Scott's Border Minstrelsy Exhibition

‘Sammlung Deutscher Volkslieder…’, 1807, by Johann Gustav Busching and Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen Scotland since the Middle Ages had had a long standing cultural relationship with France thanks to the ‘Auld Alliance’. With Scott, however, she was about to forge close links with a national culture which, like Scotland, lacked a centralised political state – Germany. If French cultural taste had been dominant in Europe since the late 17 th century, Germany was beginning to challenge this dominance by the late 18 th century. German artists, like their Scottish counterparts, began to become interested in the myths, ballads, popular customs and traditions of the common people. This was considered to be a purer form of culture than that of the decadent cosmopolitan art of French classicism. Scott showed great foresight in realising that German art was now becoming a major force in European culture. His library contains many volumes of German literature including works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). Scott’s library also contains this volume, ‘Sammlung deutscher volkslieder’, an important collection of German, Dutch and French popular ballads collected by the medieval scholar Johann Gustav Gottlieb Busching (1783-1829) and Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen (1780-1856). They included a volume of the tunes of the ballads, something that Scott unfortunately neglected to do for the ‘Minstrelsy’. During a bout of illness in 1819 Scott was to write an English translation of ‘The Noble Moringer’ from ‘Sammlung deutscher volkslieder’.

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy Mzk5MTY=