Study guide
The Lay of the Last Minstrel
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Overview
- Published
- 12 January 1805, in quarto, by Archibald Constable in Edinburgh and Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme in London; printed by James Ballantyne. A first edition of 750 copies at 25 shillings
- Written
- 1802–04, at Lasswade and Ashestiel; first planned as a Border romance for the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, it outgrew that collection
- Dedication
- Inscribed to Charles, Earl of Dalkeith, heir of the Duke of Buccleuch; his wife Harriet, Countess of Dalkeith, had asked Scott to make a ballad of the Border legend of the goblin Gilpin Horner
- Form
- Metrical romance in an Introduction and six cantos, in irregular four-stress lines and stanzas of varying length, with inset songs; each canto is closed by a short interlude about the Minstrel and his audience
- Frame
- An aged minstrel, the last of his kind, sings the tale to Anne, Duchess of Buccleuch and Monmouth, at Newark Castle on the Yarrow, in the years after the Revolution of 1688
- Setting of the tale
- Three days and nights about the middle of the sixteenth century (in the reign of Edward VI of England and the minority of Mary, Queen of Scots): Branksome Hall on the Teviot, Melrose Abbey and the Border hills
- Historical basis
- The feud of Scotts and Kerrs after the killing of Sir Walter Scott of Branksome and Buccleuch in Edinburgh in 1552; his widow, Janet Beaton, appears as 'the Ladye'
- Metrical debt
- Scott acknowledged that he took the free accentual measure from Coleridge's Christabel, which he had heard recited years before its publication in 1816
- Reception
- An immediate and lasting success that made Scott the most popular poet of the day; Francis Jeffrey praised it in the Edinburgh Review but called the Goblin Page its 'capital deformity'
- Famous lines
- 'Breathes there the man, with soul so dead'; 'O Caledonia! stern and wild'; 'If thou would'st view fair Melrose aright'; 'Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung'
Context
Walter Scott (1771–1832) was an Edinburgh advocate and, from 1799, Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire, the county of Ettrick Forest and the Yarrow. He had grown up on stories of the Border and its raiders, and in 1802–03 he published the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, a collection of ballads from oral and manuscript sources, edited, annotated and sometimes silently improved (Scott 1802) (Johnson 1970) (Sutherland 1995). The Lay of the Last Minstrel was the first long poem he wrote, and it grew directly out of that work.
Scott meant at first to add to the Minstrelsy an original ballad-romance of 'Border chivalry and enchantment'. Harriet, Countess of Dalkeith, wife of the heir of the Buccleuch family, chief of the Scotts, had asked him for a ballad on the legend of Gilpin Horner, a goblin said to have attached himself to a farm in Eskdale; Scott wove the goblin into a tale of the Scotts of Branksome, and the work outgrew the collection. When friends seemed puzzled by the first stanzas, he invented an old minstrel to tell the story, a device that justified the poem's archaic manner. Wordsworth heard Scott recite the early cantos at Lasswade in 1803 (Lockhart 1837) (Johnson 1970) (Grierson 1938).
The poem belongs to the ballad revival of the later eighteenth century. Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) had prefaced its ballads with an essay on the ancient minstrels as heirs of the bards, a claim that the antiquary Joseph Ritson fiercely disputed; Scott's Minstrel is a fiction built on that argument, a performer whose living memory reaches back into the feudal past (Percy 1765) (Groom 1999) (McLane 2008) (Newman 2007).
The free metre came from Coleridge. John Stoddart had recited to Scott the unpublished first part of Christabel, a poem that counts stresses rather than syllables; Scott adopted its four-beat line with a varying number of light syllables, and later said so openly. Since Christabel did not appear until 1816, its first readers could take Coleridge for the imitator, a reversal that Coleridge felt keenly and that Byron's public praise of Christabel helped to correct (Coleridge 1816) (Lockhart 1837) (Curran 1986).
The Lay was published in January 1805 as a handsome quarto loaded with notes on Border history, law and superstition. It sold faster than any long poem of its time, went through six editions in three years and reached tens of thousands of copies within a decade. It established the 'metrical romance' as the popular genre of the next decade, led to Marmion (1808) and The Lady of the Lake (1810), and prepared the historical method of the Waverley novels (Todd 1998) (St Clair 2004) (Millgate 1984) (Robertson 2012).
Plot overview
On a cold day in the 1690s an old, poor minstrel, last of the Border harpers, reaches Newark Castle on the Yarrow, where the Duchess of Buccleuch, widow of the executed Duke of Monmouth, receives him kindly. After some hesitation he sings her a lay of her ancestors, breaking off at the end of each canto for rest, praise or memories of his own sorrows.
The tale is set in Branksome Hall about 1550. Lord Walter Scott of Buccleuch has been killed by the Kerrs, and his widow, the Ladye, who has learned magic from her father, swears that her daughter Margaret will never marry Lord Henry Cranstoun, who fought on the Kerrs' side. She sends the moss-trooper William of Deloraine to Melrose Abbey, where an aged monk opens the tomb of the wizard Michael Scott and gives him the magic book. Returning, Deloraine meets Cranstoun, who has been meeting Margaret secretly, and is wounded. Cranstoun's Goblin Page reads one spell in the book, carries Deloraine to Branksome, and leads the Ladye's young son into the woods, where English soldiers capture him.
An English army under Lord Dacre and Lord William Howard appears before Branksome with the boy as hostage and demands that Deloraine be handed over for march-treason. The Ladye refuses, and when news of a Scottish relief army arrives it is agreed that Deloraine shall fight Sir Richard Musgrave in single combat. The champion in Deloraine's armour kills Musgrave and is revealed as Cranstoun, disguised by the goblin's glamour. The Ladye yields to fate, and Margaret and Cranstoun are married.
At the wedding feast three minstrels sing: Albert Græme a Border ballad of fatal love, Fitztraver a song of the Earl of Surrey's vision of Geraldine, and Harold a lament for Rosabelle of Roslin. A sudden darkness and a thunderbolt carry off the goblin; Deloraine has seen the shade of Michael Scott. The chiefs go barefoot in penance to Melrose, and the Minstrel ends with the hymn 'Dies Irae'. A closing passage tells that he was given a cottage near Newark, where he sang for the rest of his life.
Canto by canto
Canto 0: The Minstrel at Newark
Introduction
Summary
An old minstrel, infirm and poor, walks the Yarrow valley with his harp carried by an orphan boy. He was once a welcome guest in great halls, but times have changed: a foreign king sits on the Stuarts' throne, and Puritan 'bigots' have called his art a crime. He reaches Newark Castle, where the Duchess of Buccleuch, who has known suffering herself as the widow of the Duke of Monmouth, orders that he be cared for.
Fed and rested, he speaks proudly of the Buccleuch earls and offers to sing. In the hall his hands tremble and he cannot tune the harp; the Duchess encourages him, and at last he remembers an old strain that he once played for King Charles at Holyrood. As he catches the 'measure wild', his age and fear vanish, and the lay begins.
Analysis
The Introduction gives the whole poem its double time-scheme. The tale belongs to the sixteenth century, the frame to the end of the seventeenth, and Scott writes from the beginning of the nineteenth: each layer looks back to a vanished world. The Minstrel is a figure for tradition at the point of its extinction, and the reader is invited to hear his song as the last trace of an oral culture (McLane 2008) (Trumpener 1997).
The setting is carefully chosen. Newark belongs to the Buccleuch family, Scott's own patrons and kin, and the Duchess is Anne, heiress of the Scotts of Buccleuch, whose husband Monmouth was beheaded in 1685. The Minstrel, a Stuart loyalist who has outlived the old order, is welcomed by a woman who has also lost by politics. The frame lets Scott apologise for the poem's roughness (the old man forgets and improvises) and claim for it the authority of memory (Goslee 1988).
The passage also defines the poem's metre. Its smooth octosyllabic couplets set the base, from which the cantos will depart into a freer and more varied measure once the 'measure wild' takes hold.
The last of all the Bards was he, Who sung of Border chivalry;
The poem's title figure: the singer is himself the last relic of the world he sings.
Old times were changed, old manners gone, A stranger filled the Stuarts' throne;
The 'stranger' is William of Orange; the Revolution of 1688 marks the end of the Minstrel's world.
He had played it to King Charles the Good, When he kept court in Holyrood;
The song carries courtly and royal authority, though it is now sung by a beggar.
Canto 1: Branksome Hall
Canto I (stanzas I–XXXI and interlude)
Summary
The feast is over in Branksome Hall, where twenty-nine knights of the Scott clan keep constant watch against the English. Their chief, Lord Walter, has been killed in a street fight in Edinburgh by the Kerrs, and his widow, the Ladye, shed no tear until her small son swore revenge. Her daughter Margaret weeps both for her father and for her lover, Lord Cranstoun, who fought with the Kerrs.
The Ladye, daughter of a scholar-magician of the Bethune family, has learned his art. In her secret bower she overhears the Spirit of the Flood and the Spirit of the Fell: the stars, says the Mountain Spirit, will bring no blessing on Branksome 'till pride be quell'd, and love be free'. She defiantly swears that Margaret will never marry the enemy.
She calls William of Deloraine, a hardened moss-trooper who cannot read, and sends him to Melrose to fetch a treasure from the tomb, warning him never to look into it. The canto follows his night ride across the Border country, past Hawick and Minto crags and through the flooded Aill, to the Abbey.
Analysis
The opening establishes the Border as a society organised for war: armour never removed, horses always saddled, kinship as the basis of loyalty. Scott's notes gave historical detail for nearly every custom, and the canto shows his habit of anchoring romance in real places, almost every one of which can be found on a map (Goslee 1988) (Davis 1998).
The Ladye is the poem's strongest character, a widow who holds a clan together by will and by forbidden knowledge. The spirits' prophecy sets the plot's moral terms early: the feud will end only when her pride gives way. The Mountain Spirit's line will return almost word for word in Canto V.
Deloraine's ride is a set piece of motion and place. His illiteracy is more than a joke about the 'neck-verse' (the Latin verse by which a literate offender could claim benefit of clergy): it makes him the safe carrier of a book that no one should read. Jeffrey disliked the lines of this canto that would not scan as regular verse, but its galloping irregularity is what readers remembered (Jeffrey 1805).
Nine-and-twenty knights of fame Hung their shields in Branksome Hall,
The ballad-like numerical pattern of the opening stanzas describes a whole society in arms.
Till pride be quell'd, and love be free.
The Mountain Spirit's prophecy, the moral formula of the plot.
Be it scroll, or be it book, Into, knight, thou must not look; If thou readest thou art lorn! Better hadst thou ne'er been born.
The prohibition that governs the book; its breach by the goblin drives the plot.
Letter nor line know I never a one, Wer't my neck-verse at Hairibee.
Deloraine cannot read even the verse that would save him from the gallows at Carlisle (Hairibee).
Canto 2: Melrose Abbey and Michael Scott's Book
Canto II (stanzas I–XXXIV and interlude)
Summary
The canto opens with a famous description of Melrose Abbey by moonlight. Deloraine is admitted and greets the Monk of St Mary's aisle, a man a hundred years old who in youth fought in Spain and met the wizard Michael Scott. Michael, dying, repented, and the monk buried him with his book of magic, promising to reveal it only at the need of the chief of Branksome.
At one o'clock, as the moonlight through the window throws a red cross on the floor, Deloraine heaves up the gravestone. A light streams out; the wizard lies uncorrupted, his book in his hand. Deloraine takes it in terror; as they leave, they hear sobs and laughter in the galleries. The monk dies at his prayers before noon.
At dawn, near Branksome, Margaret slips out to meet Cranstoun under a hawthorn. Their meeting is watched by Cranstoun's strange dwarf, a goblin who once leapt out of the gorse crying 'Lost! lost! lost!' and has served him ever since. The dwarf warns the lovers to part. In the interlude, the Minstrel's voice fails, and he is revived with wine.
Analysis
The Melrose canto is the poem's Gothic centre. Its architectural detail (oriel, buttress, fleur-de-lys, corbel) belongs to the antiquarian revival of medieval building, and its moonlit sublimity was imitated by generations of visitors to the ruin. (Gamer 2000)
Michael Scott was a real thirteenth-century scholar, translator of Aristotle and astrologer at the court of the Emperor Frederick II, whose fame as a magician had grown in Scottish tradition. The monk's penance for merely knowing the spells gives the poem its central moral idea: forbidden knowledge is dangerous even when used for loyalty. The Minstrel's refusal to vouch for the noises in the aisles ('I say the tale as 'twas said to me') is typical of the poem's half-credulous tone (Goslee 1988).
The meeting of the lovers changes the register from terror to romance, and the Minstrel's address to 'fair dames' shows how the frame shapes the tale for its listeners. The goblin enters in a ballad style quite unlike the solemnity of Melrose; this mixture of tones was precisely what Jeffrey objected to (Jeffrey 1805).
If thou would'st view fair Melrose aright, Go visit it by the pale moon-light;
The most famous lines of the canto, a guidebook instruction turned into poetry.
Yet all too little to atone For knowing what should ne'er be known.
The monk's penance: knowledge itself, not only its use, is sinful.
I cannot tell how the truth may be; I say the tale as 'twas said to me.
The Minstrel's formula of the oral narrator, who reports tradition without guaranteeing it.
He heard a voice cry, "Lost! lost! lost!"
The goblin's cry, the refrain that marks each of his appearances.
Canto 3: The Goblin Page and the Beacons
Canto III (stanzas I–XXXI and interlude)
Summary
The Minstrel corrects himself: he cannot claim to be too old to sing of love. Riding away from Margaret, Cranstoun meets Deloraine; they joust, and Deloraine is wounded by Cranstoun's lance. Cranstoun orders his page to care for the wounded man and take him to Branksome.
The goblin finds the book under Deloraine's corslet, opens it with the knight's blood, and reads one spell of 'glamour' that makes things seem what they are not, before an unseen hand strikes him down. He carries Deloraine into Branksome disguised as a load of hay, then lures the young heir into the woods, where the boy is caught by English archers and taken to Lord Dacre. The goblin takes the boy's shape and makes mischief in the castle.
The Ladye heals Deloraine with a charm, treating the broken lance rather than the wound. At evening Margaret, on the turret, sees not the western star but a beacon on Penchryst Pen. The Seneschal raises the clan, and a chain of beacon-fires carries the alarm as far as Edinburgh.
Analysis
The goblin's spell states one of the poem's themes in miniature: a world of disguise in which 'all was delusion, nought was truth'. Disguise will drive the plot to its conclusion, when Cranstoun fights in another man's armour. The unseen blow, which the Minstrel attributes to no living man, implies that Michael Scott still guards his book.
The goblin is Scott's largest borrowing from local legend, and the most debated element of the poem. Jeffrey found him undignified, 'a mongrel between Puck and Caliban', and urged Scott to purge him from the poem; Scott kept him (Jeffrey 1805) (Hayden 1970) (Alexander 1976).
The healing of the lance by sympathetic magic comes from old belief in the 'weapon-salve', described in Scott's notes. The beacon passage, by contrast, is pure action and topography, and its rapid list of hills and clans gives the Border a collective voice (Goslee 1988).
For love is heaven, and heaven is love.
The Minstrel's recantation of his refusal to sing of love.
It had much of glamour might, Could make a ladye seem a knight;
'Glamour' (magical illusion) is a Scots word that Scott helped to bring into English; this spell will make Cranstoun seem Deloraine.
And youth seem age, and age seem youth— All was delusion, nought was truth.
A spell that also describes the Minstrel's own art of making the past seem present.
Is yon red glare the western star?— O 'tis the beacon-blaze of war!
The lover's star becomes the signal of war, the turn from romance to siege.
Canto 4: The English before Branksome
Canto IV (stanzas I–XXXII and interlude)
Summary
The Minstrel contrasts the peaceful Teviot of today with the river of time, which keeps every grief; he remembers his only son, killed beside Viscount Dundee at Killiecrankie. Then the tale resumes: the borderer Watt Tinlinn brings news that Lord Dacre and 'Belted Will' Howard are coming with German mercenaries. The Scott clans gather, among them Thirlestane and Wat of Harden.
The goblin, fearing the Ladye, pretends to be a coward; she sends 'her son' away with Tinlinn, whose arrow pierces the goblin when he resumes his shape in a stream. The English arrive in splendid order and their herald shows the captive heir, demanding Deloraine for march-treason and threatening to take the boy to London.
The Ladye, though moved, refuses and offers that Deloraine either clear himself by oath or fight Musgrave. News that a Scottish army is coming persuades Howard, against Dacre's anger, to accept single combat on foot the next morning. The Minstrel insists on the authenticity of these rules, learned from his own master, a harper who killed a rival bard and was executed.
Analysis
This canto most clearly links the Minstrel's history with the tale. His son died with Dundee in 1689, fighting for the exiled Stuarts, and his memories of loss bind the frame to the tale's world of feud and grief. The river-of-time stanza is one of the poem's most personal moments (Goslee 1988).
The muster and the English array are written in the manner of a heraldic roll, with crests, mottoes and family histories (Thirlestane's 'Ready, aye ready', Harden's stars and crescent). Scott's own family descended from Harden, so this is also a celebration of his own ancestry, under the patronage of the Buccleuchs (Johnson 1970) (Sutherland 1995).
Howard and Dacre are treated generously: the English are honourable enemies, and the quarrel between the wardens is told with the gravity of Border law. Lord William Howard was in fact born in 1563, long after the poem's date, an anachronism that Scott's notes acknowledge. The Ladye's defiance gives her the canto's climax.
Unlike the tide of human time, Which, though it change in ceaseless flow, Retains each grief, retains each crime,
The Minstrel's meditation on memory, which leads to the death of his son.
Our slogan is their lyke-wake dirge, Our moat the grave where they shall lie.
The Ladye's defiance: the clan's war-cry will be the English funeral song.
For, with my minstrel brethren fled, My jealousy of song is dead.
The Minstrel survives his rivals; even professional jealousy has died with his art.
Canto 5: The Combat
Canto V (stanzas I–XXX and interlude)
Summary
The Minstrel claims that when the poet dies nature mourns him, because the dead whom his song kept alive die a second death. The Scottish relief army arrives under Douglas and Home; a truce is kept, and English and Scots feast and play football together on the Teviot.
At dawn Margaret sees Cranstoun walking in the castle, disguised by the goblin's art as a knight of Hermitage, and they meet. In the lists, before both armies, the heralds proclaim the challenge and the knight in Deloraine's armour kills Musgrave, who dies with a friar beside him. The real Deloraine, half-naked from his sickbed, runs onto the field; the victor is revealed as Cranstoun.
The Ladye recalls the spirits' prophecy and yields: 'Not you, but Fate, has vanquished me'. She gives Margaret to Cranstoun. Deloraine speaks a generous epitaph over Musgrave, his old enemy, whose body the English bear home.
Analysis
The opening stanzas make the poem's claim for the poet as the guardian of collective memory: the minstrel's death means the second death of all the heroes he kept alive. This is the most explicit statement of the work's elegiac theory of poetry (McLane 2008) (Trumpener 1997).
The plot resolves through the fulfilment of the prophecy, not through the Ladye's magic. Love wins by a trick, but the trick is credited to human courage; the lists, with their heralds and rules, transform feud into lawful combat. The truce and the football match show the Border as a society of enemies who share customs, a picture that suited Scott's view of Scotland and England as rivals joined in a single history (Davis 1998).
Deloraine's lament over Musgrave is one of the poem's best passages, in the plain style of the ballads; Jeffrey thought it heavy, but it gives the old raider a dignity that the plot denies him (Jeffrey 1805).
Who say, that, when the poet dies, Mute Nature mourns her worshipper,
The Minstrel's defence of the pathetic fallacy, which turns into a theory of memory.
True love's the gift which God has given To man alone beneath the heaven.
The goblin cannot understand love; the stanza explains why his malice fails.
"Not you, but Fate, has vanquished me;
The Ladye's surrender, which fulfils the prophecy of Canto I.
Yet, rest thee God! for well I know, I ne'er shall find a nobler foe!
Deloraine's epitaph for Musgrave expresses the code of the honourable enemy.
Canto 6: The Wedding Feast and the Pilgrimage
Canto VI (stanzas I–XXXII and conclusion)
Summary
Stung by the suggestion that he should seek a richer land, the Minstrel bursts into his famous praise of native land and of Caledonia. At Branksome the wedding takes place and a great feast follows. The goblin stirs up a quarrel between the German leader Conrad and the Scot Rutherford, and wounds Watt Tinlinn with a bodkin.
The Ladye calls the minstrels. Albert Græme sings a Border ballad of an English lady poisoned by her brother for loving a Scot; Fitztraver, Surrey's minstrel, sings of the magician Cornelius showing the Earl a vision of Geraldine; and Harold, from Orkney, sings of Rosabelle, drowned on her way to Roslin, whose death is signalled by the fire that burns in the chapel when a St Clair is to die.
A darkness falls, the goblin cries 'Found! found! found!', and a thunderbolt carries him away; a voice cries 'Gylbyn, come!' Deloraine has seen Michael Scott. The Ladye renounces magic, and the chiefs make a barefoot pilgrimage to Melrose, where the monks sing the Dies Irae. The Minstrel ends, and a coda tells of his peaceful old age at Newark, singing to travellers by the Yarrow.
Analysis
'Breathes there the man' is the poem's most quoted passage. In context it is less a general sermon on patriotism than an old man's answer to an insult: his poverty in Scotland is preferable to wealth elsewhere. The 'Caledonia' passage that follows identifies the poet's love of country with his love of place, and makes Scott's landscape the image of a nation (Davis 1998) (Trumpener 1997).
The three songs form a small anthology of minstrelsy: the Border ballad, the courtly Petrarchan lyric of the Tudor court (Surrey's 'Geraldine', Elizabeth Fitzgerald), and the wild Norse-tinged lament of the north. Scott thus displays, within the poem, the range of the traditions that the Minstrelsy had collected (McLane 2008) (Curran 1986).
The ending removes the supernatural machinery: the goblin is reclaimed, the book returns to its owner, the Ladye abandons magic, and the clan does penance. The hymn for the dead closes the tale in the language of Christian judgement, and the coda turns the Minstrel's story into a happy ending of patronage, mirroring Scott's own relation to the Buccleuchs (Goslee 1988) (Sutherland 1995).
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!
The poem's most famous lines, recited and anthologised throughout the nineteenth century.
O Caledonia! stern and wild, Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Scotland's harsh landscape as the poet's nurse; Scott's self-portrait behind the Minstrel.
And, shuddering, muttered, "Found! found! found!"
The goblin's 'Lost!' is answered at last: he is found and reclaimed (stanza numbering of this edition).
That day of wrath, that dreadful day, When heaven and earth shall pass away,
Scott's paraphrase of the medieval Dies Irae closes the tale with penitence.
Characters
Frame
- The Last Minstrel
- An aged, impoverished harper, the last of the Border minstrels, who once played for Charles II and lost his only son with Dundee at Killiecrankie. Proud, nervous and easily moved, he improvises, apologises and comments on his own story. He is both the poem's narrator and its central symbol of a dying tradition.
- The Duchess of Buccleuch
- Anne, Duchess of Buccleuch and Monmouth, heiress of the Scotts and widow of the Duke of Monmouth, executed in 1685. Her kindness gives the Minstrel his audience and, at the end, his home; she stands for the noble patron of poetry, and the poem is an act of homage to her descendants.
Scotts of Buccleuch
- The Ladye of Branksome
- Widow of Lord Walter Scott, killed by the Kerrs; based on the historical Janet Beaton. She has learned magic from her father, rules the clan with courage and pride, and opposes her daughter's love for a man of the enemy party. Defeated by fate rather than by force, she yields, and in the end renounces her art.
- Margaret
- The Ladye's daughter, the 'Flower of Teviot', who secretly loves Lord Cranstoun. Gentle and largely passive, she is the prize of the feud and the image of love divided by war.
- William of Deloraine
- A rough, illiterate moss-trooper, five times outlawed, faithful to the Ladye and fearless in the field. He fetches the book from Michael Scott's tomb, is wounded by Cranstoun, and ends as a generous mourner of his enemy Musgrave. He is the poem's most vivid portrait of the Border reiver.
- The young Buccleuch
- The Ladye's small son and heir, brave beyond his years. Captured by English archers, he becomes the hostage around whom the siege is negotiated, and is the 'prize' Cranstoun restores to his mother.
- Watt Tinlinn
- A Liddesdale yeoman and archer who brings news of the English invasion, wounds the goblin with an arrow, and is wounded in revenge at the feast. He represents the ordinary Border fighting man.
Cranstoun
- Lord Henry Cranstoun
- A young baron who fought against the Scotts with the Kerrs. Brave and courteous, he wounds Deloraine, spares him, and with the goblin's illusion fights in his armour to free the heir and win Margaret.
Supernatural
- The Goblin Page
- Cranstoun's dwarf, based on the Eskdale legend of Gilpin Horner, who appeared crying 'Lost! lost! lost!'. Malicious but limited in power, he steals a spell from the book, abducts the heir and sows quarrels, until he is reclaimed by a voice crying 'Gylbyn, come!'. Critics from Jeffrey onward have debated his place in the poem.
- Michael Scott
- The historical thirteenth-century scholar, here the legendary wizard who split the Eildon hills in three. He appears only as an uncorrupted corpse and, at the end, as a shade who reclaims his book and his goblin.
- Spirits of the Flood and the Fell
- The river and mountain spirits whose dialogue in Canto I prophesies that Branksome will know no blessing 'till pride be quell'd, and love be free'.
Melrose
- The Monk of St Mary's aisle
- A former soldier who knew Michael Scott in Spain and buried him with his book. After a century of penance he opens the tomb for Deloraine and dies the same morning, his last act a sin he must expiate.
English
- Lord William Howard
- 'Belted Will', English warden, calm, courteous and generous to his enemies. Historically he lived much later (1563–1640); Scott anachronistically makes him the model of an honourable English foe.
- Lord Dacre
- The fiery English warden, eager to storm Branksome, who resents Howard's prudence. His pride and anger contrast with Howard's courtesy.
- Sir Richard Musgrave
- The English champion whose brother Deloraine had killed in a raid. He dies in the lists confessing to a friar, and is mourned by his enemy.
Minstrels
- Albert Græme, Fitztraver and Harold
- The three minstrels of the wedding feast: a Border balladeer of the Debatable Land, the Earl of Surrey's courtly singer, and an Orkney bard of the St Clairs. Their songs show three kinds of minstrelsy that the Last Minstrel inherits.
Themes
The end of tradition
The Minstrel is the last of his kind, and the poem is filled with images of extinction: dead brethren, forgotten chiefs, towers that 'harbour now the hare'. Scott's frame turns the romance into an elegy for oral culture and for the feudal world that supported it.
The irony is that the elegy is a printed book with learned notes, sold in thousands. The poem both mourns tradition and turns it into modern literature, as the Minstrelsy had done (McLane 2008) (Trumpener 1997).
Feud, pride and reconciliation
The tale begins in vengeance and ends in a wedding. The prophecy that blessing will come only when 'pride be quell'd' makes the Ladye's surrender the moral turning point, and Deloraine's lament over Musgrave shows the generosity that can exist within the feud.
On a larger scale, the truce on the Teviot and the courtesy of Howard suggest a history in which Scots and English, once enemies, share a common code; readers have linked this to Scott's commitment to the Union (Davis 1998).
Forbidden knowledge and magic
Magic in the poem is always ambiguous. The Ladye's art serves her clan but feeds her pride; Michael Scott's book is guarded by penance and death; the goblin's single spell causes nothing but mischief. The poem ends with renunciation and pilgrimage, restoring Christian order.
Scott keeps the supernatural at a distance through the Minstrel's hedging ('I cannot tell how the truth may be'), a technique that lets a sceptical age enjoy superstition (Gamer 2000).
Love against war
The Minstrel claims to be too old to sing of love and then retracts; love is the hidden force of the plot, opposed to the feud. Margaret and Cranstoun's meetings are brief, but love is finally defined as a 'silver cord' that no malicious spirit can understand.
The inset songs at the feast are all tragedies of love, a reminder that the happy ending is exceptional.
Poetry, patronage and memory
The frame dramatises the relation of poet and patron: the Minstrel's art depends on the Duchess's kindness, and the poem itself was written for the Buccleuch family. Canto V's claim that the poet's death is the second death of the heroes he sings gives poetry the role of national memory (Sutherland 1995) (Goslee 1988).
Motifs
Refrains and cries
The goblin's 'Lost! lost! lost!' and its answer 'Found! found! found!', the clan slogans, the heralds' formulas and Albert Græme's refrain give the poem the repetitive texture of oral song.
Disguise and illusion
Glamour makes Deloraine a load of hay, the goblin a boy, and Cranstoun a knight of Hermitage and then Deloraine; the plot is resolved by recognition when the helmet is removed.
Place-names
Rivers, hills and towers (Teviot, Yarrow, Ettrick, Eildon, Penchryst Pen) are named in long lists, binding the story to a real landscape that readers could and did visit.
The interrupted song
Every canto ends with the Minstrel pausing, faltering or being praised, so that the reader never forgets the performance and its audience.
Symbols
The harp
The Minstrel's 'sole remaining joy', the instrument of a dying art; its silence at the end ('Hushed is the harp') marks the passing of the tradition.
Michael Scott's book
Iron-clasped and forbidden, it stands for dangerous knowledge; it can be opened only with blood, and must finally return to the grave.
Melrose Abbey
A ruin seen by moonlight, symbol of the medieval past and of mortality; it is the place both of the sinful opening of the tomb and of the final penance.
The beacon-fires
The chain of fires that carries the alarm across the Border is an image of collective memory and solidarity, and of the speed of war.
Critical debates
The Goblin Page
Jeffrey's review praised the poem warmly but called the goblin 'the capital deformity' of the work, an undignified figure who belongs to no general belief and spoils the dignity of the romance; Byron also mocked the goblin in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.
Defenders argue that the goblin is the link between the poem and the oral tradition from which it grew, and that his comic malice belongs to the mixed tone of ballad and romance. The debate is a version of the larger question of whether the poem's supernatural machinery is necessary at all (Jeffrey 1805) (Byron 1809) (Alexander 1976) (Hayden 1970).
The debt to Christabel
Scott openly acknowledged that his metre came from hearing Christabel recited, and Coleridge's preface of 1816 explained his own principle of counting accents rather than syllables. Because the Lay appeared first, the influence was invisible to most readers, and Coleridge's priority had to be established after the event.
Critics have discussed how far Scott's measure is really Coleridge's: Scott's line is faster and more narrative, closer to the octosyllabic metre of medieval romance, while Christabel's is hesitant and uncanny. The question is part of the history of how Romantic poets revived the forms of romance (Coleridge 1816) (Curran 1986) (Lockhart 1837).
The Minstrel and the ballad revival
The frame takes sides in an eighteenth-century antiquarian controversy. Percy had presented the minstrels as honoured successors of the bards; Ritson replied that they were mere entertainers. Scott's Minstrel, a beggar who once played for kings, joins both views.
Recent scholarship reads the Minstrel as a figure through which Romantic writers imagined the relation of print to oral culture, and through which Scott presented himself as the heir of tradition (Percy 1765) (Groom 1999) (McLane 2008) (Newman 2007) (Trumpener 1997).
Text and notes: romance and history
The first edition surrounded the poem with extensive notes on Border history, law, superstition and family genealogy. Jeffrey thought the notes too long for the general reader; others see in the combination of romance and documentation the beginning of the method of the Waverley novels.
The question is whether the Lay is a romance that uses history as decoration, or an early historical fiction that uses romance to make the past intelligible (Jeffrey 1805) (Millgate 1984) (Duncan 2007) (Goslee 1988).
Scotland, Britain and 'Breathes there the man'
The patriotic lines of Canto VI were quoted throughout the nineteenth century as a statement of national feeling, in Britain and beyond. But whose nation? The poem celebrates Scottish landscape and clan loyalty, yet its English characters are honourable and its conflicts are resolved in truce and marriage.
Critics have read the Lay as a negotiation between Scottish identity and the British state after the Union, in which a romantic past is preserved as culture precisely because it is no longer politics (Davis 1998) (Trumpener 1997) (Robertson 2012).
The Gothic and the market
The Lay appeared when Gothic fiction was popular and critically despised. Its magic, tombs and spectres invite comparison with the Gothic novel, yet its antiquarian notes and aristocratic patronage gave it a respectability that the novels lacked.
Some critics argue that Scott deliberately marketed a 'manly', learned romance that kept the pleasures of the Gothic while escaping its reputation; the poem's sales then show how a new mass readership for poetry was created (Gamer 2000) (St Clair 2004) (Todd 1998).
Biography and the frame
The Minstrel resembles Scott in his love of the Border, his loyalty to the Buccleuchs and his dependence on patrons; the Harden family celebrated in Canto IV were Scott's own ancestors. Biographers have read the poem as a disguised self-portrait of a lawyer who wished to be a bard.
Others warn against reading the Minstrel too personally, since he is also a careful historical construction, a Jacobite loyalist of the 1690s (Lockhart 1837) (Johnson 1970) (Sutherland 1995) (Grierson 1938).
Key passages
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!
The poem's most famous passage, an old man's answer to the suggestion that he should leave Scotland for a richer country. It became a standard recitation piece of nineteenth-century patriotism.
And, doubly dying, shall go down To the vile dust, from whence he sprung, Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.
The man without love of country dies twice, in body and in memory, because no minstrel will sing of him. The idea repeats the theory of poetry as memory from Canto V.
O Caledonia! stern and wild, Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Scotland's harsh landscape is imagined as the nurse of poets. The lines join the Minstrel's voice with Scott's own, since both were formed by the Border.
The last of all the Bards was he, Who sung of Border chivalry;
The frame's opening defines the Minstrel as the final survivor of a tradition, so that the whole poem becomes an elegy for oral culture.
Old times were changed, old manners gone, A stranger filled the Stuarts' throne;
The Revolution of 1688 marks the end of the Minstrel's world; the lines give the poem's sense of history as loss.
Be it scroll, or be it book, Into, knight, thou must not look; If thou readest thou art lorn! Better hadst thou ne'er been born.
The prohibition placed on Deloraine; the illiterate knight keeps it, but the goblin breaks it, and the plot follows from his reading.
If thou would'st view fair Melrose aright, Go visit it by the pale moon-light;
The opening of the Melrose canto, which made the ruined Abbey a destination for Romantic tourists and set the tone of Gothic sublimity for the tomb scene.
And youth seem age, and age seem youth— All was delusion, nought was truth.
The goblin's spell of glamour, which prepares the disguise of the climax and comments on the poem's own art of illusion.
For pride is quelled, and love is free.
The Ladye repeats the Mountain Spirit's prophecy as it is fulfilled. The echo closes the plot's moral pattern: the feud ends when pride gives way.
Yet, rest thee God! for well I know, I ne'er shall find a nobler foe!
The raider's lament for his enemy Musgrave shows the honour of the Border feud, and gives Deloraine a dignity the plot has denied him.
Questions for study
Why does Scott tell the story through an old minstrel rather than in his own voice?
Consider the double historical setting, the apologies for roughness, the interludes, and the ballad revival's argument about minstrels.
How do the interludes between cantos change the way we read the tale?
Look at the Minstrel's failing voice, the wine, the memory of his son, and the ladies' praise.
Is the Goblin Page a flaw in the poem, as Jeffrey thought, or an essential part of it?
Think about the origin of the poem in the Gilpin Horner legend, the role of illusion in the plot, and the mixture of tones.
What role does magic play in the Ladye's character, and why does she renounce it?
Compare her pride, the prophecy, her secret knowledge of the coming help, and the final pilgrimage.
How does Scott use real places and place-names, and to what effect?
Deloraine's ride, the beacons, the muster of the clans, and the notes.
How is the English enemy portrayed, and what does that suggest about Scott's view of Scotland and England?
Compare Howard and Dacre, the truce and football, Musgrave's death, and the period of the Union.
What did Scott take from Christabel, and how does his use of the four-stress line differ from Coleridge's?
Compare a passage of Deloraine's ride with the opening of Christabel; think about pace and mood.
What is the function of the three songs at the wedding feast?
Consider their origins (Border, Tudor court, Orkney), their shared theme of tragic love, and the poem's interest in kinds of minstrelsy.
Read 'Breathes there the man' in its context. Is it a general statement of patriotism?
Look at the end of Canto V: what has provoked the Minstrel, and what is his personal situation?
How does the poem's ending balance romance, religion and history?
Consider the goblin's removal, Michael Scott's shade, the Dies Irae, and the coda of the Minstrel's old age.
Further reading
- Alexander, J. H. Two Studies in Romantic Reviewing. 2 vols. Vol. 2: The Reviewing of Walter Scott's Poetry, 1805–1817. Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1976.
- Byron, George Gordon, Lord. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers: A Satire. London: James Cawthorn, 1809.
- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Christabel; Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep. London: John Murray, 1816.
- Curran, Stuart. Poetic Form and British Romanticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
- Davis, Leith. Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707–1830. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
- Duncan, Ian. Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
- Gamer, Michael. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
- Goslee, Nancy Moore. Scott the Rhymer. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988.
- Grierson, H. J. C. Sir Walter Scott, Bart.: A New Life Supplementary to, and Corrective of, Lockhart's Biography. London: Constable, 1938.
- Groom, Nick. The Making of Percy's Reliques. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.
- Hayden, John O., ed. Scott: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
- Jeffrey, Francis. Review of The Lay of the Last Minstrel: A Poem, by Walter Scott. Edinburgh Review 6, no. 11 (April 1805): 1–20.
- Johnson, Edgar. Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan; London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970.
- Lockhart, John Gibson. Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. 7 vols. Edinburgh: Robert Cadell; London: John Murray and Whittaker, 1837–38.
- McLane, Maureen N. Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
- Millgate, Jane. Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.
- Newman, Steve. Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
- Percy, Thomas, ed. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. 3 vols. London: J. Dodsley, 1765.
- Robertson, Fiona, ed. The Edinburgh Companion to Sir Walter Scott. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.
- Scott, Walter, ed. Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. 3 vols. Kelso and Edinburgh: James Ballantyne, 1802–03.
- St Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
- Sutherland, John. The Life of Walter Scott: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
- Todd, William B., and Ann Bowen. Sir Walter Scott: A Bibliographical History, 1796–1832. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1998.
- Trumpener, Katie. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-19.