The Mountain Bard

James Hogg

Hogg grew up in rural Ettrick Forest in a notable family of tradition-bearers, and in his first major poetry collection The Mountain Bard of 1807 he claims his rightful position at the centre of that culture. Whereas Scott collected the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border Hogg was the sole author of The Mountain Bard. He learned to negotiate the erudite print culture of Edinburgh with the literary ballad, sometimes helped and sometimes hindered by his powerful friend, shifting the shape of his earlier manuscript and periodical poems accordingly. Then in 1821, when he was an established literary man, he published a revised edition in keeping with his new professional status as Author of The Queen’s Wake. The present edition prints together, for the first time, the surviving pre-1807 versions of poems included in The Mountain Bard, the full 1807 collection, and the complete 1821 version. The Introduction (besides giving a full history of this complex, changing work) places it firmly within the eighteenth-century antiquarian projects of ballad-collecting and the intellectual currents of Romanticism, in particular the literary vogue for the ballad shown in works such as Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Visit the James Hogg Society website to find out more about Hogg.

Available in Paperback:

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

The Shepherd’s Calendar

Tales of the Wars of Montrose

The Three Perils of Woman

Winter Evening Tales

Anecdotes of Scott

The Queen's Wake

Altrive Tales

Also Available in Hardback:

A Queer Book

The Shepherd’s Calendar

The Three Perils of Woman

Tales of the Wars of Montrose

Lay Sermons

Queen Hynde

Anecdotes of Scott

The Spy

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

The Jacobite Relics of Scotland (First Series)

The Jacobite Relics of Scotland (Second Series)

Winter Evening Tales

The Queen's Wake

Altrive Tales

The Collected Letters of James Hogg, Volume 1, 1800-1819

Related Subjects

• Fiction

About the Author

Ibrahim Warde is a Research Affiliate at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a writer for Le Monde Diplomatique and an international financial consultant. Suzanne Gilbert is a Lecturer at the University of Stirling. She is a ballad scholar, and an Associate General Editor of the Stirling/South Carolina Edition of James Hogg, for which she has edited Queen Hynde (with Douglas S. Mack).

top of page