Trees, Rivers, and Stories: Walter Scott and the Land
Thursday 5th May 2016
Summary of the Talk:
Dr Susan Oliver, Reader in Literature at the University of Essex, delivered an engaging lecture on the ecological imagination of Sir Walter Scott. Drawing on research from her forthcoming book Green Scott: Historical Fiction, Ballads and National Ecologies, she explored how Scott’s deep connection to the natural world shaped his writing and environmental views.
Key Points:
- Scott the Ecologist: Scott planted over a million trees at Abbotsford and kept detailed records of soil conditions, tree species, and local flora in his planting journal Sylva Abbotsfordiensis. His love of trees was both literary and practical, influenced by both folklore and science.
- Ecocriticism and Literature: Oliver explained ecocriticism as a lens that views literature in relationship with the land, highlighting how Scott treated nature as an active participant in his stories rather than just a setting. Scott saw land and water as carriers of memory, history, and storytelling.
- Industrial Deforestation and Monocultures: Scott warned against the rise of industrial forestry and monocultures of non-native trees. His essays for the Quarterly Review critiqued the loss of Scotland’s native woodlands and the ecological degradation brought by mass logging, especially in North America.
- Scott and Salmon Stocks: In novels like Old Mortality and The Antiquary, Scott highlighted the environmental consequences of damming rivers and overfishing. He even helped found the Tweed Commissioners in 1805 to preserve salmon in the River Tweed—making it one of the first environmentally managed rivers in the world.
- Trees, Rivers, and Folklore: The role of trees and rivers in Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and novels like Waverley and The Lady of the Lake is profound. Through characters like Thomas the Rhymer, Scott connects the landscape to prophecy, memory, and oral storytelling.
- Altered Landscapes and Lost Memory: In Waverley, the removal of ancient trees is not only ecological loss but symbolic of cultural erasure. Scott shows how war and economic change leave scars in the landscape, and how only the storyteller can restore meaning to those lost places.
- Eerie, Enchanted Spaces: Scott was fascinated by the mystical and haunted quality of places like the Rhymer’s Glen and Huntly Bank. These places embodied the blurred line between folklore and reality and played into his belief that the land itself could tell stories if we knew how to listen.
Noteworthy Observations
- Scott as a Forefather of Environmental Writing: Dr Oliver positions Scott as a visionary environmental thinker, whose warnings about forestry and climate change anticipated modern ecological concerns.
- The Land "Writes Back": Oliver compellingly argued that Scott’s landscapes were not passive backdrops but resistant, sentient, and even rebellious. The soil itself could reject unsuitable tree species or retain memory through rivers and stones.
- Sound as Storytelling: The lecture touched on the idea that Scott may have deliberately used stone placement and tree growth at Abbotsford to amplify the sound of the River Tweed—a subtle but poetic method of blending storytelling with place.
- Influence Beyond Scotland: The talk ended with a transatlantic reflection, showing how Scott’s influence reached writers like Robert Louis Stevenson, who reimagined Scott’s characters in ecologically and culturally fraught American landscapes.
- Thomas the Rhymer as an Eco-Poetic Hero: The image of Thomas being taken underground by the Elf Queen, among tree roots, becomes a metaphor for Scott’s belief that deep knowledge and poetic vision arise from immersing oneself in the land—literally and symbolically.
Introduction by Alasdair Hutton:
Sir Walter Scott’s writing has received a lot more attention recently as I think everyone here believes is well deserved.
Rather less well known is Sir Walter’s enjoyment of nature and his management of the natural world around him. He studied the planting of trees and became something of an authority on the subject. Indeed, buying land and planting trees became an addiction and was one of the factors which left him with no money when the publishing businesses of Archibald Constable and James Ballantyne crashed into bankruptcy and carried Scott down with them.
To tell us a great deal more about this important part of Sir Walter Scott’s life we are very fortunate tonight to have with us Dr Susan Oliver, Reader in Literature at the University of Essex where she writes about and teaches Romantic, transatlantic and periodical studies, along with ecocriticism.
Susan has published many articles about Sir Walter Scott and Scottish literature, and about the literature of the Romantic period more generally. She was awarded the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 2007 for her book Scott, Byron, and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter.
But of closest importance to us is that she is writing a monograph titled Green Scott that re-evaluates Walter Scott’s writing about the ecological history of Scotland. That book also assesses Scott’s forward importance to the twentieth- and twenty-first century environmental studies.
