The Mountain Bard

Hogg grew up in rural Ettrick Forest in a notable family of tradition-bearers, and in his first major poetry collection The Mountain Bard of 1807 he claims his rightful position at the centre of that culture. Where Scott collected the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border Hogg was The Mountain Bard. He learned to negotiate the erudite print culture of Edinburgh with the literary ballad, sometimes helped and sometimes hindered by his powerful friend, shifting the shape of his earlier manuscript and periodical poems accordingly. Then in 1821, when he was an established literary man, he published a revised edition in keeping with his new professional status as Author of The Queen’s Wake. The present edition prints together, for the first time, the surviving pre-1807 versions of poems included in The Mountain Bard, the full 1807 collection, and the complete 1821 version. The Introduction (besides giving a full history of this complex, changing work) places it firmly within the eighteenth-century antiquarian projects of ballad-collecting and the intellectual currents of Romanticism, in particular the literary vogue for the ballad shown in works such as Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge.