(Or attempting to!) Our Scots bard has been portrayed at times as a reckless, womanising drunk, and his poetry work has not been taken seriously by academics and educators. I believe these false myths are far from the truth and are of serious consideration. Because our national bard continues to this day to have a significant impact on Scots national image and psyche.
He has written some of Scots most loved poetry and songs and we celebrate Burns night each January 25th.
He has been dismissed as an uneducated farmer. These myths matter, because as our Scots national bard Burns image is one of the most famous image for Scots. It matters on our images of “Scottishness” and of our long history of Scots cultural identity.
In fact Burns was voted by Scots as the most iconic Scots image, much like Mozart’s image in Vienna. During Victorian empire times Burns was viewed as part of the empire narrative associated to Walter Scott’s romantic Scottish nostalgia – of a Scotland that was lost and gone forever – and this image focused on Burns love poems, while neglecting his other work.
The elites, the academics and literati in Edinburgh found it hard to accept the farmer Burns in his boots who never attended university: but was self educated through his local education, his father and his own reading. He met the great and the good here and began his song collecting journeys, after meeting James Jamieson who published the Scot musical museum.
Burns was far more than the peasant farmer or ploughman poet and was highly educated. What is often ignored is that Burns father was a cultured, disciplined and well spoken man himself, who greatly valued education for his family. His mother knew and sang all the old Scots ballads. For a few years Burns attended a school in Ayr where he was taught by the young teacher John Murdoch, at the age of seven, and he became a great reader. After which he and Gilbert were tutored by Murdoch over the occasional summer months.
Yes he may have occasionally enjoyed social drinking, but as he writes from Ellisland to his friend Robert Cunningham in 1791, after a party when he had sold off the Ellisland farm equipment: “After the roup was over, about thirty people engaged in a battle and fought it out for three hours. Not was the scene much better in the house. Not fighting, indeed, but folk lying drunk on the floor and decanting, until both my dogs got so drunk by attending them, that they could not stand. You will easily guess how I enjoyed the scene as I was no further over than you used to see me.”
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| Tam O Shanter by Alexander Goudie |
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| Anchors Close Edinburgh |
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| Edina , the New World |
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| Poozie Nansies |
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| Burns & highland Mary |
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| Library books Ellisland |
There has been too much negativity written. Why? Was it because Burns didn’t fit into normal accepted norms, and had friends he met at the Globe Inn who were reformers for votes for all men? Because he grew up the son of a tenant farmer? Because he was a free, independent thinker, who challenged the elites narratives. Or mainly because he wrote in the Scots language and therefore was not to be taken seriously.
Considering all Burns writing, studying, researching and collecting – his many letters, poems, songs and epistles. His years of toil and hard farm labour growing up, plus his Scotia travels during his short life and all the myths that surround him. I find it hard to believe that Burns was a hard drinker as some myths put out. Because, how did he find time to write some of his best poetry at Ellisland and in Dumfries – plus his Excise work of detailed record keeping, long days travelling on horseback and being a young father.
