About Burns’s ‘To a Haggis’
This Burns Night, here are some of the things that interest our researchers about Burns’s famous poem, ‘To a Haggis’. Inspiration and Publishing History – Gerard Lee McKeever As is often the case with...
Author: baitken
Guest Blog by Professor Patrick Scott – A Burns Puzzle Solved: Davidson Cook and the ‘English’ Original for ‘It is na, Jean, thy bonie face’ (SMM 333)
One of the longstanding puzzles for Burns editors has been the original on which he based the song ‘It is na, Jean, thy bonie face’, first published unsigned in the Scots Musical Museum in...
Robert Burns’s ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ – Happy Halloween!
This Halloween, we thought we’d share what interests us about Burns’s most famous and most eerie tale: ‘Tam o’ Shanter’. Conception and Publication ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ was written at the suggestion of the...
Guest Blog by Professor Patrick Scott – The mysterious ‘WR’ once more: a mid-Victorian reminiscence
This is a follow-up to Nigel Leask’s blog-posts last June and again in October, commenting on the identity of the mysterious ‘WR.’ WR was one of several people who made annotations to Burns’s First...