INTRODUCTION
This journal is a record of our journey to the Western Isles, guided by Boswell & Johnson, travelling over the summer of 2013, visiting some of the landmarks that they describe. An accompanying series of essays and poems will be posted over the coming months, spurred by some of the ideas and associations their accounts suggested.
As the dates will indicate, we travelled in reverse, anti-clockwise, passing Johnson and Boswell heading westwards, somewhere near Strath Cluanie.
The reader can navigate this e-journal in any sequence, by location, clicking the links to the right.
Johnson’s curiosity about the Highlands sprang from childhood, when his bookseller father, Michael, gave him a copy of Martin Martin’s A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland. A copy of the same book went with the travellers, packed in their saddlebags. Boswell later inscribed this volume, dated it ‘16 April 1774’ and gifted it to the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh. It now resides in the National Library of Scotland.
Books fared us along the way. Our title is from Boswell:
‘He this day, when we were by ourselves, observed, how common it was for people to talk from books; to retail the sentiments of others, and not their own; in short, to converse without any originality of thinking. He was pleased to say, “You and I do not talk from books.”’
(Boswell, Journal, 3 XI 1773)
The journey continued our practice of the ginko road, or field-trip, established on the road north, when we were guided by another famous literary partnership, the Japanese poet Basho and his companion Sora, who travelled to the north of Honshu in 1689. Sometimes we more closely resembled Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
as JOHNSON needs BOSWELL
so LENNON needs McCARTNEY
as JOHNSON needs BOSWELL
so HARDY needs LAUREL
as JOHNSON needs BOSWELL
so HOLMES needs WATSON
as JOHNSON needs BOSWELL
so DON QUIXOTE needs SANCHO PANZA
as JOHNSON needs BOSWELL
so PROSPERO needs ARIEL
as JOHNSON needs BOSWELL
so DANTE needs VIRGIL
as JOHNSON needs BOSWELL
so JESUS needs PETER
In his Dictionary, Johnson gives his definition of ‘journey’: ‘the travel of a day’.
Like Basho, Johnson travelled to view nadokoro, places of name – Macbeth’s ‘blasted heath’, the Gaelic courts of Raasay and Dunvegan – the better to stand his words on the firm ground of experience:
‘with a notion that we might there contemplate a system of life almost totally different from what we had been accustomed to see; and, to find simplicity and wildness, and all the circumstances of remote time or place, so near to our native great island, was an object within the reach of reasonable curiosity’.
Bibliography
Basho Back Roads to Far Towns, trans. Corman & Susumu (1968)
Johnson, Samuel A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)
Martin, Martin A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland (1703)
QUATENUS DIES PATET
Johnson walked with a Homeric staff of oak. He and Boswell knew the classical poets well; they quote from them repeatedly, and competitively, in the course of their Tour.
This habit, of viewing Scotland through the frame of Virgil, Ovid, Juvenal, Horace or Euripides, encouraged us to commission the German scholar, Daniel Höehr, to translate some of our writings, including the dedicatory poems below, backwards, as it were, into Latin.
On their first sea-voyage, from Leith over to Fife, the travellers debate, via Ovid, on the value of views, and the sameyness of the sea. In Aberdeen, Johnson sought the spirit of his near namesake, the neo-Latin poet Arthur Johnston (1579–1641). While on Skye, and on Inchkenneth, Johnson wrote Latin verses of the islands.
Towards the end of their tour, in Ayrshire, Boswell describes ‘the groves of Auchinleck’, his childhood home, as ‘scenes which, in my mind, were all classical; for in my youth I had appropriated to them many of the descriptions of the Roman poets’.
Bibliography
Crawford, Robert Apollos of the North (2006)
Davenport, Guy 7 Greeks (1995)
Highet, Gilbert Poets in a Landscape (1957)
As the dates will indicate, we travelled in reverse, anti-clockwise, passing Johnson and Boswell heading westwards, somewhere near Strath Cluanie.
The reader can navigate this e-journal in any sequence, by location, clicking the links to the right.
Johnson’s curiosity about the Highlands sprang from childhood, when his bookseller father, Michael, gave him a copy of Martin Martin’s A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland. A copy of the same book went with the travellers, packed in their saddlebags. Boswell later inscribed this volume, dated it ‘16 April 1774’ and gifted it to the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh. It now resides in the National Library of Scotland.
Books fared us along the way. Our title is from Boswell:
‘He this day, when we were by ourselves, observed, how common it was for people to talk from books; to retail the sentiments of others, and not their own; in short, to converse without any originality of thinking. He was pleased to say, “You and I do not talk from books.”’
(Boswell, Journal, 3 XI 1773)
The journey continued our practice of the ginko road, or field-trip, established on the road north, when we were guided by another famous literary partnership, the Japanese poet Basho and his companion Sora, who travelled to the north of Honshu in 1689. Sometimes we more closely resembled Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
as JOHNSON needs BOSWELL
so LENNON needs McCARTNEY
as JOHNSON needs BOSWELL
so HARDY needs LAUREL
as JOHNSON needs BOSWELL
so HOLMES needs WATSON
as JOHNSON needs BOSWELL
so DON QUIXOTE needs SANCHO PANZA
as JOHNSON needs BOSWELL
so PROSPERO needs ARIEL
as JOHNSON needs BOSWELL
so DANTE needs VIRGIL
as JOHNSON needs BOSWELL
so JESUS needs PETER
In his Dictionary, Johnson gives his definition of ‘journey’: ‘the travel of a day’.
A N
E Y E
REST
horizon
E Y E
REST
horizon
Like Basho, Johnson travelled to view nadokoro, places of name – Macbeth’s ‘blasted heath’, the Gaelic courts of Raasay and Dunvegan – the better to stand his words on the firm ground of experience:
‘with a notion that we might there contemplate a system of life almost totally different from what we had been accustomed to see; and, to find simplicity and wildness, and all the circumstances of remote time or place, so near to our native great island, was an object within the reach of reasonable curiosity’.
Bibliography
Basho Back Roads to Far Towns, trans. Corman & Susumu (1968)
Johnson, Samuel A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)
Martin, Martin A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland (1703)
QUATENUS DIES PATET
Johnson walked with a Homeric staff of oak. He and Boswell knew the classical poets well; they quote from them repeatedly, and competitively, in the course of their Tour.
This habit, of viewing Scotland through the frame of Virgil, Ovid, Juvenal, Horace or Euripides, encouraged us to commission the German scholar, Daniel Höehr, to translate some of our writings, including the dedicatory poems below, backwards, as it were, into Latin.
On their first sea-voyage, from Leith over to Fife, the travellers debate, via Ovid, on the value of views, and the sameyness of the sea. In Aberdeen, Johnson sought the spirit of his near namesake, the neo-Latin poet Arthur Johnston (1579–1641). While on Skye, and on Inchkenneth, Johnson wrote Latin verses of the islands.
Towards the end of their tour, in Ayrshire, Boswell describes ‘the groves of Auchinleck’, his childhood home, as ‘scenes which, in my mind, were all classical; for in my youth I had appropriated to them many of the descriptions of the Roman poets’.
AS FAR AS THE DAY GOES
journey
QUATENUS DIES PATET
iter
AS FAR AS THE TALE KNOWS
book
QUATENUS FABULA SCIT
liber
journey
QUATENUS DIES PATET
iter
AS FAR AS THE TALE KNOWS
book
QUATENUS FABULA SCIT
liber
Bibliography
Crawford, Robert Apollos of the North (2006)
Davenport, Guy 7 Greeks (1995)
Highet, Gilbert Poets in a Landscape (1957)