["Yes! 'wish-fulfilment dreams' we spin to cheat our timid hearts and ugly Fact defeat!"]. After all it was partly to restore to England something of what she'd had taken from her after 1066 and the importation of a lot of French nonsense about arthurian knights that he wrote Lord of The Rings.
Buy this book. It is important. Yet so too, I contend, is the mythopoeism it questions. Myth is a binding agent. It appeals to imagination in ways rationalism and scholarship never can. It renders the whole infinitely larger than the sum of its parts. Ultimately it fulfils a need we all feel to belong to something greater than ourselves.
Myth-making fuels every national culture in one way or another. Enlightenment-fixated scholars like Roper dislike this because they locate nation-building to a particular epoch. But nation building is not the same thing as the national consciousness which necessarily precedes it, and as the migration myth, the idea of a people moving in search of a 'promised land', illustrates perfectly.
Mythologizing inspired Anglo Saxon society for centuries. Dorothy Whitelock cites writers such as Bede, Gildas (british), Alucin, Wulftsan and the composer of Brunanburh as all being influenced by it. She speaks of the pride 11th century Anglo Saxons took in their ancestors' victory over the Britons.
Nicholas Howe (1989, 2001) parallels Exodus for the Jews and Beowulf for the English, both of which display 'a deeply absorbed sense of myth' (2001, p.2), while Thomas Jefferson requested the seal of the new United States represent 'the children of Israel in the wilderness.....and on the other side, Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honour of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.' (Boyd 1950).
Germanic myth served the English, English myth served the Founding Fathers. So it goes. Roper's narrow historicism misconstrues what a nation actually is I suspect. And anyway was it not a scotsman, Carlyle, who described history as 'a distillation of rumour'? If that's true then truth will - should - always come second to cultural preservation. Survival matters. As nations continue to bend under the internationalist yoke it's probably all that does.
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