What do you think?
Rate this book
Scottish Journey
First published in 1935, Scottish Journey is a perceptive, subtle, and beautifully written account by one of Scotland's greatest modern writers of prose and poetry. Edwin Muir's journey took him from Edinburgh to the Lowlands, to Glasgow and the Highlands, and the book, while a masterpiece of travel writing, is also a quest for the real nature of Scottish identity.
250 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1935
3 people are currently reading
86 people want to read
About the author
Edwin Muir
142 books31 followersEdwin Muir, Orcadian poet, novelist and translator noted, together with his wife Willa Anderson, for making Franz Kafka available in English.
Between 1921 and 1923, Muir lived in Prague, Dresden, Italy, Salzburg and Vienna; he returned to the UK in 1924. Between 1925 and 1956, Muir published seven volumes of poetry which were collected after his death and published in 1991 as The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir. From 1927 to 1932 he published three novels, and in 1935 he came to St Andrews, where he produced his controversial Scott and Scotland (1936).
Between 1921 and 1923, Muir lived in Prague, Dresden, Italy, Salzburg and Vienna; he returned to the UK in 1924. Between 1925 and 1956, Muir published seven volumes of poetry which were collected after his death and published in 1991 as The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir. From 1927 to 1932 he published three novels, and in 1935 he came to St Andrews, where he produced his controversial Scott and Scotland (1936).
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
August 3, 2023
While this is a travel journey around Scotland, it is much more. The book was written in 1935, about six months after the two-week journey described in the book. Being nearly 90 years ago now, one may look at this book as a historical look at Scotland rather than a travel book. And it is still more than that.
The frame of the book is Edwin Muir driving around the country for two weeks in an older car, and since these are early automobile days, of course it gave him trouble along the way. Instead of our typical travel descriptions, while sometimes is there, particularly when he reached the Highlands, he writes about the character of the people.
Such as in Edinburgh the people want to look at each other so take to walking about, although depending on class only walk in certain areas, “they turn back when they reach this invisible barrier”. The prostitutes are the only ones crossing these “barriers” with any ease and regularity.
In Glasgow Muir describes the slums and how industrialism has ruined the town and the countryside since many people moved for the jobs which now are nonexistent. There was a depression going on, shipbuilding he says is past its peak, unless another war breaks out (which it does, but he doesn’t know that).
Muir has lengthy passages of a political nature on several occasions. There’s quite a bit about Scottish people starving and suffering on unemployment. Every now and then he addresses the question of Independence and has some concluding thoughts in the last part of the book, which basically comes down to the question of economics.
Overall Muir provides a bleak look at Scotland, and perhaps it was at that time. I expect most of the world looked bleak as well. Although, certainly London, or England overall, was doing much better in comparison.
I found it curious that in the chapter titled Conclusion he states that one cannot know Scotland, even saying about his travels, “I could not find anything which I could call Scotland”. Muir himself is Scottish, first living in the Orkney Islands, then in Glasgow and elsewhere, although at that time was living in England. Curious.
The frame of the book is Edwin Muir driving around the country for two weeks in an older car, and since these are early automobile days, of course it gave him trouble along the way. Instead of our typical travel descriptions, while sometimes is there, particularly when he reached the Highlands, he writes about the character of the people.
Such as in Edinburgh the people want to look at each other so take to walking about, although depending on class only walk in certain areas, “they turn back when they reach this invisible barrier”. The prostitutes are the only ones crossing these “barriers” with any ease and regularity.
In Glasgow Muir describes the slums and how industrialism has ruined the town and the countryside since many people moved for the jobs which now are nonexistent. There was a depression going on, shipbuilding he says is past its peak, unless another war breaks out (which it does, but he doesn’t know that).
Muir has lengthy passages of a political nature on several occasions. There’s quite a bit about Scottish people starving and suffering on unemployment. Every now and then he addresses the question of Independence and has some concluding thoughts in the last part of the book, which basically comes down to the question of economics.
Overall Muir provides a bleak look at Scotland, and perhaps it was at that time. I expect most of the world looked bleak as well. Although, certainly London, or England overall, was doing much better in comparison.
I found it curious that in the chapter titled Conclusion he states that one cannot know Scotland, even saying about his travels, “I could not find anything which I could call Scotland”. Muir himself is Scottish, first living in the Orkney Islands, then in Glasgow and elsewhere, although at that time was living in England. Curious.
May 29, 2021
I wrote the following as part of a blog about my travels:
There’s a passage in Edwin Muir’s Scottish Journey which seems to get right to the nub of one important fact about travel writing, namely that it’s essentially biased, but what comes out on the page has a veneer of reportage – partiality dressed up as impartiality. Muir finds the contrast pleasantly odd. I’ll quote it in full:
“During all my way from Edinburgh my mind had been slightly but pleasantly troubled in the evening, but especially at bedtime, by a sort of illusion, partly optical and partly temporal, which must be known to everyone who covers a good stretch of country in an open car. The place I started from in the morning seemed suddenly to have dropped an immeasurable distance behind and to be almost in a different world. All impressions of the day, all the landscapes that had followed so fast on one another, seemed to have built up an impregnable barrier between me and the place where that morning I had eaten quite an ordinary breakfast, and to have clothed it in the atmosphere of landscapes seen many years before. Yet at the same time I could see myself starting the car from that very place ten hours ago; indeed, I could almost feel it, as if my muscles remembered. This double sensation of time was confusing and yet pleasant. and evoked in my imagination an unusually vivid sense of the simultaneity of the many lives and downs and landscapes scattered over the world, the countless human and animal and material things co-existing there contemporaneously in a thousand forms, unaware of the life beyond their horizons, and yet following the same laws as it. From this indistinct and yet vivid image I tried to extract a picture of Scotland as an entity, but I did not succeed…”
Anyone who travels by bike, too, will surely know that feeling of last night’s camp feeling like another world. Muir uses this to make a specific point about a sort of internal confusion in the Scottish “spirit” that defies explanation (beyond the quite beautifully tautologous conclusion that “the Scotland of the present day must be the inevitable result of the Scottish spirit, and its sole extant expression”). But there’s a more interesting general truth here, that most writing about individual experience, especially travel, is an imaginative effort, dressed up as documentary. It’s the piece of insight which, I think, pulls this work up being the judgemental scrawlings of a member of the Scottish literary elite or a screed on the miseries of industrial capitalism – though it is both of these things, and Muir’s contrasts between the (always male) hardy Highlander and the “ruthless…essential quality of the Clyde workman” read as poorly as colonial ethnographies. But it’s an insight that lets him off the hook. Ultimately, it’s a text which describes the poetical imagination of Edwin Muir, through the lens of the places he’s been, and not the other way round.
I’ve more to say about Scottish Journey, but here’s a good stopping off point if this feels a little indulgent. The short version is that I don’t know how to write about a journey, and this gives me both some stylistic pointers and moral disclaimers for when, as Muir does, I write off a series of “bloated and scabbed villages”. The impact and the mode of expression is more interesting than the insight, and that the insight is more about the writer than the object. You can pity the fool, as long as he’s interesting.
I’ll get into the guts, if you’ll stay with me. Broadly, Scottish Journey does exactly what it says on the tin. Already established as a translator and poet, Muir was commissioned to write this travelogue on Scotland by a London publisher. So, setting out from Edinburgh in 1933, he headed South through the small towns of the Borders and Ayrshire, and then back north to Glasgow. Approaching the Highlands through Argyll, and the depressed mining towns of Lanarkshire, he made Perthshire, then Inverness, at which point (unbenownst to him) he basically picked up the NC500 through Ullapool, Lochinver, Durness, across the North coast to Scrabster where he took the ferry to Orkney to recuperate and write. He roughly creates a metaphorical triangle, with corners at Edinburgh (Scotland’s bourgeois, urbane centre, previously and artistic powerhouse but now a Scott-themed aesthetic graveyard), Glasgow (the nexus of inhumane industrialisation, where he reads the excesses of capitalism on every face), and Orkney (the Eden of Muir’s childhood, where a cooperative mode of life and expression, in relative harmony with the natural world, is more-or-less a vision of Muir’s Socialism). Everything else in between seems a combination of, or some variation on, these prototypical societies.
Stylistically, there’s a lot to note here. One of the difficulties that’s become particularly apparent as I fumble in blog writing – that is, writing that is essentially about oneself – is that it’s hard not to make not entirely boringly, mawkishly, introspective: “I wonder if…”, “I thought that…”, “I felt as if”. Yuck! Here’s Muir navigating those pitfalls:
“Climbing out of [the valley] by a steep road, I suddenly found myself in a landscape quite different from any that I had seen till now. It is quite difficult to give any impression of that beautiful and almost quite solitary stretch of moorland… For about twenty miles I can remember seeing only two houses… The thin air was sweetened by a thousand scents rising into it from every tuft in these miles of moorland, mingling as they rose so that one seemed to be breathing in the landscape itself, drinking it in with all one’s senses except that of hearing which was magically stilled. The silence of such places is so complete that it sinks into one’s mind in waves, making it clearer and clearer, drenching it in some positive life-giving essence, not out of the mere absence of sound. In that silence the moor was a living thing spreading its fleece of purple and brown and green to the sun. As I sat in the heather, breathing in the perfume, it seemed to me that I could feel new potentialities of nature working in this scene, secrets that I had never know or else had quite forgotten: perhaps they were merely memories of childhood… There was not one contour, one variation which did not suggest peace and gladness; and the loneliness and silence surrounding the moor were like a double dream enclosing it and making it safe, one might have thought, for ever.”
Tense, in particular, does a lot of work here. He starts by journaling the actual event (past tense); he then describes his recollections (present tense, “I can remember”); then back to past tense in describing his sensation (“the thin air was sweetened”) before making a present tense general observation on the quality of the silence (“the silence of such places is…”). This present observation is used to support an interpretation of the experience (“that silence was…”), an epiphany about the experience of that beautiful and comforting desolation. But even as described in the past tense there’s some distancing going on: “it seemed to me that I could feel”. I’m reminded here of Wordsworth’s formulation of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquility, which feels a bit trite but fits with the stylistic approach here. In short, Muir doesn’t attempt to give the impression of having spontaneous and fully formed thoughts on what he experiences. That would, of course, be silly.
There’s also a lot in here on nature writing, a form of prose which has a good-going industry right now, but which has moved little on from Nan Shepherd’s classic The Living Mountain. I’ll say very little on mountains “looming” and rivers “breathing” other than that I find Robert McFarlane challenging. But that’s not to dismiss the importance of writing interestingly about the natural world, and Muir, I think, has this down pat when he notes that “natural description, though a pleasant art, has something of make-believe in it; it pretends to reproduce a scene or a locality, but really expresses the writer’s emotions.” The same goes for weather (very likely to feature on this site), which “does not merely change the aspect of nature, but also determines the mood in which we contemplate it.” It seems obvious when expressed so clearly, and sheds light on some of what I find daft about some contemporary nature writing. So, when Robert McFarlane writes of a mountain “thickly armoured in ice”, he mistakes his impression that the mountain has taken up a defensive position with the idea that it has some facility for doing so. This feels intuitively like a cheap shorthand, and Muir puts his finger on why.
But style can be studied and, to an extent, copied. Alas, creativity can’t and, really, it’s Muir’s imagination which I’m most taken with in these pages. Here he is describing the “untidy, draggled appearance of most small Scottish towns of a respectable age”: “the look of an old crone of settled habit who morosely snuffs and smokes by the chimney-corner”. Any two-bit writer (e.g. me) might have hit on the image of an old lady, better ones would have reached “crone”. I think it’s the “settled habit” which makes this pop. In fact, he has a knack for refocussing the ordinary. Writing about the Paps of Jura, I know of no writer who would risk going in hard on the obvious fact of why they are called the paps. But Muir lets his imagination go where it takes him: “they are like the magnificent breasts of some giantess lying outstretched on the ocean bed”. I like how he takes the obvious, but extends it to imagine its connection to the whole (the land to the seabed; the paps to the sleeping giantess). The guy was, primarily, a poet after all. I’m not, so perhaps more instructive is his alertness to the limits of his imagination. Visiting Bannockburn, for instance, now a public park in Stirling, Muir struggles to imagine a battle being fought, partly because battle creates nothing, but partly because “I have no vestige of what is called the military imagination”.
I could go on. There’s plenty of blind spots, too. Muir often makes sweeping judgements, and then runs and hides behind statements like “I merely note this: it would be foolish to lament a change that is inevitable”. But he shows enough insight into his own partiality that I think he not only gets away with it, but it’s an essential proof of the particular pudding he’s making. And there’s some quite funny judgements made. “Determined to commune with nature in his leisure,” he writes of the newly leisured suburban class, “he had finally no choice but to create a huge town in which to do it with comfort.” Come on. That’s pure sass.
Finally, I’m just delighted that Muir took time to write about the place I live, and which I’ll soon be leaving for a time. When he writes about driving in the darkness along the Beauly Firth, it’s recognisably my home. His prose bounces off a solid mass of my own memories, built of hundreds of hours cycling back and forth alongside that inlet. To those memories I now have the addition of Muir’s just delightful impression:
“The houses and the fields at the opposite side of the straight had the peculiar teasing intimacy of things which are both near and inaccessible, reawakening in my mind one of the most persistent illusions of childhood: that everything can be easily reached, no matter what obstacles may lie between one and it. In the wet light the near bank, the far one and the Firth itself seemed to flow past with the transparent motion of water.”
I really do hope the illusion is a persistent one. I might never set off otherwise.
There’s a passage in Edwin Muir’s Scottish Journey which seems to get right to the nub of one important fact about travel writing, namely that it’s essentially biased, but what comes out on the page has a veneer of reportage – partiality dressed up as impartiality. Muir finds the contrast pleasantly odd. I’ll quote it in full:
“During all my way from Edinburgh my mind had been slightly but pleasantly troubled in the evening, but especially at bedtime, by a sort of illusion, partly optical and partly temporal, which must be known to everyone who covers a good stretch of country in an open car. The place I started from in the morning seemed suddenly to have dropped an immeasurable distance behind and to be almost in a different world. All impressions of the day, all the landscapes that had followed so fast on one another, seemed to have built up an impregnable barrier between me and the place where that morning I had eaten quite an ordinary breakfast, and to have clothed it in the atmosphere of landscapes seen many years before. Yet at the same time I could see myself starting the car from that very place ten hours ago; indeed, I could almost feel it, as if my muscles remembered. This double sensation of time was confusing and yet pleasant. and evoked in my imagination an unusually vivid sense of the simultaneity of the many lives and downs and landscapes scattered over the world, the countless human and animal and material things co-existing there contemporaneously in a thousand forms, unaware of the life beyond their horizons, and yet following the same laws as it. From this indistinct and yet vivid image I tried to extract a picture of Scotland as an entity, but I did not succeed…”
Anyone who travels by bike, too, will surely know that feeling of last night’s camp feeling like another world. Muir uses this to make a specific point about a sort of internal confusion in the Scottish “spirit” that defies explanation (beyond the quite beautifully tautologous conclusion that “the Scotland of the present day must be the inevitable result of the Scottish spirit, and its sole extant expression”). But there’s a more interesting general truth here, that most writing about individual experience, especially travel, is an imaginative effort, dressed up as documentary. It’s the piece of insight which, I think, pulls this work up being the judgemental scrawlings of a member of the Scottish literary elite or a screed on the miseries of industrial capitalism – though it is both of these things, and Muir’s contrasts between the (always male) hardy Highlander and the “ruthless…essential quality of the Clyde workman” read as poorly as colonial ethnographies. But it’s an insight that lets him off the hook. Ultimately, it’s a text which describes the poetical imagination of Edwin Muir, through the lens of the places he’s been, and not the other way round.
I’ve more to say about Scottish Journey, but here’s a good stopping off point if this feels a little indulgent. The short version is that I don’t know how to write about a journey, and this gives me both some stylistic pointers and moral disclaimers for when, as Muir does, I write off a series of “bloated and scabbed villages”. The impact and the mode of expression is more interesting than the insight, and that the insight is more about the writer than the object. You can pity the fool, as long as he’s interesting.
I’ll get into the guts, if you’ll stay with me. Broadly, Scottish Journey does exactly what it says on the tin. Already established as a translator and poet, Muir was commissioned to write this travelogue on Scotland by a London publisher. So, setting out from Edinburgh in 1933, he headed South through the small towns of the Borders and Ayrshire, and then back north to Glasgow. Approaching the Highlands through Argyll, and the depressed mining towns of Lanarkshire, he made Perthshire, then Inverness, at which point (unbenownst to him) he basically picked up the NC500 through Ullapool, Lochinver, Durness, across the North coast to Scrabster where he took the ferry to Orkney to recuperate and write. He roughly creates a metaphorical triangle, with corners at Edinburgh (Scotland’s bourgeois, urbane centre, previously and artistic powerhouse but now a Scott-themed aesthetic graveyard), Glasgow (the nexus of inhumane industrialisation, where he reads the excesses of capitalism on every face), and Orkney (the Eden of Muir’s childhood, where a cooperative mode of life and expression, in relative harmony with the natural world, is more-or-less a vision of Muir’s Socialism). Everything else in between seems a combination of, or some variation on, these prototypical societies.
Stylistically, there’s a lot to note here. One of the difficulties that’s become particularly apparent as I fumble in blog writing – that is, writing that is essentially about oneself – is that it’s hard not to make not entirely boringly, mawkishly, introspective: “I wonder if…”, “I thought that…”, “I felt as if”. Yuck! Here’s Muir navigating those pitfalls:
“Climbing out of [the valley] by a steep road, I suddenly found myself in a landscape quite different from any that I had seen till now. It is quite difficult to give any impression of that beautiful and almost quite solitary stretch of moorland… For about twenty miles I can remember seeing only two houses… The thin air was sweetened by a thousand scents rising into it from every tuft in these miles of moorland, mingling as they rose so that one seemed to be breathing in the landscape itself, drinking it in with all one’s senses except that of hearing which was magically stilled. The silence of such places is so complete that it sinks into one’s mind in waves, making it clearer and clearer, drenching it in some positive life-giving essence, not out of the mere absence of sound. In that silence the moor was a living thing spreading its fleece of purple and brown and green to the sun. As I sat in the heather, breathing in the perfume, it seemed to me that I could feel new potentialities of nature working in this scene, secrets that I had never know or else had quite forgotten: perhaps they were merely memories of childhood… There was not one contour, one variation which did not suggest peace and gladness; and the loneliness and silence surrounding the moor were like a double dream enclosing it and making it safe, one might have thought, for ever.”
Tense, in particular, does a lot of work here. He starts by journaling the actual event (past tense); he then describes his recollections (present tense, “I can remember”); then back to past tense in describing his sensation (“the thin air was sweetened”) before making a present tense general observation on the quality of the silence (“the silence of such places is…”). This present observation is used to support an interpretation of the experience (“that silence was…”), an epiphany about the experience of that beautiful and comforting desolation. But even as described in the past tense there’s some distancing going on: “it seemed to me that I could feel”. I’m reminded here of Wordsworth’s formulation of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquility, which feels a bit trite but fits with the stylistic approach here. In short, Muir doesn’t attempt to give the impression of having spontaneous and fully formed thoughts on what he experiences. That would, of course, be silly.
There’s also a lot in here on nature writing, a form of prose which has a good-going industry right now, but which has moved little on from Nan Shepherd’s classic The Living Mountain. I’ll say very little on mountains “looming” and rivers “breathing” other than that I find Robert McFarlane challenging. But that’s not to dismiss the importance of writing interestingly about the natural world, and Muir, I think, has this down pat when he notes that “natural description, though a pleasant art, has something of make-believe in it; it pretends to reproduce a scene or a locality, but really expresses the writer’s emotions.” The same goes for weather (very likely to feature on this site), which “does not merely change the aspect of nature, but also determines the mood in which we contemplate it.” It seems obvious when expressed so clearly, and sheds light on some of what I find daft about some contemporary nature writing. So, when Robert McFarlane writes of a mountain “thickly armoured in ice”, he mistakes his impression that the mountain has taken up a defensive position with the idea that it has some facility for doing so. This feels intuitively like a cheap shorthand, and Muir puts his finger on why.
But style can be studied and, to an extent, copied. Alas, creativity can’t and, really, it’s Muir’s imagination which I’m most taken with in these pages. Here he is describing the “untidy, draggled appearance of most small Scottish towns of a respectable age”: “the look of an old crone of settled habit who morosely snuffs and smokes by the chimney-corner”. Any two-bit writer (e.g. me) might have hit on the image of an old lady, better ones would have reached “crone”. I think it’s the “settled habit” which makes this pop. In fact, he has a knack for refocussing the ordinary. Writing about the Paps of Jura, I know of no writer who would risk going in hard on the obvious fact of why they are called the paps. But Muir lets his imagination go where it takes him: “they are like the magnificent breasts of some giantess lying outstretched on the ocean bed”. I like how he takes the obvious, but extends it to imagine its connection to the whole (the land to the seabed; the paps to the sleeping giantess). The guy was, primarily, a poet after all. I’m not, so perhaps more instructive is his alertness to the limits of his imagination. Visiting Bannockburn, for instance, now a public park in Stirling, Muir struggles to imagine a battle being fought, partly because battle creates nothing, but partly because “I have no vestige of what is called the military imagination”.
I could go on. There’s plenty of blind spots, too. Muir often makes sweeping judgements, and then runs and hides behind statements like “I merely note this: it would be foolish to lament a change that is inevitable”. But he shows enough insight into his own partiality that I think he not only gets away with it, but it’s an essential proof of the particular pudding he’s making. And there’s some quite funny judgements made. “Determined to commune with nature in his leisure,” he writes of the newly leisured suburban class, “he had finally no choice but to create a huge town in which to do it with comfort.” Come on. That’s pure sass.
Finally, I’m just delighted that Muir took time to write about the place I live, and which I’ll soon be leaving for a time. When he writes about driving in the darkness along the Beauly Firth, it’s recognisably my home. His prose bounces off a solid mass of my own memories, built of hundreds of hours cycling back and forth alongside that inlet. To those memories I now have the addition of Muir’s just delightful impression:
“The houses and the fields at the opposite side of the straight had the peculiar teasing intimacy of things which are both near and inaccessible, reawakening in my mind one of the most persistent illusions of childhood: that everything can be easily reached, no matter what obstacles may lie between one and it. In the wet light the near bank, the far one and the Firth itself seemed to flow past with the transparent motion of water.”
I really do hope the illusion is a persistent one. I might never set off otherwise.
July 16, 2016
A gem of a book that takes you around a Scotland reeling from the blows of the great depression in the company of someone worth listening to. A companion piece to JB Priestley' English Journey and a worthy one. Like Priestley he deliberately travels to parts of the country that tell different stories, that have suffered differently in the economic turmoil of the times. Muir has been criticised for waxing political as he wanders among Glasgow Slums or talks of farm labourers' struggles under surf like conditions; their wives dying in childbirth to avoid the cost of a doctor or refusing to take time off to become ill because they know it will cost a livelihood; in the end it costs a life. How can a sensitive and caring man wax anything other than political? Priestley certainly does as he visits Tyneside.
Here is a proud Scot who doesn't care for the cult of Burns and Scott (though he admires both as writers). A man who resents the wrongs done to his countrymen, who is happy to point out the good when he comes across it...and he comes across plenty... and who sees a great need for change (and who sees hope in that need).
I have written my own notes to a tour of Scotland where I cover much of the same ground geographically. Reading Muir has been a most enjoyable experience and one that has shown me just how far short I am in any aspiration to being a travel writer.
Oh, and the prose is as beautiful as you'd expect from a true poet.
Here is a proud Scot who doesn't care for the cult of Burns and Scott (though he admires both as writers). A man who resents the wrongs done to his countrymen, who is happy to point out the good when he comes across it...and he comes across plenty... and who sees a great need for change (and who sees hope in that need).
I have written my own notes to a tour of Scotland where I cover much of the same ground geographically. Reading Muir has been a most enjoyable experience and one that has shown me just how far short I am in any aspiration to being a travel writer.
Oh, and the prose is as beautiful as you'd expect from a true poet.
May 24, 2008
One of the most undiscovered books I have ever found. A gem by a gem of a writer. History as imagination, a distilled personal drenching of his (then) contemporary Scotland. There are passges here which could be pasted on to just about anything important in UK/Scotland in 2008. It is also a very lovely book by a lovely man.
October 3, 2014
Apart from the first chapter (Edinburgh, which is rather political) well worth reading - a very interesting (& in places, humorous) perspective on Scotland, both historically and in 1935, some of which is still definitely relevant today......
October 3, 2025
Gleich am Anfang stellt Edwin Muir klar, dass er keinen Reisebericht schreiben will. Es geht ihim nicht (nur) um die Landschaft, sondern hauptsächlich um die Menschen, denen er begegnet. Das wird auf seiner ersten Station, den Lowlands klar.
Lowlands
Das erste Wort, das mir eingefallen ist war "traurig". Muir beschreibt das Dorf, durch das er gerade reist als einen Ort, an dem "die Zeit an einem Sonntag stehen geblieben ist". Es ist schön anzusehen, aber auch nicht mehr zeitgemäß. Die Menschen haben die kleinen Orte verlassen und sind in die Städte gezogen, wo es ein Auskommen gibt. Er schreibt von den zweiten Clearances, nur dass diesmal nicht der Gutsherren, sondern die Umstände die Menschen vertreiben.
Von den Lowlands geht es nach Edinburgh. Dem Autor fällt auf dass sich die Leute sehr bemühen, englisch (oder besser: nicht-schottisch) zu wirken. Man gibt sich weltmännisch und wirkt dadurch eher lächerlich als dass man den gewünschten Effekt erzielt. Muirs letzter Besuch in Edinburgh vor diesem lag einige Zeit zurück. Die Entwicklung gefällt ihm nicht. Alles wirkt größer, lauter und moderner auf ihn.
Wenn ich bis jetzt seine mit meinen Eindrücken vergleiche, sehe ich viele Gemeinsamkeiten. In manchen kleinen Orten scheint die Zeit wirklich still zu stehen, auch wenn es da in den letzten Jahren teilweise deutliche Entwicklungen gab. Aber gerade das macht den Unterschied zu den Plätzen, in denen sich nichts getan hat noch deutlicher. Edinburgh dagegen kommt mir manchmal über-schottisch vor. Aber den Touristen gefällt es.
Weiter geht es in die Scottish Borders. Diese Region mag ich sehr und Edwin Muir geht es genauso. Er beschreibt die Leichtigkeit, die in den kleinen Städten an der Grenze zu England herrscht. Städte wie Galashiels und Jedburgh profitieren von der Textilindustrie, aber sie sind auch nicht mit der blutigen Geschichte der Highlands behaftet oder leiden unter der Stadtflucht wie die Region um Glasgow. Muir nennt die Gegend neugierig und lebendig. Man erkennt an seinem Stil deutlich, wie gut ihm dieser Teil der Reise gefällt.
Auf dem Weg nach Glasgow fährt er weiter durch bekannte Orte: Kircudbright (was, wie ich diesem Sommer glernt habe Kerkubri ausgesprochen wird), ist sogar in Wigtown und Girvan. Der Aufenthalt dort ist eher traurig, dann alle seine Bekannten von dort sind ausgewandert.
Glasgow selbst bringt ihm viele Erinnerungen. Hier hat er vor 15 Jahren gelebt, als er von Orkney gekommen ist und war anfangs erschrocken über die Kaltherzigkeit und den Egiosmus der Glaswegians. Muir erzählt nur wenig von seinen Erlebnissen, dieses Kapitel ist mehr ein Ausflug in Politik und Geschichte.
#Die letzte Station sind die Highlands. Hier macht Edwin Muir hauptsächlich das Wetter zu schaffen, denn sein Auto springt bei den sintflutartigen Regenfällen einfach nicht an. Außerdem ist es nicht geeignet für die oft sehr steilen Straßen. Oft muss er sich zurückrollen lassen und erneut Anlauf nehmen, bis er den Hügel hinauf kommt. Zum Glück waren damals noch nicht so viele Autos unterwegs! Auch mit dem Dresscode hat er seine Schwierigkeiten. Je weiter nördlich er kommt, desto mehr Touristen sind unterwegs und beim Dinner ist ein Anzug Pflicht.
Die Reise endet auf den Orkneyinseln, wo er mit seiner Familie den Sommer verbringt.
Ein besonderer Reisebericht. Edwin Muir beschreibt Schottland sehr ehrlich und macht sich angesichts der schwindenden Industrie in den meisten Städten Sorgen um die Zukunft des Landes. Gleichzeitig zeigt er aber auch, wie sehr er seine Heimat liebt, trotz seiner kritischen Betrachtung. Für mich ist dieses Buch ein echtes Highlight.
Lowlands
Das erste Wort, das mir eingefallen ist war "traurig". Muir beschreibt das Dorf, durch das er gerade reist als einen Ort, an dem "die Zeit an einem Sonntag stehen geblieben ist". Es ist schön anzusehen, aber auch nicht mehr zeitgemäß. Die Menschen haben die kleinen Orte verlassen und sind in die Städte gezogen, wo es ein Auskommen gibt. Er schreibt von den zweiten Clearances, nur dass diesmal nicht der Gutsherren, sondern die Umstände die Menschen vertreiben.
Von den Lowlands geht es nach Edinburgh. Dem Autor fällt auf dass sich die Leute sehr bemühen, englisch (oder besser: nicht-schottisch) zu wirken. Man gibt sich weltmännisch und wirkt dadurch eher lächerlich als dass man den gewünschten Effekt erzielt. Muirs letzter Besuch in Edinburgh vor diesem lag einige Zeit zurück. Die Entwicklung gefällt ihm nicht. Alles wirkt größer, lauter und moderner auf ihn.
Wenn ich bis jetzt seine mit meinen Eindrücken vergleiche, sehe ich viele Gemeinsamkeiten. In manchen kleinen Orten scheint die Zeit wirklich still zu stehen, auch wenn es da in den letzten Jahren teilweise deutliche Entwicklungen gab. Aber gerade das macht den Unterschied zu den Plätzen, in denen sich nichts getan hat noch deutlicher. Edinburgh dagegen kommt mir manchmal über-schottisch vor. Aber den Touristen gefällt es.
Weiter geht es in die Scottish Borders. Diese Region mag ich sehr und Edwin Muir geht es genauso. Er beschreibt die Leichtigkeit, die in den kleinen Städten an der Grenze zu England herrscht. Städte wie Galashiels und Jedburgh profitieren von der Textilindustrie, aber sie sind auch nicht mit der blutigen Geschichte der Highlands behaftet oder leiden unter der Stadtflucht wie die Region um Glasgow. Muir nennt die Gegend neugierig und lebendig. Man erkennt an seinem Stil deutlich, wie gut ihm dieser Teil der Reise gefällt.
Auf dem Weg nach Glasgow fährt er weiter durch bekannte Orte: Kircudbright (was, wie ich diesem Sommer glernt habe Kerkubri ausgesprochen wird), ist sogar in Wigtown und Girvan. Der Aufenthalt dort ist eher traurig, dann alle seine Bekannten von dort sind ausgewandert.
Glasgow selbst bringt ihm viele Erinnerungen. Hier hat er vor 15 Jahren gelebt, als er von Orkney gekommen ist und war anfangs erschrocken über die Kaltherzigkeit und den Egiosmus der Glaswegians. Muir erzählt nur wenig von seinen Erlebnissen, dieses Kapitel ist mehr ein Ausflug in Politik und Geschichte.
#Die letzte Station sind die Highlands. Hier macht Edwin Muir hauptsächlich das Wetter zu schaffen, denn sein Auto springt bei den sintflutartigen Regenfällen einfach nicht an. Außerdem ist es nicht geeignet für die oft sehr steilen Straßen. Oft muss er sich zurückrollen lassen und erneut Anlauf nehmen, bis er den Hügel hinauf kommt. Zum Glück waren damals noch nicht so viele Autos unterwegs! Auch mit dem Dresscode hat er seine Schwierigkeiten. Je weiter nördlich er kommt, desto mehr Touristen sind unterwegs und beim Dinner ist ein Anzug Pflicht.
Die Reise endet auf den Orkneyinseln, wo er mit seiner Familie den Sommer verbringt.
Ein besonderer Reisebericht. Edwin Muir beschreibt Schottland sehr ehrlich und macht sich angesichts der schwindenden Industrie in den meisten Städten Sorgen um die Zukunft des Landes. Gleichzeitig zeigt er aber auch, wie sehr er seine Heimat liebt, trotz seiner kritischen Betrachtung. Für mich ist dieses Buch ein echtes Highlight.
December 26, 2022
Having read and been impressed by the writing it Muir's autobiography, I was looking forward to reading "Scottish Journey" but was somewhat surprised and concerned by the reviews it had attracted. Having now completed my own reading, I now fully understand why this has attracted such mixed reviews. The book is not in its entirety a description of sights and sounds of his travels but often a "state of the nation" description. Coming as it does in the aftermath of the depression, his findings are rather gloomy, in particular, when visiting the larger cities. In addition to painting a rather negative image of his sights, there is much discussion of politics and on nationalism and independence and what shape the latter should take. While I am not averse to reading about such topics, I found the book contained an uneasy mixture of topics and components which didn't feel at one with each other and led to a question regarding what the central theme of the book really was. Truth be told, I might have preferred that he stuck to his description of his struggles with the old car which he used on the journey as this was perhaps the single thread which I found most interesting.
April 10, 2025
This just scraped into the three star category, but it was a close thing.
I usually love travel writing from the past, as I find it fascinating to compare then and now, and since Muir has a good reputation as a writer, and this was published in the same series as J B Priestley's 'English Journey', I had high hopes, but sadly, they were not fulfilled.
Muir seems to like very little about Scotland, and unlike Priestley, who could mix acerbic wit with his gloom, Muir just comes across as sour and miserable. The book also seems quite skimpily researched - Muir lays down the law on Scottish agriculture based on a conversation with one friend who is a farmer, and his sweeping statements about working class families have flimsy backing. His relentless enthusiasm for socialism is a constant theme, and I do wonder how much of the book was coloured by his determination to prove that every aspect of Scottish life would be improved by a socialist government!
There are some sections of beautiful writing, which pushed this from 2 stars to 3, but overall, I wouldn't recommend it. A period piece that is best left in the past.
I usually love travel writing from the past, as I find it fascinating to compare then and now, and since Muir has a good reputation as a writer, and this was published in the same series as J B Priestley's 'English Journey', I had high hopes, but sadly, they were not fulfilled.
Muir seems to like very little about Scotland, and unlike Priestley, who could mix acerbic wit with his gloom, Muir just comes across as sour and miserable. The book also seems quite skimpily researched - Muir lays down the law on Scottish agriculture based on a conversation with one friend who is a farmer, and his sweeping statements about working class families have flimsy backing. His relentless enthusiasm for socialism is a constant theme, and I do wonder how much of the book was coloured by his determination to prove that every aspect of Scottish life would be improved by a socialist government!
There are some sections of beautiful writing, which pushed this from 2 stars to 3, but overall, I wouldn't recommend it. A period piece that is best left in the past.
July 29, 2020
Occasionally insightful, but overall an infuriatingly lazy book.
From the Introduction, it appears that this was commissioned by a left-wing publisher, and Muir took up the offer so that he could fund a holiday for his family. As far as I can tell, he then proceeded to do the quickest 'journey' around Scotland he could get away with (about 2 weeks I'd guess) and still get paid to write the book. He didn't seem to have been a sociable type and didn't really bother talking to anyone on his journey. He then wrote up a book of things he already thought about Scotland.
It's a bit like an early Bill Bryson, without being funny.
There are a just a couple of places where he actually has a real conversation with someone, and those are fascinating (for example, when he discovers that virtually all his friends from one village have emigrated) - these give a glimpse of what this could have been, if he'd made more effort.
From the Introduction, it appears that this was commissioned by a left-wing publisher, and Muir took up the offer so that he could fund a holiday for his family. As far as I can tell, he then proceeded to do the quickest 'journey' around Scotland he could get away with (about 2 weeks I'd guess) and still get paid to write the book. He didn't seem to have been a sociable type and didn't really bother talking to anyone on his journey. He then wrote up a book of things he already thought about Scotland.
It's a bit like an early Bill Bryson, without being funny.
There are a just a couple of places where he actually has a real conversation with someone, and those are fascinating (for example, when he discovers that virtually all his friends from one village have emigrated) - these give a glimpse of what this could have been, if he'd made more effort.
November 30, 2018
Really, I don't know what to think. I was expecting luminous craftsmanship, perhaps, based on the author's reputation. Instead, I now know every fersticken synonym for deprivation. Granted, this was written in the mid-1930s, when deprivation was universal for many across the globe. Surely Scotland was not as bleak as he paints, and just as surely not as sniffily provincial as he depicts.
I marked this as 'read', but I couldn't finish it after slogging through the first two thirds of this patronizing volume, hoping he would turn a corner on his dour prose. I can offer a tip, though: Read the first two sentences of each chapter, and you will have a synopsis of its entirety. The rest of each chapter is just beating a dead horse in a thousand ways. Whew. Give it a miss.
I marked this as 'read', but I couldn't finish it after slogging through the first two thirds of this patronizing volume, hoping he would turn a corner on his dour prose. I can offer a tip, though: Read the first two sentences of each chapter, and you will have a synopsis of its entirety. The rest of each chapter is just beating a dead horse in a thousand ways. Whew. Give it a miss.
August 7, 2020
This Scottish poet considers the nature of Scottish culture amid talks of independence in 1935. He gives some consideration of the impact of industrialization, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, and socialization on Scotland as he travels through slums and in the midst of unemployment-- sometimes with a malfunctioning car. It contains many beautifully written passages.
June 24, 2023
'A disused, slovenly, everlasting Sunday'
'One's final impression of a town is coloured by all the emotions one has ever felt in it'
'I can now go on to give my impressions of Glasgow, some old and some new, and mostly, I am afraid, painful.'
'One's final impression of a town is coloured by all the emotions one has ever felt in it'
'I can now go on to give my impressions of Glasgow, some old and some new, and mostly, I am afraid, painful.'
July 31, 2018
I read this some time ago. It is on my book shelf. It was likely a Christmas gift. I don't remember a thing about this book except that I thought it was pretty good. I should reread this one.
March 6, 2023
Sometimes sad at how certain areas still face the same problems. A fantastic read and thought provoking....for me anyway.
January 22, 2008
Edwin Muir, Scottish Journey (Mainstream Publishing, 1935)
Edwin Muir is a pretty good writer, when he sticks to travelogues and abstract philosophy. He doesn't do so in Scottish Journey, though one would think so from the first hundred pages. Scottish Journey is meant as (and was commissioned as) a travelogue, and for the most part, Muir sticks to the template. He writes well of the Scots countryside, and passably of Edinburgh, slipping in bits of philosophy here and there, as is to be expected in any good travelogue. As well, Muir is an extremely quotable writer; his words are clear and precise, and draw excellent pictures in the reader's mind.
Muir was, however, an ardent Socialist of the closed-minded sort, as much as he professes otherwise. This affects the book in his long chapter on Glasgow, which he starts with a screed against Industrialism (he always capitalizes the word, I might as well, too) and capitalism. Humorously, he attempts to say that Industrialism, in and of itself, isn't all that bad. He does so in a paragraph that spans almost two and a half pages. The first and last few sentences are of the opinion that Industrialism isn't all that bad. It's the middle hundred or so sentences that shoot the argument in the foot, as he catalogs a list of the horrors he sees in Glasgow. One wonders how it's possible to write all these things and frame them with "it's not bad." It would be kind of like a pagan writing the same of the Inquisition, from the evils that Muir ascribes to Industrialism.
What's worse, he can't see the forest for the trees. In one breath, he talks about ho a capitalist system can't take population contraction into account; in the next, he's talking about unemployment. And he sees no correlation between the two, or at least none he's willing to admit. At one point, perhaps the book's nadir, he says, while discussing the rise of the Scottish Nationalist party, "....If such devotion and fidelity are not to be admired, then all our ideas of morality are mistaken." Leaving it as it is, he infers that no such thing could possibly be true. Yet not five pages later, at the beginning of his chapter on the Highlands, he has little good to say about the morality of a people who are so embarrassed by the twin hills known as the Paps of Jura, one of Scotland's biggest tourist draws at the time, that he couldn't find a postcard that showed them clearly anywhere in the town. One is tempted to see the inconsistencies as a (sub?)conscious undercutting of Muir's own arguments, but nothing else in the book points to it; the man's to solid and straightforward a writer to resort to such tricks.
Overall, though, it's worth checking out for the travel writing and the easy read. Just take his political outlook with a grain of salt. ** ½
Edwin Muir is a pretty good writer, when he sticks to travelogues and abstract philosophy. He doesn't do so in Scottish Journey, though one would think so from the first hundred pages. Scottish Journey is meant as (and was commissioned as) a travelogue, and for the most part, Muir sticks to the template. He writes well of the Scots countryside, and passably of Edinburgh, slipping in bits of philosophy here and there, as is to be expected in any good travelogue. As well, Muir is an extremely quotable writer; his words are clear and precise, and draw excellent pictures in the reader's mind.
Muir was, however, an ardent Socialist of the closed-minded sort, as much as he professes otherwise. This affects the book in his long chapter on Glasgow, which he starts with a screed against Industrialism (he always capitalizes the word, I might as well, too) and capitalism. Humorously, he attempts to say that Industrialism, in and of itself, isn't all that bad. He does so in a paragraph that spans almost two and a half pages. The first and last few sentences are of the opinion that Industrialism isn't all that bad. It's the middle hundred or so sentences that shoot the argument in the foot, as he catalogs a list of the horrors he sees in Glasgow. One wonders how it's possible to write all these things and frame them with "it's not bad." It would be kind of like a pagan writing the same of the Inquisition, from the evils that Muir ascribes to Industrialism.
What's worse, he can't see the forest for the trees. In one breath, he talks about ho a capitalist system can't take population contraction into account; in the next, he's talking about unemployment. And he sees no correlation between the two, or at least none he's willing to admit. At one point, perhaps the book's nadir, he says, while discussing the rise of the Scottish Nationalist party, "....If such devotion and fidelity are not to be admired, then all our ideas of morality are mistaken." Leaving it as it is, he infers that no such thing could possibly be true. Yet not five pages later, at the beginning of his chapter on the Highlands, he has little good to say about the morality of a people who are so embarrassed by the twin hills known as the Paps of Jura, one of Scotland's biggest tourist draws at the time, that he couldn't find a postcard that showed them clearly anywhere in the town. One is tempted to see the inconsistencies as a (sub?)conscious undercutting of Muir's own arguments, but nothing else in the book points to it; the man's to solid and straightforward a writer to resort to such tricks.
Overall, though, it's worth checking out for the travel writing and the easy read. Just take his political outlook with a grain of salt. ** ½
March 6, 2014
Coming Sunday! Louise Welsh hits the 1930s trail blazed round Scotland by Orkney poet Edwin Muir and we kick off in the capital city. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/...
LATER - one episode in and I can already tell that Mr Muir is not a man for me, even though the programme itself is sunny and airy.
In misery it is great comfort to have a companion - however that companion will not be yours truly.
blurb - In 1934 the Orcadian poet Edwin Muir embarked on his iconic 'Scottish Journey' a set of travels round depression-era Scotland where he tried to get to grips with Scottish identity and to consider what the future held for a country whose industries were being devastated by a recession
'. . . a silent clearance is going on in industrial Scotland, a clearance not of human beings, but of what they depend upon for life'
As a man very much of his time, of the 1930s, he wavered between socialism and nationalism as cures for Scotland's ills, but in-between reflected on the nature of work, poverty, Scottishness, tourism, the ideal way of living, the highland and the lowland character and the possible existence of a best of all possible worlds on his native Orkney. In the summer of 2011, crime writer Louise Welsh decided to embark on a mini whistle-stop version of Muir's journey, taking to the roads in an open-top car, just as he did, and trying to get a flavour now of a country also in the grip of austerity and flirting with nationalism. How are people reacting in the wake of the bank crash today? Appropriately enough, we start in Edinburgh with funds manager Douglas Watt contrasting it with Muir's idyllic Orkney.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 21, 2015
An absolute abortion. God this man is a patronising writer who hasn't got a good thing to say about Scotland. I hated this book an in particular I hated the voice of its author.
September 1, 2016
Makes for an interesting contrast between the commentary which is still largely applicable and that which is no longer relevant.
April 2, 2017
"First published in 1935 Scottish Journey is a perceptive, subtle and beautifully written account by one of Scotland's greatest modern writers of prose and poetry. Edwin Muir's journey took him from Edinburgh to the Lowlands, to Glasgow and the Highlands, and the book, while a masterpiece of travel writing, is also a quest for the real nature of Scottish identity.
" 'Muir held up a mirror to the face of Scotland all those years ago. It is frightening to see so many recognizable features lingering in its glass.' "
~~back cover
"perceptive, subtle and beautifully written"? That wasn't my impression at all. Let me give you some background on Mr. Muir:
"His childhood in remote and unspoiled Orkney represented an idyllic Eden to Muir, while his family's move to the city corresponded in his mind to a deeply disturbing encounter with the "fallen" world. The emotional tensions of that dichotomy shaped much of his work and deeply influenced his life. ... Muir came to regard his family's movement from Orkney to Glasgow as a movement from Eden to Hell.
"Paul Henderson Scott, in Towards Independence, said 'Edwin Muir was an Orkney man who never quite felt that he was Scottish.'" [Wikipedia]
Which would explain why this book was almost entirely devoted to philosophical ruminations about the evils of Industrialism: "If, then, I paint a dark picture of Industrialism in the succeeding chapters, it is simply in the hope that the evils of present-day Industrialism may be realized and the necessity for taking it in hand brought home as vividly as possible to the reader. And if, in my description of the rural community of the Orkneys, ... the colours will be pleasing, that is partly because they are actually so, but mainly because I wish to deepen the darkness of my picture of industrial Glasgow by contrasting it with a normal traditional mode of existence." [pg. 105] and the downtrodden city dwellers mostly condemned to live in slums without any available employment. I suppose you could consider this chapters-long diatribe against the rise of Industrialism perceptive, but to me it seems to be an almost knee-jerk condemnation arising out of the author's prejudices against a non-agrarian way of life and against Scotland as opposed to the Orkneys.
It's not that I don't agree that our civilization has taken a path that holds many unexpected dangers to the human soul & psyche, because I do. I just think that his opinions run so deep in him that he can't see anything but slums and hopeless slum dwellers and poor.
The travel descriptions of areas of Scotland outside the big cities, and the few pages devoted to the Orkneys, are less derogatory and sometimes admiring. But they are scant, compared to the definitely not subtle opinions and descriptions of Glasgow. And not at all what I was hoping this book would be.
" 'Muir held up a mirror to the face of Scotland all those years ago. It is frightening to see so many recognizable features lingering in its glass.' "
~~back cover
"perceptive, subtle and beautifully written"? That wasn't my impression at all. Let me give you some background on Mr. Muir:
"His childhood in remote and unspoiled Orkney represented an idyllic Eden to Muir, while his family's move to the city corresponded in his mind to a deeply disturbing encounter with the "fallen" world. The emotional tensions of that dichotomy shaped much of his work and deeply influenced his life. ... Muir came to regard his family's movement from Orkney to Glasgow as a movement from Eden to Hell.
"Paul Henderson Scott, in Towards Independence, said 'Edwin Muir was an Orkney man who never quite felt that he was Scottish.'" [Wikipedia]
Which would explain why this book was almost entirely devoted to philosophical ruminations about the evils of Industrialism: "If, then, I paint a dark picture of Industrialism in the succeeding chapters, it is simply in the hope that the evils of present-day Industrialism may be realized and the necessity for taking it in hand brought home as vividly as possible to the reader. And if, in my description of the rural community of the Orkneys, ... the colours will be pleasing, that is partly because they are actually so, but mainly because I wish to deepen the darkness of my picture of industrial Glasgow by contrasting it with a normal traditional mode of existence." [pg. 105] and the downtrodden city dwellers mostly condemned to live in slums without any available employment. I suppose you could consider this chapters-long diatribe against the rise of Industrialism perceptive, but to me it seems to be an almost knee-jerk condemnation arising out of the author's prejudices against a non-agrarian way of life and against Scotland as opposed to the Orkneys.
It's not that I don't agree that our civilization has taken a path that holds many unexpected dangers to the human soul & psyche, because I do. I just think that his opinions run so deep in him that he can't see anything but slums and hopeless slum dwellers and poor.
The travel descriptions of areas of Scotland outside the big cities, and the few pages devoted to the Orkneys, are less derogatory and sometimes admiring. But they are scant, compared to the definitely not subtle opinions and descriptions of Glasgow. And not at all what I was hoping this book would be.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews