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Crossing "Dark Barriers": Intertextuality and Dialogue between Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott

2008; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

2330-118X

Susan Oliver,

Travel Writing and Literature

Crossing “Dark Barriers”: intertextuality and dialogue between Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. This essay discusses intertextual references as a form of poetic dialogue between Lord Byron and Walter Scott. Byron’s poetic relationships with Scotland and Scott are evident from the beginning of his career. “Elegy on Newstead Abbey,” (Hours of Idleness, 1807), has an epigraph from Ossian. In the same collection, “The Death of Calmar and Orla: an Imitation of Macpherson’s Ossian,” is a “northernized” prose version of the episode concerning Nisus and Euryalus from Virgil’s Aeneid. Byron’s affection for the “wild” parts of Scotland’s Highland interior are emphasized in “Lachin Y Gair,” a poem celebrating the Highland regions that he visited with his mother when he was a boy and where his maternal ancestors (so the poem proclaimed) lived and died in the course of Scottish history. The details of locations, topographical features and a guide to pronunciation contained in a brief introductory note establish a literary relationship between Byron and Scott. Subsequently, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (particularly cantos 1 and 2, 1812), the Eastern Tales, The Island (1823) and parts of Don Juan incorporate various reflections on Scotland and on Scott’s poetry. Scott, in the meantime, orientalized the Scottish Highlands. In setting the scene for his narrative in The Lady of the Lake (1810), he surveys the view of the Grampian Mountains from the Highland margins of the Trossachs. Scott instigates a chain of association in his reader through architectural and cultural metaphors, as his narrator describes a landscape seemingly set with cupolas, minarets and pagodas. Byron reciprocated, employing a simile likening Ali Pasha’s Tepaleen palace to Branksome, a Baronial Castle that featured in Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805). Amongst the figurations considered in this essay are the return to Britain and laundering of outlaw “otherness” in Scott’s Rokeby (1813), and the perplexing, secretive “strangeness” of the communications between Europe and the East in Byron’s Lara (1814). A consideration of Byron’s use of Hebridean and Polynesian motifs in The Island leads into an exploration of his engagement with Scott in Don Juan, Scott’s acknowledgment in his journal of Byron’s example, and some brief comments on Byron’s quotations from Scott in his correspondence.