Imagining Scotland: Walter Scott vs Hugh MacDiarmid

Tuesday 6th October 2026

Summary of the Talk:

The evening brought together Alexander Linklater, whose work centres on Hugh MacDiarmid/Christopher Murray Grieve, and James Robertson, whose doctoral work was on Walter Scott and whose own fiction engages extensively with Scottish history and identity.

1. Two very different visions of Scotland

Linklater began with MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, particularly its furious catalogue of Scottish historical figures and its questioning of what Scotland had actually achieved.

His central argument was that MacDiarmid wanted unity, but not necessarily reconciliation. His idea was closer to a transcendent unity in which apparently incompatible elements — Gaelic and Scots, Catholic and Protestant, Highland and Lowland, east and west — could somehow coexist without suppressing their differences.

Scott, by contrast, sought reconciliation through a shared historical narrative. He brought together competing versions of Scotland's past and presented them as parts of a single national story. Linklater suggested that, in this very broad sense, MacDiarmid was doing something in the twentieth century comparable to what Scott had done in the nineteenth.

One of the most striking formulations was essentially:

Scott sought unity through reconciliation; MacDiarmid sought unity through division.

That is probably the single most useful idea to take from the lecture.

2. Scott created a Scotland that had never quite existed

A major part of Linklater's argument concerned Scott's famous opening to Waverley: “Sixty years since.”

The point was not simply that Scott was looking backwards. By placing fictional characters inside a carefully reconstructed historical world, he created a relationship between past, present and future.

Scott's Scotland was partly an imaginative construction. The Scotland he presented as a coherent whole had never quite existed in historical reality — but subsequent generations came to regard that imagined Scotland as part of their genuine inheritance.

This led to an interesting paradox: Scott did not merely preserve Scottish history; he helped create the way later Scots imagined that history.

3. MacDiarmid's little white rose

One of Linklater's most entertaining sections concerned MacDiarmid's “little white rose”, which became associated with Scottish nationalism.

The interesting point was that the symbolism was not actually as historically Scottish as many people might assume. MacDiarmid took the image from Compton Mackenzie, who had described a Scottish rose as white, small, prickly and sweet-smelling. MacDiarmid then transformed the image through poetry.

The symbol subsequently became associated with the SNP, including the famous occasion in 2015 when the SNP MPs at Westminster wore white roses.

The irony was considerable: the supposedly ancient Scottish symbol was actually the product of layers of literary invention and reinterpretation.

That fitted perfectly with the wider argument about Scott: national symbols often acquire their power not because they are historically authentic, but because people come to believe in the stories attached to them.

4. Robertson's response: Scott and MacDiarmid both mattered

James Robertson then argued that Scott and MacDiarmid shared more than might initially appear.

Both had:

• extraordinarily restless and capacious minds;
• remarkable work rates;
• an intense concern with Scotland;
• an interest in the relationship between Scotland and England;
• and, crucially, a determination to influence how Scotland understood itself in the future.

But their circumstances were radically different.

Scott's answer was essentially nationalist unionism: Scotland could retain a distinctive identity while remaining within the Union.

MacDiarmid's answer was much more radical: the Union, conventional Scottish politics and much of the inherited cultural establishment had failed Scotland and needed to be challenged.

Robertson emphasised that MacDiarmid's politics were shaped profoundly by the First World War. The experience of war, together with the Russian and Irish revolutions, transformed Christopher Murray Grieve's political thinking.

The First World War was therefore presented as a watershed. Scott's nineteenth-century vision could no longer speak to everyone after the catastrophic experience of 1914–18. That wasn't necessarily Scott's fault: the world had changed.

5. Scott and MacDiarmid were separated by readership as well as politics

There was a particularly striking comparison of their literary reach.

Scott was the internationally successful bestselling author of his age, publishing in large editions and influencing readers across Europe and beyond.

MacDiarmid was extraordinarily prolific but initially reached a tiny audience. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle was published in 1926 in an edition of only 500 copies and was not reprinted for 27 years.

Yet MacDiarmid behaved as though his readership already existed — even if it might take generations to arrive.

That was an important insight into his extraordinary confidence: he was writing for the Scotland he believed ought to exist rather than necessarily the Scotland that existed around him.

6. The surprising MacDiarmid/Christopher Murray Grieve distinction

One of the best parts of the discussion came when Linklater was asked whether he actually liked MacDiarmid.

His answer was fascinating because he distinguished between Hugh MacDiarmid, the literary and political persona, and Christopher Murray Grieve, the man.

Linklater was quite clear that MacDiarmid's Stalinism and some of his political positions were extreme and sometimes deeply misguided. But he said that the private Christopher Murray Grieve emerging from the biographical evidence was almost the opposite of the monstrous literary persona.

He described Grieve as courteous, gentle, thoughtful, mild-mannered, orderly and rule-following.

That was reinforced by Robertson's recollections of accounts from people who had actually met him: a kind and charming man who occasionally seemed to acquire “a gleam” in his eye before saying something outrageous.

The contrast between the deliberately provocative public MacDiarmid and the quiet, courteous Christopher Murray Grieve is potentially one of the most interesting aspects of Linklater's forthcoming biography.

7. Robertson's personal connection with MacDiarmid

Robertson gave a particularly nice explanation of his own relationship with the two writers.

He said MacDiarmid was largely unknown to him until after Grieve's death in 1978. When he began reading him, MacDiarmid opened up an entire world of Scottish literature and history that Robertson had not previously encountered.

He also spent two years living at Brownsbank, MacDiarmid's former home near Biggar.

That experience directly fed into And the Land Lay Still. Robertson confirmed that both Scott and MacDiarmid influenced the novel. MacDiarmid even makes a cameo appearance, while Robertson consciously adopted Scott's technique of putting fictional characters into real historical circumstances.

This was a particularly neat moment because a twentieth-century Scottish novelist was explaining how one nineteenth-century writer and one twentieth-century poet had both influenced his own imagining of Scotland.

8. Edinburgh, the Borders and the “small-town” Scotland

The discussion then moved away from the two great personalities and into an interesting debate about geography.

Edinburgh was recognised as crucial because it was a centre of publishing, intellectual life and rapid urban change. Robertson also pointed out that Edinburgh's publishing importance continued well into the twentieth century.

But Linklater challenged the idea of MacDiarmid simply as a “rural” writer.

His argument was that MacDiarmid was better understood as a small-town writer. His formative landscape was Langholm rather than some idealised rural Scotland. This connected with a wider argument about the importance of small-town Scotland to interwar nationalism.

That is an aspect of the discussion which could easily have been overlooked, but it was genuinely interesting.

9. The First World War as the dividing line

The speakers returned to the war when discussing why Scott and MacDiarmid responded so differently to the modern world.

Scott had experienced the Napoleonic Wars and believed that Union and Empire provided stability and security in a dangerous international environment.

MacDiarmid experienced the First World War directly. Its slaughter and aftermath caused him to question whether Scotland was returning to a better society at all.

The speakers therefore contrasted:

Scott: war and instability reinforce the case for Union and continuity.

MacDiarmid: war exposes the failure of the existing political and social order and strengthens the case for radical change.

10. An important qualification about Scott's influence

An audience member made a very good challenge to the idea that Scott was responsible for reconciling Scotland's Highland and Lowland identities.

Scott, it was pointed out, was building on something that was already happening through the Union, the British Army and the Scottish regiments, particularly during the Seven Years' War and the imperial expansion that followed.

The speakers agreed.

That led to a particularly interesting observation about tartan and the Borders: much of the tartan associated with Highland regiments was produced in Border mills. In other words, the supposedly ancient Highland image of Scotland was partly being manufactured by the industrial economy of the Lowlands and Borders.

The memorable conclusion was essentially:

Scott may not have invented the image — but he was exceptionally good at marketing it.

Points worth mentioning

1. Scott and MacDiarmid were ultimately presented as more alike than different

The title suggests a contest, but the discussion gradually undermined the “versus”.

Both men were trying to answer:

What is Scotland, and how can Scottish identity survive into the future?

Their answers were radically different, but their underlying concern was remarkably similar. Robertson explicitly suggested that they could be seen partly as allies rather than adversaries, because they were responding to different historical circumstances.

2. Scott's imagined Scotland became real in people's minds

This was probably the deepest intellectual point of the evening.

Scott's achievement was not simply recording a Scotland that already existed. Through fiction, historical memory and national mythology, he helped create a version of Scotland that later generations accepted as their inheritance.

3. The “little white rose” story is a brilliant example of invented tradition

The revelation that the supposedly Scottish nationalist white rose came through Compton Mackenzie → MacDiarmid → modern Scottish nationalism is a wonderful example of how national symbols acquire historical authority after the event.

4. MacDiarmid's public persona was not the whole man

I think this was possibly the most human part of the evening.

The forthcoming biography appears likely to complicate the familiar image of MacDiarmid considerably: the outrageous, difficult, Stalinist, combative MacDiarmid versus the courteous, quiet, orderly Christopher Murray Grieve.

5. The First World War explains much of the gulf between them

Rather than simply saying “Scott was conservative and MacDiarmid was radical”, the speakers gave a much more historically grounded explanation.

They were products of different worlds. The First World War fundamentally altered the intellectual landscape in which Scottish writers operated.

6. Scott didn't create Scottish national identity from nothing

The audience intervention about the Scottish regiments, Empire and the Highlandisation of Scottish identity was important because it prevented the argument becoming too Scott-centric.

Scott was an enormously influential participant in a process already under way, rather than the sole inventor of modern Scottish identity.

7. There was a lovely irony about Blackwood's

A publishing house established in Scott's era subsequently published some of MacDiarmid's most important early work.

So there was a literal institutional link between the two literary worlds, even though MacDiarmid regarded much of the nineteenth-century Scottish literary inheritance with considerable hostility.

8. The evening itself demonstrated the argument

Perhaps the nicest thing about the event was that James Robertson and Alexander Linklater were themselves doing what the lecture was describing.

Robertson, a writer influenced by Scott and MacDiarmid, was in conversation with Linklater, who is writing MacDiarmid's biography while also deeply engaged with the Scott tradition. The discussion therefore became another generation's attempt to reconcile different versions of Scotland's literary past.

And it ended rather appropriately with the suggestion that they had only scratched the surface and that the conversation could continue.