130 Years
Sir Walter Scott in Dictionaries: Invention and Artistry
On Thursday 15th June 2017 we had a talk by Prof. Jeremy J. Smith. He was introduced by our Chairman, Prof. Peter Garside
Jeremy Smith is Professor Emeritus in English Language and Linguistics, University of Glasgow, and an Honorary Professor in the University of St Andrews. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of the English Association, and of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies. He has served as President of the International Society for the Linguistics of English, as Convener of the Board of Trustees of Scottish Language Dictionaries (now Dictionaries of the Scots Language), and on the Council of the Scottish Text Society; he is currently a member of Council of the Philological Society. He specialises in English historical linguistics, the history of Scots, and book history. Recent publications include Transforming Early English (Cambridge UP, 2020), a co-edited collection, Genre in English Medical Writing 1500-1820 (also Cambridge UP, 2022), and Reinventing Medieval Liturgy in Victorian England (with David Jasper, Boydell and Brewer, 2023). Current projects include a corpus-based study of English religious discourse, 1380-1780, funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
Synopsis: The Oxford English Dictionary records two core meanings for invention. One is current: ‘The action of devising, contriving, or making up; contrivance, fabrication.’ However, according to classical and medieval rhetoricians, there was another sense, now obsolete: ‘The action of coming upon or finding; the action of finding out; discovery (whether accidental, or the result of search and effort).’ I argue that Scott’s creations exhibit both kinds of invention.
My lecture begins by examining Scott’s presence in the great historical dictionaries of English and Scots. Then, after a digression on what is meant by style, I analyse one of the writer’s great early successes, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), referring also to his novel The Antiquary (1816), and Scott’s great house at Abbotsford.
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