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If you finish Scott's The Lady of the Lake* and are left wanting something more in that line, only without those constantly tumbling octosyllabic couplets, then I have the thing for you: Mador of the Moor**** by James Hogg, which combines many of the same plot points, a slightly racier story-line, and Spenserian stanzas handled with surprising energy and grace. At least, they have energy once the story gets going for reals -- there's a couple false starts in the opening canto, some of them occasioned by Ye Obligatory Descriptive Passages of Scottish landscape.*** Which are very pretty, to be sure, but do gum up the plotworks.
But once the story engine gets going, we get a nice Highland yarn about the massacre of the king's hunting party (apparently by vengeful fairies, though Hogg is deliberately obscure here), a cantankerous minstrel, and a determined young woman in search of her missing babydaddy. Yes, medieval setting, not contemporary -- you don't think he could get away with those elements in 1816, do you?
I can't say this is as good as The Lady of the Lake, a rather high bar, but it certainly isn't bad -- better, certainly, than Gertrude of Wyoming. And I want to track down more Hogg -- his "Kilmeny" was interesting enough,** and it sounds like some of his other longer works are excellently weird.
* It makes me sad that more people haven't done so -- good short-novel-length narrative poetry is worth the while, and this is Walter "Narrative Drive" Scott at his best.
** Now mostly forgotten by anthologists, this was once a recitation standard. The story of what happens to those who return from Faeryland is not a new topic.
*** These seem to have been a sort of contractual requirement for publication in Scotland. See also Poems of Places volumes 6-8.
**** I've no idea how to one-up this with alliteration on N -- "Nevin of the Ness," maybe?
ETA: To get to the other cantos, click Indexes.
---L.
Subject quote from Mador of the Moor, James "the Ettrick Shepherd" Hogg.
But once the story engine gets going, we get a nice Highland yarn about the massacre of the king's hunting party (apparently by vengeful fairies, though Hogg is deliberately obscure here), a cantankerous minstrel, and a determined young woman in search of her missing babydaddy. Yes, medieval setting, not contemporary -- you don't think he could get away with those elements in 1816, do you?
I can't say this is as good as The Lady of the Lake, a rather high bar, but it certainly isn't bad -- better, certainly, than Gertrude of Wyoming. And I want to track down more Hogg -- his "Kilmeny" was interesting enough,** and it sounds like some of his other longer works are excellently weird.
* It makes me sad that more people haven't done so -- good short-novel-length narrative poetry is worth the while, and this is Walter "Narrative Drive" Scott at his best.
** Now mostly forgotten by anthologists, this was once a recitation standard. The story of what happens to those who return from Faeryland is not a new topic.
*** These seem to have been a sort of contractual requirement for publication in Scotland. See also Poems of Places volumes 6-8.
**** I've no idea how to one-up this with alliteration on N -- "Nevin of the Ness," maybe?
ETA: To get to the other cantos, click Indexes.
---L.
Subject quote from Mador of the Moor, James "the Ettrick Shepherd" Hogg.