The Edinburgh and Borders of Sir Walter Scott and Muriel Spark

Summary of the Talk:

The lecture, delivered by Professor Gerard Carruthers, explored the unlikely yet illuminating connections between two of Scotland's literary giants: Sir Walter Scott and Muriel Spark. While seemingly disparate in time, tone, and subject matter, both authors share deep concerns with place, memory, and identity—particularly regarding Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders.

Carruthers suggested that both authors, while famous for evoking Edinburgh and the Borders, do so in ambiguous, unstable ways. Place in their work often turns out to be treacherous rather than settled. Both writers are also curiously out of step with mainstream Scottish literary nationalism—Scott as a Unionist and Spark as cosmopolitan and morally complex.

He traced Scott’s invention of the “Border Ballads” genre as a transformative cultural project—turning oral traditions into literary ones, and sparking a legacy that would shape Romanticism itself. Spark, for her part, plays with balladic structures and themes (especially those of temptation, moral choice, and supernatural justice), often in subversive and ironic ways.

The talk touched on major works including The Chronicles of the Canongate, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, and The Driver’s Seat. Carruthers examined how Spark inherited and distorted Scott's moral and narrative frameworks, especially his fascination with fragmented narratives and moral uncertainty.

Noteworthy Highlights and Insights:

1. Place as Performance, Not Stability:
   Both Scott and Spark construct Edinburgh and the Borders as places of dramatic performance rather than reliable identity. For Spark especially, Edinburgh is a city of masks and shifting values.
2. The Ballads as Moral Parables:
   Carruthers highlighted Spark’s use of balladic logic—characters are tempted and fall due to free will, not coercion. This recalls Scott’s own fascination with moral ambiguity in supposedly straightforward tales.
3. Scott’s Romantic Liminality:
   Despite being often pigeonholed as conservative or Enlightenment-bound, Scott is deeply invested in liminality—in-between spaces, cultural transitions, and historical hauntings.
4. Spark’s Catholicism and Ethical Rigour:
   Spark’s interest in sin, free will, and divine justice (e.g. Peckham Rye, The Black Madonna) reveals her Catholic world view, often masked by irony. She borrows narrative mechanisms from traditional ballads to play out modern moral dramas.
5. Critique of Nationalist Readings:
   Both writers resist being co-opted into nationalist literary agendas. Scott is too loyal to monarchy and empire; Spark too detached and ironic to serve a cultural programme. Both ask awkward, uncomfortable questions.
6. Educational Reflections:
   In the discussion, Carruthers lamented the diminishing presence of Scottish ballads and older literature in schools. He stressed the need to teach literature not for affirmation of beliefs but for intellectual and moral challenge.
7. Spark’s Satirical Edge:
   Her characters often fail morally not because they are monstrous, but because they are petty, vain, or consumed by convention (e.g. the housekeeper who values clean sheets over family). This echoes the moral rigour of traditional folk tales.
8. Scott’s Dual Nature:
   Simultaneously a writer of romantic chivalry and gritty social realism, Scott’s fiction blends noble ideals with scenes of violence, fanaticism, and ruin (Old Mortality, St Ronan’s Well, The Heart of Midlothian).
9. Spark’s Use of Balladic Deaths:
   Characters in Spark often meet sudden, ironic, even absurd deaths, narrated with a distant or sardonic tone—recalling the detachment of traditional ballads.
10. Universal Themes with Scottish Roots:
    Though both authors are rooted in Scotland, they transcend it. Their works speak to broader human frailty, identity, belief, and memory—making them globally relevant and enduring.