The Shepherd's Calendar

by James Hogg, Douglas S. Mack (Editor)

James Hogg is one of the acknowledged masters of the short story. Some of his best stories appeared in The Shepherd's Calendar, a work of the 1820s in which he sets out to re-create on paper the manner and the content of the traditional oral storytelling of Ettrick Forest, the upland sheep-farming district in which he grew up. Like Hogg's masterpiece The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, several of the stories from The Shepherd's Calendar deal disturbingly with the supernatural, and explore psychological depths with a remarkable insight and intensity.

The Shepherd's Calendar also draws on Hogg's experiences as a young shepherd in the 1790s, giving a convincing and very human picture of the dangers, pleasures, and tensions of the lives of the rural poor in Scotland in the years that followed the French Revolution.

This paperback is based on the hardback edition of The Shepherd's Calendar for the Stirling / South Carolina Col

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1829

About the author

James Hogg was a Scottish poet, novelist and essayist who wrote in Scots and English. As a young man he worked as a shepherd and farmhand, and was largely self-educated through reading. He was a friend of many of the great writers of his day, including Sir Walter Scott, of whom he later wrote an unauthorized biography. He became widely known as the "Ettrick Shepherd", a nickname under which some of his works were published, and the character name he was given in the widely read series 'Noctes Ambrosianae', published in Blackwood's Magazine. He is best known today for his novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. His other works include the long poem The Queen's Wake, his collection of songs Jacobite Reliques, and the novels The Three Perils of Man, The Three Perils of Woman, and The Brownie of Bodsbeck.

Reviews

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Hogg, aka "The Ettrick Shepherd," writes large parts of these tales in a kind of Scots dialect from his particular region (the Ettrick Forest), and although I'm not usually a big fan of tales told in dialect, these utterly astound and amaze me. It's a thrill as one reads to begin to sound out the "weird" spellings and vocalisms, and there's an excellent glossary in back for the many words that do not correspond to known English usage. The headings for sections include "Dreams and Apparitions," "Fairies, Brownies and Witches," and "Fairies, De[v]ils and Witches," beside many other stories unclassifiable.

One reviewer said this: "The reader is not being treated to a quaint display of an outmoded lifestyle, but privileged with glimpses of a community possessed of special knowledge and internal laws." (Fiona Stafford, *Review of English Studies*).

"Special knowledge," yes.