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...

Although portrayed as the 'boozing buffoon' of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Hogg (both as the celebrated Ettrick Shepherd and anonymously) was a key contributor of songs, narrative poems, tales and reviews to the liveliest of all early nineteenth-century periodicals. The present volume includes several items hitherto published only in Blackwood's, and ranges from the infamous 'Chaldee Manuscript' to newly-identified items such as a Scottish commemoration of the coronation of George IV. The volume also includes works Hogg intended for Blackwood's but which are now published for the first...

This volume provides access to the relevant material in the various musical collections to which Hogg refers in his 1831 head notes, thus allowing twenty-first century readers to see in facsimile what Hogg himself saw. This procedure provides a broader context - in literary and musical terms - in which to enhance our understanding of the reception of Hogg's songs during his lifetime.