A Polar Projection: The Northern Dimension in Modern Scottish Literature by Michael Jon Anthony Stachura M.Litt. (English), The University of Stirling, 2009 M.A. (English), The University of Aberdeen, 2008 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences © Michael Jon Anthony Stachura 2015 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY Spring 2015 Approval Name: Michael Stachura Degree: Doctor of Philosophy (English) Title: A Polar Projection: The Northern Dimension in Modern Scottish Literature Examining Committee: Chair: Jeff Derksen Associate Professor Leith Davis Senior Supervisor Professor Susan Brook Supervisor Associate Professor Penny Fielding Supervisor Professor Department of English University of Edinburgh, Scotland Tina Adcock Internal Examiner Assistant Professor Department of History Scott Hames External Examiner Professor Department of English University of Stirling, Scotland Date Defended/Approved: April 8, 2015 ii Partial Copyright Licence iii Abstract Drawing on a transnational turn in recent Scottish literary criticism, this dissertation examines a transnational northern dimension in modern Scottish literature. Following a ‘No’ vote in an historic referendum on independence in 2014, the question of what Scotland and ‘Scottishness’ is in a post-referendum twenty-first century world is once again being debated and reimagined. Literature, as always in Scotland, will play a major role in this process. While the nation and national identity remain important subjects of critical focus and investigation, the writers examined within this dissertation offer ways of reorienting and reconsidering the conceptual, cultural, and creative boundaries of Scotland and Scottish literature, moving northwards into an awareness of as well as engagement with a Nordic and broader circumpolar world. For these writers, the North is both a physical as well as conceptual space, and it is articulated in a number of ways: as an aspirational identity; a metaphysical space, theological as well as philosophical; as the cultural, historical and geographical world of the Norse sagas; and a larger cartographic and physical space of being in the natural world, or more geographically, ecologically, and topographically defined, being in the North. By looking North, the writers I consider in this dissertation have complicated essential notions of Scotland and transcended proscriptive conceptions of Scottishness through a reorientation of their imaginative and creative perspectives. At a time when the North is becoming an important transnational subject of critical study, these writers provide an opportunity for Scottish studies to expand its critical scope into a broader global context. From James Macpherson’s transnational northern epic Ossian (1765) to the northern ecophilosophical writing of Hugh MacDiarmid, Kenneth White, Kathleen Jamie and John Burnside, and from the creative engagement with the Icelandic sagas in the Norse novels of George Mackay Brown and Margaret Elphinstone to the transnational northern imaginative and discursive space in the contemporary Shetlandic poetry of Robert Alan Jamieson and Christine De Luca, there has been and continues to be a strong transnational northern dimension in modern Scottish literature. I will conclude by suggesting new critical directions in Scottish northern studies. Keywords: Scotland; modern Scottish literature; North; transnational literature iv Table of Contents Approval ............................................................................................................................. ii Partial Copyright Licence .................................................................................................. iii Abstract ............................................................................................................................. iv Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... v Introduction .......................................................................................................................1 Chapter One: Epics of the North ................................................................................. 22 Chapter Two: Scottish Shamans ................................................................................. 63 Chapter Three: Scottish Sagas .................................................................................. 113 Chapter Four: A Polar Projection .............................................................................. 147 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................194 References ...................................................................................................................210 v Introduction After a successful devolution referendum in 1997, which came on the back of a failed referendum in 1979, Scotland regained some form of political representation from Westminster through devolution and the reestablishment of a Scottish Parliament in 1999. In the recent independence referendum in 2014, however, Scottish voters voted ‘No’ to Scottish independence by a margin of ten percent. In the wake of such an historic referendum, the topic of what Scotland is and how it can be reconceived is once again becoming a central issue. The very question asked of Scottish voters, “Should Scotland be an independent country?” begs its own questions. What is a country? What is the difference between a country and a nation? What is Scotland? What does it mean to be “independent” in the twenty-first century? Writing in Scott Hames’s collection Unstated: Writers on Scottish Independence (2012), the author Denise Mina argues that Scotland is the perfect case study for such questions. “We could be at the helm of a public, philosophical exploration of, for example, the scope of our social and moral obligations, of the limits of international interdependence, of twenty-first century conceptions of statehood,” states Mina. “It could be the start of a new enlightenment.”1 Scottish literature—which has always been seen as something of an ‘unacknowledged legislator’ in terms of cultural politics and identity—will no doubt be at 1 Denise Mina, “Denise Mina,” in Unstated: Writers on Scottish Independence, ed. Scott Hames (Edinburgh: Word Power Books, 2012), 153. 1 the heart of these debates. Just as the failed 1979 referendum precipitated a gallimaufry of angry, confident, diverse, and politically attuned Scottish literary voices, the recent referendum result is sure to initiate another debate in Scottish literature and Scottish studies about what Scotland is in a post-referendum twenty-first century world. In The Modern Scottish Novel (1999), Cairns Craig argues that the novel offers a space wherein the concept of the nation and national identity can be debated. In Scotlands: Poets and the Nation (2004), Alan Riach and Douglas Gifford argue that the topic of the nation has likewise been at the heart of Scottish poetry. In this dissertation, however, I will discuss a range of modern Scottish writers who look beyond the national and reconceptualize Scotland as being part of a larger transnational northern or circumpolar world. In the same year that Hames’s book was published, Historic Scotland and the National Trust for Scotland, in partnership with Creative Scotland and the Scottish Poetry Library, commissioned ten of Scotland’s best poets to write a poem commemorating the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn. The victory of Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn in 1314 is a landmark event in Scottish history, and both its history and subsequent mythologizing in culture has informed the Scottish imagination for over seven hundred years. Taking place only two years before the referendum vote, the task of writing a poem on a national theme that had the chance of being inscribed for posterity on the monument of such a symbol of national identity was culturally and politically charged. The winning poem by Kathleen Jamie, “Here Lies Our Land,” which has since been inscribed on the Rotunda, escapes didacticism and historical triumphalism by looking at and contemplating Scotland and Scottishness in a very different way. 2 Here lies our land: every airt Beneath swift clouds, glad glints of sun, Belonging to none but itself. We are mere transients, who sing Its westlin’ winds and fernie braes, Northern lights and siller tides, Small folk playing our part. ‘Come all ye,’ the country says, You win me, who take me most to heart.2 The poem is undeniably Scottish: it is about connection to “our land”; it uses Scots; it pays homage to several figures, poems, and popular ballads of the Scottish literary tradition; and it alludes to the Scottish national pastime of talking about the weather, especially when the sun comes out. If the four-beat tetrameter makes a “profound bow” to the past masters of John Barbour, Robert Burns, and Walter Scott, all of who wrote about Bannockburn in that meter, the slip from such a nationally charged tetrameter into the trimeter of the third line is revealing.3 It moves away from conceptions of Scotland and Scottishness defined by historical animosity with England, territorial claim and national boundaries into a sense of belonging that is instead founded on respect for and connection with the natural landscape and phenomena of Scotland. The land, as Jamie