Margaret Laidlaw
Scottish tradition-bearer (1730–1813)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Margaret Laidlaw m. Hogg (1730–1813) was a tradition-bearer who collected native Scottish ballads from Ettrick in the Scottish Borders.[1][2]
Margaret Laidlaw | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1730 |
| Died | 1813 (aged 82–83) Ettrick, Scotland |
| Known for | Tradition-bearer |
| Children | James Hogg |
Life
Margaret Laidlaw was born in 1730 in Ettrick, Scotland to Bessie Scott and William Laidlaw.[3] Her father, known as Will o' Phawhope, was said to have been the last man in the Border country to speak with the fairies.[4]
In 1765, she married tenant farmer Robert Hogg (1729–1820) and the couple had four sons, including poet and novelist James Hogg.[1][2] A religious woman, Laidlaw raised her children with knowledge of the Bible and local storytelling.[3][5] In 1836, Laidlaw's son William writes in The New Monthly Magazine that Laidlaw was an adept storyteller of "tales and songs of spectres, ghosts, fairies, brownies, voices, &c".[3]
Works
In James Hogg's Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott (1834), Laidlaw commented on Walter Scott's editing of her collection of ballads in the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–3): "they war made for singing, and no for reading; and they're nouther right spelled nor right setten down".[3] Scott wrote that Margaret Laidlaw "sings, or rather chants...with great animation".[3]
She greatly influenced James Hogg's work, who described her as "the best friend that ever I had." The relationship inspired the spirited mother of The Marvellous Doctor in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 21 (1827), the diminutive Scottish Gaelic-speaker in The Love Adventures of George Cochrane,[6] Winter Evening Tales (1820) vol. ι., and The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824).[3]