Tales of a Grandfather

From Awe

This is a bibliography page, concerning a work to which reference is made elsewhere in this guide.

Scott, Sir Walter, Tales of a Grandfather, Being Stories Taken from Scottish History. Humbly Inscribed to Hugh Littlejohn, Esq.

(Hugh Littlejohn is an alias of Scott's grandson to his daughter Sophia, married (1820) to J.G. Lockhart, later his biographer: the boy was christened John Hugh (d. 1831). It was to alleviate his sickbed that Scott wrote the Tales.)

The first edition was In Three Vols. Printed for Cadell and Co. Edinburgh; Simpkin and Marshall, London; and John Cumming, Dublin. 1828.

It has often been reprinted. The edition used in AWE was published in 1923, by Cowans and Gray, of London and Glasgow.

The Tales of a Grandfather is, as its genesis suggests, nursery history: it is a re-telling of good stories, with a patriotic motive. It is not necessarily reliable, and should not be trusted as a source by modern historians; but it is a fine collection of the narratives that 'everyone knows', and that Scott had collected from folk memory from an early age.