The Mountain Bard: Consisting of Ballads and Songs, Founded on Facts and Legendary Tales

1807

Hogg PR4791 M68 1807

Edinburgh: Printed by J. Ballantyne by Arch. Constable and Co.

Novelist and poet, James Hogg (1770-1835) was born into a tenant farming family near Ettrick, about thirty miles south of Edinburgh as the crow flies. Out of necessity, Hogg began his working life as a cowherd aged eight. Despite a limited early education, he wrote his first verses in 1793, inspired by the stories and songs he had heard growing up. This volume, The Mountain Bard, is Hogg’s first published collection of ‘ballads and songs’, and is dedicated to Sir Walter Scott, who also helped to edit the publication. Most of the Hogg Collection was donated to the University of Otago’s Special Collections, in 1952, by the great-grandchildren of Hogg, the Gilkison family.