ABSTRACT
The presentation of Ireland as a female nation, suffering under the domestic abuse of English rule, has been at the heart of an iconography of representation of great imaginative power for several hundred years. The personification of Scotland as female mutates, as in Ireland, from Gaelic to Anglophone use: indeed, the extent to which the Anglophone literary imagination of Scotland is indebted to Gaelic is still underestimated. The group of songs titled 'The Blackbird' are perhaps those whose symbolic reach into the tradition is widest. 'Blackbirds' became more broadly not only the exiled monarchs, but also those who plotted to restore them. A language of usurpation and exploitation, which frequently adopted the female voice, had been suppressed throughout the eighteenth century by the masculinized unionist Protestantism which both Barrie and Buchan evoke. This conflict was resolved at an imaginative level by the twin closures of sentiment and nostalgia, which characterize Scottish Romanticism.
