Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of Aug. 15th
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It is the 227th day of the year, leaving 138 days remaining in 2022.
He told his stories of the Scots -- their history, their culture, and their whimsy -- in poems and novels. He is sometimes said to have "invented" Scotland, or more correctly, its image in popular culture.
He is also credited with inventing the genre of historical fiction, which he used to great effect in his novels and long, lyrical poems.
In his youth, Scott was a great reader with an eidetic memory, who loved to amaze others with his ability to recite massive amounts of poetry. When his took to writing, he would compile volumes of the works of others. His first foray into this field was the multi-volume collection, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.
His next work was The Lay of the Last Minstrel, about an old Scottish legend, and his work was enormously popular.
Over the next dozen years, he wrote several long, narrative poems, along with many shorter works. Among these were Lady of the Lake, which contains elements of historical fiction and is still read and referred to today, and the epic Marmion, with these oft-quoted lines:
Yet Clare's sharp questions must I shun,
Must separate Constance from the nun
Oh! what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive
He then turned to writing novels. His first was Waverley, which tells the story of the 1745 Jacobite Uprising through the eyes of his character, army officer Edward Waverley, Other novels included Ivanhoe, a romance set in England during the Middle Ages; Rob Roy, set in Scotland in the early 18th Century, and Old Mortality, set in Scotland in the late 17th Century.
Scott died in 1832.
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