(Image: Archive)
A leading Burns scholar is set to challenge the myths behind Scottish identity at a major cultural conference.
Professor Gerard Carruthers, founder of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow and a world authority on Scotland’s national poet, will speak at a conference marking the centenary of Hugh MacDiarmid’s landmark poem, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.
The event, which comes just days after First Minister John Swinney told the SNP conference that independence is "for my son", will take place on Saturday, November 21, at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.
Professor Carruthers will deliver a keynote address titled Burns, Scott, MacDiarmid: Inventing Scottish Identity.
Through the address, he will examine how these three writers helped shape modern perceptions of Scotland.
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Professor Carruthers said: "Scotland’s identity did not simply emerge: it was written.
"Scott created the myths, Burns was mythologised, and MacDiarmid, a character invented by Christopher Murray Grieve, was both mythologised and demonised.
"A hundred years after A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, it is time to ask how much of the Scotland we think we know is based in actual history, and how much was made up by brilliant but unreliable creative geniuses."
The conference, titled A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle: Hugh MacDiarmid and a Hundred Years of the Scottish Renaissance, will explore the life, work and legacy of Hugh MacDiarmid, considered one of the most influential Scottish writers of the 20th century.
The programme is supported by the Andrew Tannahill Fund, the Saltire Society, and the National Library of Scotland.
It brings together cultural institutions spanning a century of Scottish literature and thought.
Professor Carruthers established the Centre for Robert Burns Studies in 2007 and serves as general editor of the Oxford Edition of the Works of Robert Burns.
He has dedicated his career to examining Scottish legends through a critical academic lens.
Alexander Linklater, MacDiarmid’s biographer and co-organiser of the conference, reflected on MacDiarmid’s complex relationship with Scottish nationalism.
He said: "In 1973, the cast of 7:84’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil ended a performance at the Glasgow Citizens by standing to applaud a member of the audience: the eighty-year-old Hugh MacDiarmid – the heretical communist-nationalist, unwanted by the national party he helped founded in 1928, expelled by the Communist Party in 1938.
"Young nationalists who assume their movement was always of the left are mistaken: the SNP of 1934 was Presbyterian, conservative and anti-Irish-immigrant, and its co-founder John MacCormick called MacDiarmid 'one of the greatest handicaps with which any nationalist movement could have been burdened.'
"But as Scottish nationalism caught fire from the 1960s onward, it needed a totemic ancestor, and the 'torchlight procession of one' – as Norman MacCaig dubbed MacDiarmid – suddenly had a movement marching behind it.
"By the Sturgeon era, MacDiarmid’s left-nationalist contradiction was the unchallengeable norm – but MacDiarmid himself had been dropped as a Salmond-era dinosaur.
"His heresy had succeeded so completely that it no longer needed the heretic."
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The conference will feature contributions from leading academics and artists, including Sir Tom Devine, Murray Pittock, David Torrance, Pat Kane and Gerda Stevenson.
Maureen Beattie and W.N. Herbert will perform the poem, while Patrick Crotty will introduce a new edition of the poet’s complete collected poems.
The day will conclude with reflections on the last decade of the independence movement.
The Saltire Society and the National Library of Scotland are joined by the Andrew Tannahill Fund in supporting the event.
Academic partners include the Centre for Scottish and Celtic Studies at the University of Glasgow and the Centre for Arts, Media and Culture at Edinburgh Napier University.