The Famous Ballads of Anna Gordon, Mrs. Brown (Book Chapter)

Abstract

When one thinks of the Scottish enlightenment, one imagines men striding up the craggy peak adjoining Holyrood Park in Edinburgh, arguing and gesticulating, or reading one another‟s works by candle light, or sitting over whiskey or beer in largely male company. But there were, of course, women who participated in the intellectual ferment of that period. Among other things, women were an important part of the traditional song culture that interested Scottish intellectuals as the antiquarian remains of a precious national culture. Indeed, as Burns and Scott knew, women were often crucial in transmitting and preserving this stream of Scotland‟s literary history. Thus while learned written and printed investigations were pouring forth from the four universities of Scotland, with reverberations all over the western world, Scottish scholars and philosophers were eagerly collecting and sharing whatever records they could find of a traditional culture that was essentially oral and popular and carried forward largely by working people and occasionally by their own mothers and aunts. This is the story of the most famous of these women, Anna Gordon, whose repertoire of ballads was the first ever to be tapped and written down by antiquarians and literary scholars, at a time when scholars feared that the oral tradition was in danger of disappearing forever.