January 22nd, 2009
by
Yonmei
While the immediate impetus to write this post came from the whole failing to play together in the City of Invention thing, I’ve had something like this in mind to write since 2005.
At the Worldcon in Glasgow, in 2005, there was a panel on Scottish fantasy, which I attended out of interest: I’m Scottish, I enjoy fantasy.
There were four or five panellists. All but one were North American (except the one who was not a fantasy writer, and who said he thought he was probably on the panel because they’d wanted to have at least one Brit.)
Overwhelmingly, in publishing, Scottish fantasy is not written by Scots. Not even written by people who live in Scotland. (Because of Ireland’s lovely tax breaks on culturally-earned income, Irish fantasy may be written more often by people who do actually live in Ireland. But Irish fantasy and Scottish fantasy, while having a strong family resemblance, are not the same.)
Scotland is culturally strongly divided into the Lowlands and the Highlands, and splits East and West somewhat, and there is a strong modern rivalry between Edinburgh and Glasgow, and there’s a big difference between people who live inside and outside the Central Belt (which is to say Edinburgh, Glasgow, and commuting distance between them). Then there’s the big questions of what football team you support (which codes, sort of, into whether you’re Protestant, Catholic, or anti-sectarian), if you’re an incomer, and whether you’re middle-class or working-class. The patterns of immigration into Scotland over the past 150 years were strongly Irish, Italian, and Pakistani/Bangladeshi: the willingness of Scots to eat anything deep-fried includes pizza and pakora (but not Mars bars, no: sorry, that was a joke that got out of hand).
I don’t read much Scottish fantasy. It rarely if ever seems to have anything much to do with Scotland: it has to do, rather, with a North American concept of Scotland. (I can’t blame Braveheart, appalling though that is: sad to say, it was actually pretty damn popular in Scotland, crappy though the history was, for much the same nationalist reasons as we love to see the English lose at football. And rugby. And cricket. And… well, pretty much anything, really.)
I live in a country which is a real place: a nation divided on whether we want to be fully independent or a part of the United Kingdom; a nation which has always had some steaming issues of national pride over being better educated, better at this, better at that, better at the other, than our neighbours down South. I can happily read fantasy novels set in New Orleans or New York – or even Hartford, Connecticut – without worrying about how realistic they are, or if the werewolves in the novel sound like I think werewolves from Connecticut actually would sound like.
But name a Scottish werewolf “Eoghan” and have him live in a “neither precisely a manor house nor a castle” with lawns kept short by “Highland coos”, and of course there’s a “stout gray-haired Morag” who’s the family cook and goes around “young Master”ing the visiting werewolf… well, I’m just as likely to drop the book back on the shelf, figuring that this is yet another North American Scottish fantasy writer who is not writing about my country, but… hers.
I’ve written stories set in cities which I’ve never lived in. (I don’t think I’ve yet written a story set in a city I’ve never visited, but I may come to it yet.) It’s the telling detail that convinces which is the hardest part to get if you’ve never been there. A lot of Scottish fantasy ignores the Lowlands of Scotland as much as possible… not to mention the history of the past sixty or seventy years.
A lot of this happens because a lot of Scots went to North America, a hundred to two hundred years ago. And a lot of this happens because Walter Scott made Scottish storytelling fashionable… about a hundred and fifty years ago. But still: it leaves me with this odd situation – Scottish fantasy is very popular. But it’s being written in a country that’s no more mine than Brigadoon.
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Yonmei at
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Filed under Books & Literature, Publishing | Comments (28)
Oh, it isn’t just you Scots, I can assure you. There’s a whole “Celtic” industry in the US. The better bits of it are based on Sir Walter, Iolo Morganwg and the like. The less good bits derive from Michael Flatley. Not forgetting the “Celtic” music, which apparently includes Steeleye Span and Jethro Tull.
I’d write some Welsh fantasy myself, but who wants to read about us winning grand slams in the Six Nations…
No wait, we did!
Don’t suppose you have any genuine Scottish fantasy recommendations? I have a big ol’ soft spot for Scotland, despite not having any discernable Scottish blood in me. I just sort of fell in love with it, over a couple of weeks spent there some six years ago: not only is it awesome if one, like me, likes Celtic music and culture, and is a bit of a history buff, but I was expecting that. I wasn’t expecting that a country that, on paper, doesn’t seem like it should be heartbreakingly, staggeringly gorgeous, IS.
On to poseurs. I suspect that at least part of the phenom of non-Scots writing pseudo-Scottish fantasy may be simple exoticism. I picked up a lot of books when I was in France this summer; since I like fantasy, some of them were fantasy. One of the French fantasies I picked up was about… the adventures of an American girl who sees ghosts, as she and her family wend their way through America’s trailer parks. I also flipped through a BD (bande dessinee, French comic book) notionally set in a pre-contact Native American society… that had longhouses AND people with feathered headdresses AND totem poles (associated with the Northeast, Great Plains, and coastal Alaska, respectively). First I was entertained, muchly, at an all-too-rare (IMHO) look at my own culture from the outside; then, upon sober reflection, I figured that, just as I like to read fantasy set in some exotic other place, so do other people. This isn’t a new sentiment, and it doesn’t explain the lack of Scottish fantasy authors at a Glasgow Worldcon, but it’s *a* reason, anyway.
This is done to New Orleans, New York and Havana too, just three cities that I know very well and about which so many phony novels have been written and continue to be written — as well as excellent books too, of course.
Love, c.
I’ve never read a fantasy novel set anywhere I’ve been, but I did once read a kids mystery novel set in a city I was familiar with that suffered from massive research fail. What made it really memorable was the author’s note thanking a librarian from said city for her help with the historical part of the mystery. Why it never occured to the author to ask a few basic questions about the city (starting with where the branch libraries were located), I’ve no idea.
I don’t even want to think about what happens when research fail intersects with a romanticised idea of a place. I suspect that some of those books you’ve put back on the shelf would read as off even to some people who’ve never been to Scotland.
What do you think of Eileen Dunlop? If you’ve ever read her, that is.
Cheryl: There’s a whole “Celtic” industry in the US. The better bits of it are based on Sir Walter, Iolo Morganwg and the like. The less good bits derive from Michael Flatley.
Yeah, and that’s part of the problem: Walter Scott was not much on detailed historical research (and he was above improving an authentic ballad so that it made a better story in much the same way as the sea is not above the mountains). Iolo Morganwg wrote any number of “authentic ancient bardic works”. Both of them were great writers, but neither of them were reliable witnesses. (The difference between “improving” a ballad as you write it down and being accused of forgery for writing your own bardic works and passing them off as authentic ancient tradition? Can we say “class privilege”?)
The notion that you can just butt Wales and Scotland and Ireland all together and call it “the Celtic tradition”? Is pure North American. These are all such little countries, and so close together, and such a long way off, who’s really going to care? Just the people who actually live here, I guess…
Nightsky: Don’t suppose you have any genuine Scottish fantasy recommendations?
Sure, but if you like the North American Celtic school of Scottish fantasy, you may well not like these.
Ellen Galford, The Fires of Bride, is IMO absolutely the best Scottish fantasy ever written. It’s got every cliche you ever saw – the Laird in the castle, the penniless artist, the haunted island, the warrior nuns, Goddess worshippers – but the difference is, Galford can write, and TFoB is funny. And true, and sweet, and romantic, and depicts life on an isolated Scottish island better than anything…
Margaret Elphinstone wrote two novels set in “a future Scotland”, and a handful of short stories: The Incomer, A Sparrow’s Flight, An Apple From The Tree. They’ve suffered (as Elphinstone herself admits) from the problem of where to put them: they’re sort of fantasy (at least, the characters in them definitely believe in magic, and strange and powerful forces in the world): they could be science-fiction (but there’s no spaceships and no obvious science): they are steadily realistic – but they’re set in a Scotland far after some cataclysmic Change. They are beautifully and precisely written, and I recommend them whatever you decide to call them.
I recommended the above for our “obscure novels” listing, but none of them got through to the top twenty voting – they were all too obscure, I suppose.
Iain Banks’s Scottish novels are technically not science-fiction (like his science-fiction novels are technically not Scottish) but I can recommend The Crow Road, which I think is recognisably by an sf writer… anyway, I definitely recommend it.
Though moving rather far from fantasy, Charles Stross’s novel Halting State is set in Edinburgh and Glasgow, fifty years in the future – what part of it isn’t set in Fantasy Game Land on the internet.
I suspect that at least part of the phenom of non-Scots writing pseudo-Scottish fantasy may be simple exoticism.
Oh sure. The problem is that the non-Scots writing Scottish fantasy vastly outnumber and set the standards for Scottish fantasy. Ellen Galford and Margaret Elphinestone aren’t saleable as “Scottish fantasy writers” to the publishers who make a living out of selling “Celtic fiction”, because their novels don’t fit that genre.
YonMei: Yeah, it is annoying, but I try not to complain. After all, we are mostly white, affluent and middle class, and the English stopped doing really awful things (as opposed to just bad things) to our people around the end of the 18th Century (later for the Irish).
I look upon it as a means of helping me understand what PoC are talking about.
And then look forward to trampling the English into the dirt at Twickenham (and trying not to laugh at the poor US Eagles who do try hard).
Constance: This is done to New Orleans, New York and Havana too, just three cities that I know very well and about which so many phony novels have been written and continue to be written — as well as excellent books too, of course.
Yes. I do tend to feel it’s worse when you do it to a whole damned country, plus the point I made to Nightsky – that the North American Scottish fantasy novels set the standard for what Scottish fantasy is supposed to be like.
depizan: I don’t even want to think about what happens when research fail intersects with a romanticised idea of a place. I suspect that some of those books you’ve put back on the shelf would read as off even to some people who’ve never been to Scotland.
Oh I hope so. Or at least that they’d realise Scotland couldn’t be like that.
Eileen Dunlop! Yes. I have got hold of Robinsheugh and A Flute in Mayferry Street – I ought to have included her on the list of recommended Scottish fantasy authors. She is quite splendid.
Cheryl: I look upon it as a means of helping me understand what PoC are talking about.
Yes, it’s a learning experience *mutter mutter grumble grumble*
And then look forward to trampling the English into the dirt at Twickenham
Yay! That’s always something to look forward to. Not that I’m vindictive of course.
To turn it around on Walter Scott, what the slaveholding south did to him and his works, would have had him demanding they all be arrested or something, if he’d been alive when this phenomenon got going.
Mark Twain – Samuel Clemons describes in detail a Mardi Gras Mystic Krewe of Comus’s floats glorifying slavery in terms of the chivalry of Ivanhoe, that protects “Women, Civilization and the Aryan Race.” They were using that term even then. There were a lot of early settlers in the South from Scotland — but not in New Orleans. Their great wave of European immigration after the Civil War (little immigration to the South prior because slavery took up all the ’starter’ job slots) was from Ireland and Italy.
Love, C.
To turn it around on Walter Scott, what the slaveholding south did to him and his works, would have had him demanding they all be arrested or something, if he’d been alive when this phenomenon got going.
It would be nice to think that Walter Scott would have disapproved of Ivanhoe’s iconography being used to promote slavery/the defense of the Aryan Race. But I know of no explicit declaration Scott ever made against slavery, and his novels take for granted completely the social structure of “the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate”.
I’m afraid that presuming that Walter Scott would have hated being glorified by slaveholders, is on the same order of imagination as “I know Johnny Cash would have supported Barack Obama for President”.
Two things –
One: some people reading this might not realize you are writing it in the context of the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of Dooooom 2, or 3, or 6.
Two: Hey Yonmei, I read The Incomer on your recommendation and I really loved it! Thank you!
Liz: One: some people reading this might not realize you are writing it in the context of the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of Dooooom
I guess they might not, if they didn’t read the first paragraph, follow the link embedded in it, and read what it links to. But then, there’s been an awful lot in that debate already of white people trying to make it All About Them.
Hey Yonmei, I read The Incomer on your recommendation and I really loved it! Thank you!
Whee! I love Margaret Elphinstone.
I think there may be a snowball effect here as well. The more “Scottish” fiction gets written/filmed, the more it shapes the North American concept of Scotland. Writers can feel they know Scotland because they’ve read a lot about it and not do the research they might otherwise do for lands and cultures they know little to nothing about.
Combined perhaps with the feeling that many North Americans probably have that we have a right to use Scottish culture, because some of our ancestors were Scottish. Or, at least, we think they were.
The more “Scottish” fiction gets written/filmed, the more it shapes the North American concept of Scotland. Writers can feel they know Scotland because they’ve read a lot about it and not do the research they might otherwise do for lands and cultures they know little to nothing about.
As I already noted to Nightsky: “The problem is that the non-Scots writing Scottish fantasy vastly outnumber and set the standards for Scottish fantasy. Ellen Galford and Margaret Elphinestone aren’t saleable as “Scottish fantasy writers” to the publishers who make a living out of selling “Celtic fiction”, because their novels don’t fit that genre.
Combined perhaps with the feeling that many North Americans probably have that we have a right to use Scottish culture, because some of our ancestors were Scottish.
Yeah. We run into those kind of tourists all the time – they’re great for selling tartan and “clan badges” to. And they routinely show up on Nanowrimo boards, or did last time I was hanging out on the Scotland board during November, asserting that their authority for writing a Scottish novel is that they’ve “always felt Scottish” since their gran came from Scotland. It’s one of the things I really like about the Scottish National Party: about twenty or thirty years ago, they just moved away from this whole concept of “tartan bloodlines” to declare that if you’re living or born in Scotland and you want to be a Scot, the SNP count you as Scottish. And if you’re not living in Scotland and weren’t born in Scotland, you’re fracking well not Scottish, no matter if you have Mac tacked onto your surname or can identify your preferred “clan tartan” at sight.
J Andrews: that we have a right to use Scottish culture
Yeah, but – that isn’t the problem. This is what the cultural appropriation debate is about, I do finally get it (there are earlier comments from me on this blog where I didn’t). Elizabeth Bear isn’t Scottish. She isn’t a werewolf. She isn’t a Kelpie. She has the same right to make use of Scottish culture, to write about werewolves, to write about Kelpies, as any other citizen of the City of Invention – whether they’ve got one Scottish a ancestor or forty or none.
But I am a citizen of the City of Invention too. And I can shrug at their tartantat constructions and their Scottish werewolves with Irish given names who live somewhere far out of reach of the local pub and never have to deal with coachloads of tourists, and whose staff don’t talk like any Scots I recognise, and point out that this is not derived from Scottish culture but from a marketed idea of Scottish culture – that they have not done the research, that they are not writing of my country and my people thoughtfully and with respect, but stupidly and full of cliches.
Hmmm, what would you say about Dorothy Dunnett’s Scottish settings and characters? Her historical books are only tangentially fantasy (aside from the superhumanly durable hero), but they’re OTT Romance in several ways. She was Scots, and was verifiably a fiend for research on her 15th-century settings elsewhere in Europe. Would her _King Hereafter_ be a worthwhile book on your list?
The first time I read the Lymond chronicles, I think I noticed that the central characters did not speak with a Scottish accent, no matter that one would expect them to. In fact I think I recollect that Will Scott, a central character in the first novel, does not speak with a Scottish accent (though his father, a subsidary character, does) but that by the third novel, Will Scott is a subsidiary character, and now speaks with a Scottish accent. But I may be remembering it wrong, and I can’t say I have any impetutus to go back and re-read.
Dorothy Dunnett’s research is all but impeccable (I do pec’ a bit at Lymond being able to swim the Nor’ Loch in the 15th century: I think he would only be able to squelch it…): it’s not her fault I totally hate Lymond so much.
Somehow, I thought this post was going to be about the way in which the “romantic Highlands” stereotype was largely created by Queen Victoria and her idea of what the Highlands “should” be like.
Well, while Queen Victoria undoubtedly had a massively privileged view of life in the Highlands, and a romantic idea of herself as a “Royal Stuart” (hm, well, she did have a smidgeon of a claim to that), unlike most of the writers of “Scottish fantasy”, she did actually visit the Highlands of Scotland regularly and spend considerable time there.
Seeing the promo at Feministe reminded me that I had starred this on Google Reader earlier and never got around to the comment I had meant to post…namely about how moronic the popular view of the Monolithic Celtic Culture is, here in the US, and how it has, in my experience, about zero relevance to the actuality.
It doesn’t have the racial connotations, but you’re right, it does smack of cultural appropriation. That is, it comes from this overwhelming tendency of white Americans to believe that we (using we to refer to myself as part of said group) have no culture, and exoticize the hell out of everything different because it’s so interesting and meaningful, unlike our banal everyday. And with the Celtic nations it’s prevalent because OMG OUR PEOPLEZ CAME FROM THAR AND WERE OPPRESSED and they’re white people and speak English along with $other-language and are therefore safe.
Add to this the fact that everybody, and that doesn’t just include Americans, has a tendency to visualize and write other cultures in terms of stereotypes, and you have a big fat mess. I subscribed to it; I won’t run from admitting that, or from admitting I still have a lot to work through. Living in Scotland helped, actually, and I think a lot of people could benefit from some time in a foreign country.
I agree with your rec of Halting State–I really enjoyed it and found it refreshing. I just could very well never read another pseudo-Celtic fantasy society again.
Judging by certain characters in Scott’s works who are slaves, like Wamba in Ivanhoe, it seems he may not have liked being glorified by slaveholders.
Scott was as privileged as anyone could be in his society who wasn’t an aristocrat, and who didn’t have a paralyzed leg from a childhood illness (early polio?) and who may have died except his family had the resources of family, economics and all the rest to keep him alive, educated and all the rest during those childhood days — as well as those days providing the writer the materials out of which he was inspired to write his novels.
Still, in his novels, he tried to show the value of reconciliation and letting go of the past. He didn’t seem to value slavery — as again, going by what the slave characters in his novels say.
With all the class and so on issues with Scott, it’s still hard to believe he would have enjoyed being glorified by the Confederacy slave owners.
Love, C.
Constance, I like your point about Scott, and I wish I agreed with it.
You’re right that he treats Wamba–who is certainly a slave–with respect, and allows him to argue against slavery and ultimately escape it–but there are also two _black_ slaves in Ivanhoe who don’t come off that well.
You may not remember them, because they don’t have any lines (except, I think, for threatening grunts in Arabic). They’re the slaves the main villain, the Knight Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert, brought back from the Crusades. And they’re part of his general I’m-wearing-a-black-hat-boo-for-me paraphenalia.
There’s a strong sense that BG has been “corrupted” by his contact with “Eastern” culture–including, hilariously enough, the dark tan he’s gotten in the Middle East. (Cue music for scary brown people!) You could certainly argue that being a slave-owner is part of that, as it fits into the Orientalist idea of the Islamic world being more hierarchical & unjust, etc.
But there’s no sense that Scott recognizes the slaves’ humanity. They loom menacingly and threaten Isaac with torture and generally take a page from the anti-black racism playbook of the 19th century–the “savage” without the “noble” bit. It’s very much in line with Islamophobic ideas current at the time (and, sadly, now). BG is a complicated and ambiguous and maybe even redeemed villain, but his henchmen don’t get to be.
Scott was roundly criticized for including black characters at all, which his contemporaries thought was an anachronism (admittedly one of many). I’m not so sure about that (Old Irish wouldn’t have a word for sub-Saharan Africans if there hadn’t been a need for it, and we now know a lot more about Africans in Iberia and Sicily, and the trans-Mediterranean slave trade, which started early).
But I’m also not sure that Scott would have made the connection between Anglo-Saxon slavery and slavery in the Southern US. He might have–but his racism might also have gotten in the way.
I think about the way Scott treats Isaac. There’s no doubt that the novel condemns the vicious anti-Semitism of many of its characters, but the portrait of Isaac also reinforces anti-Jewish stereotypes (as money-grubbing, cowardly, etc.).
So I’m less sanguine about how Scott would have responded to his Confederate fans. I think, like many things in the novel, it’s ambiguous–which is a shame, as I enjoy the novel a great deal while also being disturbed by it. There’s probably a lot still to say, however, about how Confederate readers misread the book.
Thank you for the interesting post, Zahara! You’re right about the voicelessness — stage props condition of the villain’s slaves who are given the job of torturing Isaac.
And, of course, how early slaves were imported from Africa to the Iberian Peninsula (there were already sugar plantations worked with African slaves in Portugal and Spain by the time Columbus sailed on his first western voyage). Slavery of every kind persisted all around the Mediterranean rim, for that matter, long after the rest of Europe gave up the condition — until the African Atlantic trade began again to bring labor to the New World.
As for Scott’s attitude though, about slavery as it existed in the New World — he was against it. He was active in groups that agitated for the end of Britain’s slave trade and that of the U.S. as well, as can bee seen, for instance in Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery, 1756-1838, published by the Univ. Edinburgh Press.
If you don’t have access to JSTOR etc., you can see some of this work here.
An interesting aside regarding Scott and slavery in the U.S.: Frederick Douglas — who also had a fair amount of influence on President Lincoln — escaped from slavery in 1838 and took the last name of Douglass from Sir Walter Scott’s hero in “The Lady of the Lake”. See here.
Love, C.
On a previous topic, I have always hated Lymond, which was terribly embarrassing, as I was loaned the Lymond Chronicles by Someone I Should Not Name — but I hated him and the books.
Weirdly, last week I finally read the first Lymond volume, Game of Kings from beginning to end — I have never been able to get through it before, ever, no matter how often I tried because of She Who I Should Not Name, and the terrible, and yes, I will now proclaim it, pernicious influence on her work of Lymond — and I still hate him.
Except I am impressed by the descriptive power of the places in which the characters make passage in the course of the narrative.
Love, C.
Constance–Thanks for some fascinating information! I didn’t know about the sugar slave plantations in Iberia (and I’m working on a project about slavery in Muslim al-Andalus)! And also the details about Douglass, and Scott’s abolitionist work! Thanks much!
Zahara — Thank you! Glad this was useful. We’ve been working in these areas for many years now; sharing the information is the point, after all.
If you don’t read Spanish (there isn’t anything else like this in English), you might like looking at the first chapters of Cuba And Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo. They deal with early Iberia — well, Africa and the Phoenicians, as well as the Islamic era. It takes a while before we go to Cuba. Music is the forensics for so much history.
Love, C.