ABSTRACT

James Hogg completed two major texts during 1824: his novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which was published in June of that year, and his epic poem Queen Hynde. Hogg had a strong emotional investment in Queen Hynde, and valued it highly. In asserting that it was ‘the best epic poem that ever had been produced in Scotland’, he was by implication setting it up as a rival to James Macpherson’s celebrated Ossian poems, Fingal and Temora, for recognition as Scotland’s national epic. In marked contrast, Queen Hynde sets out to offer scotland a different kind of national epic. The passage echoes lines from the traditional ballad ‘Erlinton’, and as it happens the A-version of ‘Erlinton’ in Francis James Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads is derived from Hogg. Many Scottish Presbyterians of the era of Burns and Hogg were like founding fathers of the American Revolution, in that they held various truths to be self-evident.