A makar () is a term from
Scottish literature
Scottish literature is literature written in Scotland or by Scottish writers. It includes works in English, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Brythonic, French, Latin, Norn or other languages written within the modern boundaries of Scotland.
The earli ...
for a
poet
A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator ( thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems ( oral or wri ...
or
bard, often thought of as a
royal court
A royal court, often called simply a court when the royal context is clear, is an extended royal household in a monarchy, including all those who regularly attend on a monarch, or another central figure. Hence, the word "court" may also be appl ...
poet.
Since the 19th century, the term ''The Makars'' has been specifically used to refer to a number of poets of fifteenth and sixteenth century
Scotland
Scotland (, ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a Anglo-Scottish border, border with England to the southeast ...
, in particular
Robert Henryson
Robert Henryson (Middle Scots: Robert Henrysoun) was a poet who flourished in Scotland in the period c. 1460–1500. Counted among the Scots ''makars'', he lived in the royal burgh of Dunfermline and is a distinctive voice in the Northern Renai ...
,
William Dunbar
William Dunbar (born 1459 or 1460 – died by 1530) was a Scottish makar, or court poet, active in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. He was closely associated with the court of King James IV and produced a large body of work i ...
and
Gavin Douglas
Gavin Douglas (c. 1474 – September 1522) was a Scottish bishop, makar and translator. Although he had an important political career, he is chiefly remembered for his poetry. His main pioneering achievement was the '' Eneados'', a full and fa ...
, who wrote a diverse
genre
Genre () is any form or type of communication in any mode (written, spoken, digital, artistic, etc.) with socially-agreed-upon conventions developed over time. In popular usage, it normally describes a category of literature, music, or other for ...
of works in
Middle Scots
Middle Scots was the Anglic language of Lowland Scotland in the period from 1450 to 1700. By the end of the 15th century, its phonology, orthography, accidence, syntax and vocabulary had diverged markedly from Early Scots, which was virtually ...
in the period of the
Northern Renaissance
The Northern Renaissance was the Renaissance that occurred in Europe north of the Alps. From the last years of the 15th century, its Renaissance spread around Europe. Called the Northern Renaissance because it occurred north of the Italian Renais ...
.
The Makars have often been referred to by literary critics as ''Scots Chaucerians''. In modern usage, poets of the Scots revival in the 18th century, such as
Allan Ramsay and
Robert Fergusson
Robert Fergusson (5 September 1750 – 16 October 1774) was a Scottish poet. After formal education at the University of St Andrews, Fergusson led a bohemian life in Edinburgh, the city of his birth, then at the height of intellectual and c ...
are also makars.
Since 2002, the term "makar" has been revived as the name for a publicly funded poet, first in Edinburgh, followed by the cities of Glasgow, Stirling and Dundee. In 2004 the position of
Makar or National Poet for Scotland, was authorized by the
Scottish Parliament.
Etymology
Middle Scots
Middle Scots was the Anglic language of Lowland Scotland in the period from 1450 to 1700. By the end of the 15th century, its phonology, orthography, accidence, syntax and vocabulary had diverged markedly from Early Scots, which was virtually ...
(plural ) is the equivalent of Middle English ''
maker''. The word functions as a
calque
In linguistics, a calque () or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language w ...
(literal translation) of
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic p ...
term () "maker;
poet
A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator ( thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems ( oral or wri ...
". The term is normally applied to poets writing in
Scots although it need not be exclusive to Scottish writers.
William Dunbar
William Dunbar (born 1459 or 1460 – died by 1530) was a Scottish makar, or court poet, active in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. He was closely associated with the court of King James IV and produced a large body of work i ...
for instance referred to the English poets
Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer (; – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for '' The Canterbury Tales''. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He w ...
,
Lydgate and
Gower
Gower ( cy, Gŵyr) or the Gower Peninsula () in southwest Wales, projects towards the Bristol Channel. It is the most westerly part of the historic county of Glamorgan. In 1956, the majority of Gower became the first area in the United Kingdom ...
as .
The Makars in history
The work of the Makar of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was in part marked out by an adoption in
vernacular
A vernacular or vernacular language is in contrast with a "standard language". It refers to the language or dialect that is spoken by people that are inhabiting a particular country or region. The vernacular is typically the native language, n ...
languages of the new and greater variety in
metrics
Metric or metrical may refer to:
* Metric system, an internationally adopted decimal system of measurement
* An adjective indicating relation to measurement in general, or a noun describing a specific type of measurement
Mathematics
In mathema ...
and
prosody current across Europe after the influence of such figures as
Dante
Dante Alighieri (; – 14 September 1321), probably baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante (, ), was an Italian people, Italian Italian poetry, poet, writer and philosopher. His ''Divine Comedy'', origin ...
and
Petrarch
Francesco Petrarca (; 20 July 1304 – 18/19 July 1374), commonly anglicized as Petrarch (), was a scholar and poet of early Renaissance Italy, and one of the earliest humanists.
Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited ...
and similar to the route which Chaucer followed in England. Their work is usually distinguished from the work of earlier Scottish writers such as
Barbour and
Wyntoun
Andrew Wyntoun, known as Andrew of Wyntoun (), was a Scottish poet, a canon and prior of Loch Leven on St Serf's Inch and, later, a canon of St. Andrews.
Andrew Wyntoun is most famous for his completion of an eight-syllabled metre entitled, '' ...
who wrote
romance
Romance (from Vulgar Latin , "in the Roman language", i.e., "Latin") may refer to:
Common meanings
* Romance (love), emotional attraction towards another person and the courtship behaviors undertaken to express the feelings
* Romance languages, ...
and
chronicle verse in octosyllabic couplets and it also perhaps marked something of a departure from the medieval
alliterative
Alliteration is the conspicuous repetition of initial consonant sounds of nearby words in a phrase, often used as a literary device. A familiar example is "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers". Alliteration is used poetically in various ...
or
troubador
A troubadour (, ; oc, trobador ) was a composer and performer of Old Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages (1100–1350). Since the word ''troubadour'' is etymologically masculine, a female troubadour is usually called a ''trobairi ...
traditions; but one characteristic of poetry by the Makars is that features from all of these various traditions, such as strong alliteration and swift narration, continued to be a distinctive influence.
The first of the Makars proper in this sense, although perhaps the least Scots due to his education predominantly in captivity at the English court in
London
London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...
, is generally taken to be
James I James I may refer to:
People
*James I of Aragon (1208–1276)
*James I of Sicily or James II of Aragon (1267–1327)
*James I, Count of La Marche (1319–1362), Count of Ponthieu
*James I, Count of Urgell (1321–1347)
*James I of Cyprus (1334–13 ...
(1394–1437) the likely author of the
Kingis Quair. Apart from other principal figures already named, writing by makars such as
Richard Holland,
Blind Hary and
Walter Kennedy also survives along with evidence that suggests the existence of a substantial body of lost work. The quality of extant work generally, both minor and major, demonstrates a thriving poetic tradition in Scotland throughout the period.
Henryson
Robert Henryson (Middle Scots: Robert Henrysoun) was a poet who flourished in Scotland in the period c. 1460–1500. Counted among the Scots ''makars'', he lived in the royal burgh of Dunfermline and is a distinctive voice in the Northern Renai ...
, who is generally seen today as one of the foremost makars, is not known to have been a
court poet
A poet laureate (plural: poets laureate) is a poet officially appointed by a government or conferring institution, typically expected to compose poems for special events and occasions. Albertino Mussato of Padua and Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) ...
, but the Royal Palace of
Dunfermline, the city in which he was based, was one of the residences of the
Stewart court.
A high point in cultural patronage was the Renaissance Court of
James IV
James IV (17 March 1473 – 9 September 1513) was King of Scotland from 11 June 1488 until his death at the Battle of Flodden in 1513. He inherited the throne at the age of fifteen on the death of his father, James III, at the Battle of Sauch ...
(1488–1513) now principally associated in literary terms with
William Dunbar
William Dunbar (born 1459 or 1460 – died by 1530) was a Scottish makar, or court poet, active in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. He was closely associated with the court of King James IV and produced a large body of work i ...
. The pinnacle in writing from this time was in fact Douglas's ''
Eneados
The ''Eneados'' is a translation into Middle Scots of Virgil's Latin ''Aeneid'', completed by the poet and clergyman Gavin Douglas in 1513.
Description
The title of Gavin Douglas' translation "Eneados" is given in the heading of a manuscript at C ...
'' (1513), the first full and faithful translation of an important work of classical antiquity into any
Anglic language
The Anglo-Frisian languages are the Anglic (English, Scots, and Yola) and Frisian varieties of the West Germanic languages.
The Anglo-Frisian languages are distinct from other West Germanic languages due to several sound changes: besides the ...
. Douglas is one of the first authors to explicitly identify his language as ''Scottis''. This was also the period when use of Scots in poetry was at its most richly and successfully aureate. Dunbar's ''Lament for the Makaris'' (c.1505) contains a
leet
Leet (or "1337"), also known as eleet or leetspeak, is a system of modified spellings used primarily on the Internet. It often uses character replacements in ways that play on the similarity of their glyphs via reflection or other resemblance. ...
of makars, not exclusively Scottish, some of whom are now only known through his mention, further indicative of the wider extent to the tradition.
Qualities in verse especially prized by many of these writers included the combination of skilful artifice with natural diction, concision and quickness () of expression. For example, Dunbar praises his peer,
Merseir in
The Lament' (ll.74-5) as one
:...
:"That did in love so lively write, So short so quick, of sentence high..."
Some of the Makars, such as Dunbar, also featured an increasing incorporation of Latinate terms into Scots prosody, or
aureation
Aureation ("to make golden", from la, aureus) is a device in arts of rhetoric that involves the " gilding" (or supposed heightening) of diction in one language by the introduction of terms from another, typically a classical language considere ...
, heightening the creative tensions between the ornate and the natural in
poetic diction Poetic diction is the term used to refer to the linguistic style, the vocabulary, and the metaphors used in the writing of poetry. In the Western tradition, all these elements were thought of as properly different in poetry and prose up to the time ...
.
The new plane of achievement set by Douglas in
epic and
translation
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between ''transla ...
was not followed up in the subsequent century, but later makars, such as
David Lyndsay
Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount (c. 1490 – c. 1555; ''alias'' Lindsay) was a Scottish herald who gained the highest heraldic office of Lyon King of Arms. He remains a well regarded poet whose works reflect the spirit of the Renaissance, speci ...
, still drew strongly on the work of fifteenth and early sixteenth century exponents. This influence can be traced right through to
Alexander Scott and the various members of the
Castalian Band
The Castalian Band is a modern name given to a grouping of Scottish Jacobean poets, or makars, which is said to have flourished between the 1580s and early 1590s in the court of James VI and consciously modelled on the French example of the P ...
in the Scottish court of
James VI
James is a common English language surname and given name:
*James (name), the typically masculine first name James
* James (surname), various people with the last name James
James or James City may also refer to:
People
* King James (disambiguat ...
(1567–1603) which included
Alexander Montgomerie
Alexander Montgomerie (Scottish Gaelic: Alasdair Mac Gumaraid) (c. 1550?–1598) was a Scottish Jacobean courtier and poet, or makar, born in Ayrshire. He was a Scottish Gaelic speaker and a Scots speaker from Ayrshire, an area which wa ...
and, once again, the king himself. The king composed a treatise, the
Reulis and Cautelis (1584), which proposed a formalisation of Scottish prosody and consciously strove to identify what was distinctive in the Scots tradition. The removal of the Court to London under James after 1603 is usually regarded as marking the eclipse of the distinctively Scottish tradition of poetry initiated by the Makars, but figures such as
William Drummond might loosely be seen as forming a continuation into the seventeenth century.
The Makars have often been referred to by literary critics as ''Scots Chaucerians''. While Chaucer's influence on fifteenth-century Scottish literature was certainly important, the makars drew strongly on a native tradition predating Chaucer, exemplified by Barbour, as well as the courtly literature of France.
In the more general application of the term which is current today the word can be applied to poets of the Scots revival in the eighteenth century, such as
Allan Ramsay and
Robert Fergusson
Robert Fergusson (5 September 1750 – 16 October 1774) was a Scottish poet. After formal education at the University of St Andrews, Fergusson led a bohemian life in Edinburgh, the city of his birth, then at the height of intellectual and c ...
. In recent times, other examples of poets that have seemed to particularly exemplify the traditions of the makars have included
Robert Garioch,
Sydney Goodsir Smith
Sydney Goodsir Smith (26 October 1915 – 15 January 1975) was a New Zealand-born Scottish poet, artist, dramatist and novelist. He wrote poetry in literary Scots often referred to as Lallans (Lowlands dialect), and was a major figure of the S ...
,
George Campbell Hay
George Campbell Hay (1915–1984) was a Scottish Symbolist poet and translator, who wrote in Scottish Gaelic, Scots and English. He used the patronymic Deòrsa Mac Iain Dheòrsa. He also wrote poetry in French, Italian and Norwegian, and ...
and
Norman MacCaig among many others.
Modern usage
The Scots Makar
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A position of national Poet laureate">laureate
In English, the word laureate has come to signify eminence or association with literary awards or military glory. It is also used for recipients of the Nobel Prize, the Gandhi Peace Award, the Student Peace Prize, and for former music direc ...
. The first appointment was made directly by the Parliament in that year when Edwin Morgan (poet)">Edwin Morgan received the honour to become Scotland's first ever official national poet. He was succeeded in 2011 by
. Jackie Kay was announced as the third holder of this post in 2016. Before Kay was appointed, it was suggested that the role might now only be referred to as the National Poet for Scotland, because of concerns that the word makar had to be explained outside of Scotland. Kay states that she argued for retaining the Makar name, which is still used. In August 2021
was announced as the fourth holder of the post.
, Scotland's capital, instituted a post of makar, known as the Edinburgh Makar. Each term lasts for three years and the first three incumbents were
(2008, 2011). The current incumbent (as of 2021) is
. The previous Edinburgh makars were
. and Shetlandic dialect writer and advocate
).
#43 and #94.
*''Makar'' is the name of a fictional character in the video game ''The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker'', see
.
* Makar is a New York indie rock band formed in 2002 by singer/songwriters Mark Purnell and Andrea DeAngelis.
*The Edinburgh Makars is an Amateur Drama Group founded in 1932 by
, the well-known Scottish actress, broadcaster and playwright.