Submitting.
Experts at the university’s Walter Scott Research Centre now aim to return his poetry to a form that more closely reflects the writer’s original intentions and include his long notes on characters, time and place for context for the reader.
Sir Walter Scott - his notoriously-spidery handwriting and the speed at which some of his poems were published led to mistakes being written into printed versions of the works. PIC:
The project will be led by Professor Alison Lumsden, who has developed expertise in reading Scott’s handwriting through her work in creating the Edinburgh Editions of his novels.
The poetry of Sir Walter Scott will be brought to new audiences through a £1 million research project to help preserve his legacy.
Researchers at the University of Aberdeen have been awarded funding by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), to revisit the author’s original manuscripts and create a new edition of his poems.
While his novels, which include Waverley, Ivanhoe and Rob Roy, have never been out of print there are very few editions of his poetry.
Those that exist are blighted by errors due to a combination of the writer’s notoriously spidery handwriting and the speed of the publishing process which was driven by the demand for his work in his day.