Palermo

"next stop: Toledo" I wrote, eagerly anticipating the continuation of the Michael Scot trail. Melrose was great fun but it yielded only memories of legends of Scot, the medieval astrologer, astronomer, 'wizard' of legend. Getting nearer to the real man would mean mainland Europe. We don't really know where in Scotland he came from and his first unambiguous appearance in documented history is in Toledo (well, actually Bologna, in 1215, but he was there in the party of the Bishop of Toldeo). For a variety of reasons that next step has taken more than a year but Toledo still awaits; we went to Sicily.

Michael Scot's enduring fame certainly owes a lot to his association with the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, King of Sicily, King of Germany, King of Jerusalem. Scot joined Frederick's Court sometime between 1220 and 1224 and spent the rest of his life with him, dying in 1235 (probably). Frederick was, apparently a remarkable man, intellectual, tolerant, bold, ruler of a huge swathe of Europe, favoured even by fate - at least at first; '...one of a small band of medieval rulers who possesses modern admirers,' as Abulafia notes (if you doubt us, Abulafia and me, just take a look not only at this tweet in which Frederick is depicted as 'literal coolest dude ever', but also at the thousands of likes and the many responses). Stupor mundi, he was called, 'wonder of the world'. The hyperbolic sense of epoch-making ubermensch has hardly lessened since.

He would always have been noted in scholarly circles but his role as Frederick's Court Astrologer brought Michael Scot and his esoteric knowledge to the eyes of the wider world. According to Kantorowicz, 'The shuddering awe which Frederick II inspired was shared by his Court Astrologer, whom people called a "second Apollo".' Dante placed both men in the appropriate circles of his Inferno, possibly boosting Scot's fame for many more centuries than might otherwise have been the case. Grasping Frederick's story is thus essential to understanding Michael's. Books and articles discussing Frederick are often useful sources for Michael. A visit to Palermo, Frederick's childhood home, capital of his Kingdom of Sicily, home at least some of the time to his Court, seemed like a great way to get closer to the latter stages of Michael's life and times.

Here is The Court of the Emperor Frederick II in Palermo as represented in 1865 by German painter Arthur von Ramberg; a vision perhaps tailored to Frederick's place in the German national origin myth. The great Emperor, noble of mien, receives some awed Muslim visitors. I was intrigued by the turbanned gentlemen conferring surreptitiously at upper right: Court Astrologers and Philosophers?

This picture was pretty much all of my Palermo-specific preparation. I think I wanted to let the city itself lead me deeper into the times and tales of Frederick and Michael. If nothing else, being there led me to read more. I found a vigorous city of great character languishing in many layers of history.

This is Palermo Cathedral. It was built in 1185 on top of a mosque that had been built on top of an earlier Christian church and was modified and augmented several times in succeeding centuries. It is one of the major buildings of the Arab-Norman architecture that emerged in Sicily in the 12th century as the conquering Norman invaders employed Arabic styles and craftsmen, indulging in the 'enthusiastic but often inelegant juxtaposition of ideas and practices derived from several cultures' (Abulafia). Palermo Cathedral is impressive if not 'elegant' but its present-day appearance owes a lot to additions and alterations on top of the Normans' characteristic eclecticism. Its fundamental Arab-Norman identity points to the cultural melting pot Sicily must have been at this time, similarly to Toledo; the right sort of place for Michael's own cross-cultural activity.

Despite the stories we don't know where or how Michael Scot died, or where he was buried. How strange, then, to stand in Palermo Cathedral just a couple of feet from Frederick's sarcophagus, from the mortal remains of the man who, 800 or so years ago, added Michael to his court, came to value his teaching and counsel, incidentally brought him to enduring prominence; sat, possibly no further away than I was from the sarcophagus, asking Michael for astrological counsel on some course of action or posing questions like, 'on what does the Earth rest?'

In the 12th century Palazzo dei Normanni (Norman Palace) we saw the beautiful, famous Capella Palatina with its blend of Norman, Arabic and Byzantine form and decoration, but also the royal apartments: ancient wood paneling, high ceilings, decorated again with Byzantine style mosaics. The palace was built not by Frederick but by his grandfather, Roger II, but he would have lived there and used it as headquarters when he was in Palermo. What trusted advisers would have been admitted to the Emperor's own, private apartments?

The great architectural attractions of Palermo were mostly built by Frederick's predecessors in the 12th century. He himself left fewer buildings to posterity. He spent much time away from Sicily and probably had less money to spend. The Castello Maniace in Syracuse is one of the few buildings of his that remains so of course we had to visit it, when we found ourselves on that side of the island. While the H P Lovecraft fan in me likes the idea of a "castle of the maniacs" this is not the meaning of the name - its name comes from the Byzantine general who originally established a fort on the island of Ortigia, perfectly placed for the defence of Syracuse. No trace of that original castle remains and what we see now is something like the building constructed on Frederick's orders between 1232 and 1240, plus some modifications in the years since. A planned second storey was never added.

Everywhere we went in Sicily we saw towns marked by or reconstructed after the earthquake of 1693. The Maniace Castle also suffered an explosion in 1704, in a room being used as an armory. The repairs after the 1693 earthquake were recent enough that the associated documents still exist, incidentally revealing more detail of the original building despite its great temporal remove. The outstanding feature of the castle is doubtless its vaulted Great Hall whose function is quite mysterious, within a military, defensive structure. Frederick may have spent time here but Michael was dead before it was completed. Is it fanciful to suggest that its incorporation of classical motifs into something Gothic mirrors the introduction of classical thinkers to medieval philosophy?

Palermo's great medieval buildings are world-famous, in great condition, very busy as tourist attractions (I might write a separate post on that topic) but the medieval city does not really persist. Perhaps one begins to get some sense of it in the Kalsa district, towards the Piazza Marina, a grand square standing where Palermo's medieval harbour has long since silted up. Frederick spent years at a time away from Palermo taking his Court with him, astrologers, animals and all so it would be wrong to imagine Michael making himself a happy home there. Nonetheless Palermo rubbed my nose in Frederick's times and the environment he grew up in, with all its geopolitical superstructure and, most importantly of all, human depth and complexity. In coming a little bit closer to Frederick's world, so that it starts to feel less cartoon-like, I feel I've also come a little bit closer to the world in which Michael Scot functioned; a fine consequence of a couple of weeks' holiday.

William Blake

The Michael Scot trail continues to lead in all sorts of amusing directions. I believe Scot's prominence in history, beyond academic treatises on medieval science, stems largely from his visibility in Dante's Divine Comedy. The Divine Comedy in turn gained quite beautiful illustrations at the hands of William Blake though sadly this project was left unfinished when Blake died. So when my wife and I found ourselves planning a trip south of the border a stop in Cambridge for William Blake's Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum seemed obligatory. It would have been even without Scot.

The exhibition was a revelation, illuminating the radical humanitarianism underlying his visionary art. It sent me back to this long-neglected book where I lingered over the tale of little Tom Dacre who is sold to be a chimney sweep by his father when his mother dies. His life is miserable but he has a wonderful visionary dream of liberation in which an angel tells him that if he's a good boy, 'He'd have God for his father and never want joy.' The next morning:

And so Tom awake; and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Tho' the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm;
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.

Blake would improve Tom's material lot but he's already in a better place spiritually.

Our world is very different from Blake's and most of us nowadays do not share his religious belief. In the world we've created for ourselves, doing your duty is no defence against great harm, maybe cast aside in some global restructuring exercise or suddenly finding ourselves guilty of some unimagined bureaucratic sin. Why should people buy into structures where you can do your duty and come to harm nonetheless?

K-Pop

I was fascinated by this account from the BBC: How jealous 'super fans' try to dictate their idols' private lives. Fans of the K-Pop group aespa are outraged to discover that singer Karina has a boyfriend. Karina has compounded the offence by apologising publicly rather than on a private, fans-only forum. She's only a girl in a band. Can't she have a personal life like everybody else?

A bizarre tale but it's the background that holds the attention, the personal involvement of the fans in the capitalistic project of the band.

"Fans put in labour to ensure the group's success. They consider the idol a product. And if you want to see the product on the stage for a long time, the artistes, the fans, and the management will all have to put in hard work."

We learn of "fan labour": streaming their idols' music, even at night while sleeping, to move them up the charts; studying the voting rules of the several fan polls; dividing their voting efforts to get their group as far up the rankings as they can; responding to negative comments in online forums.

Karina is not 'like everybody else'. She is a component of a corporate entity, filling a role that precludes a personal life. Her reality has to be that perceived by the corporate organism, not the human one she grew up with; just as other human components of such organisms need to abandon their human moral values to fulfil their functions. The striking K-Pop innovation is to transform the super fans from consumers to constituents. They also must embrace the reality perceived by the corporation, 'put in hard work' alongside artistes and management to help it optimise its position in the landscape it perceives, of money, charts, prizes. They don't need it for insight, balm, enlightenment, support... they need it to succeed. Its success, on its own terms, is their success. What a wheeze!

---

Karina image: 티비텐, CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Green banks

Greenbank Garden is a National Trust for Scotland property on the very south edge of Glasgow, actually in East Renfrewshire council area. It's a couple of miles from my house and I pass there quite often on walks; a liminal territory, suburbs shading into farmland. The house and garden both date from the 18th century but it's the garden that's the real draw, lavishly stocked and creatively laid out. Also there's a café!

No doubt Greenbank's garden sees thousands of visitors each year. It would probably lose a fame contest, however, to Green Bank, West Virginia, USA. The Green Bank Observatory has operated since the late 1950s and has played host to several large instruments, including now the Robert C Byrd Telescope, the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world.

In the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), astronomers look for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilisations, perhaps incidental to the normal conduct of their business, perhaps sent out deliberately to say, "we're here!" to anybody who might be listening (for a sense of this work, see the film Contact, science fiction of course but realistic in its depiction of SETI research). Green Bank has been central to these efforts: in Project Ozma (1960), Project Phoenix (1995-1998) and currently in Breakthrough Listen. The chances of success are small but the implications would be enormous, comparable in importance to the Copernican revolution. SETI inevitably catches people's imaginations far beyond the professional community so Green Bank is a pretty famous place.

Meandering past I wondered if there is any connection between the two 'green bank's? Greenbank Garden has played no role in SETI or indeed any science other than horticulture. I'm sure Green Bank Observatory's grounds are well maintained but I doubt the shrubs and grass attract visitors.

Many Scottish place names have been reused in the former colonies. Could Green Bank be one of them? The name is mundane, likely to occur independently to many people for local, topographical reasons. There are several 'Greenbank's across central Scotland. In West Virginia we learn that the name was given in Civil War times, 'from a little green bank on J Pierce Woodell's land beside the stream.' Nonetheless we can look a little closer.

The phone snapshot at left is very poor but possibly gives some sense of how atmospheric Greenbank House is at the end of the day. It was built in 1763 by Robert Allason. Mr Allason started out as a baker in Port Glasgow but diversified to become rich from transatlantic trade. His half-brother William established a store in Falmouth, Virginia. Robert sourced goods for William's store which were exchanged for tobacco, a valuable commodity on this side of the Atlantic. The Allasons had farmed for generations at Flenders, just south of what is now Clarkston. We might imagine some degree of pride and satisfaction when Robert was able to buy Flenders Farm and other parcels of land and build Greenbank House. After the American Wars of Independence he went bankrupt, however, and he had been forced to sell Greenbank by 1784.

From an excellent Inverclyde local history blog we learn that William Allason travelled 'extensively' in Virginia before establishing the store in Falmouth. It does then seem possible that William passed through the very country that would come to be called by almost the same name as his brother's mansion in Scotland. Could he have bequeathed the name? That doesn't seem likely. The account referenced above places the naming of Green Bank a century later. So all we probably have is the most ethereal of resonances, feet that knew one Greenbank treading the earth of the other. Perhaps, in an obscure way, a barely perceptible trace of the sort that will eventually reveal the existence of extraterrestrial life.

The Allasons traded also in the Caribbean and owned property there. I've seen Robert Allason described as a 'slave trader' and he definitely profited from plantations where slaves carried out the work. Yuck. But look also at the full address of Green Bank Observatory. It's in 'Pocahontas County, West Virginia'. Both green banks also bump us against the brutality of colonialism.

Ending on a milder note, here's my wife Margaret in the beautiful woodlands surrounding Greenbank, after a working day.

Gerald Balfour; H P Lovecraft

This splendid portrait by G F Watts shows Gerald William Balfour, 2nd Earl of Balfour (1853-1945). Balfour was a Conservative MP from 1885 to 1906, occupying various Cabinet positions; his elder brother Arthur was Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905. Gerald also followed his brother as President of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). I'm not a political historian. I came across the Balfours when I read Archie Roy's great book, The Eager Dead. Archie, a past SPR President himself, tells a detailed tale from the early years of the Society for Psychical Research, drawing on previously unseen Balfour family papers he'd been given access to. It's an amazing story! Gerald Balfour plays a central role which particularly caught my imagination.

In very brief summary: Gerald and his lover, Winifred Coombe-Tennant conceived a child. Mrs Coombe-Tennant had had difficult experiences giving birth and did not relish the prospect but both of them believed they were being directed to do this from beyond the grave by the founding fathers of the SPR, Frederick Myers, Henry Sidgwick and Edmund Gurney. Their child, guided by the deceased eminences of the SPR, was meant to grow into a sort of messiah who would lead mankind into a new golden age. While Henry Coombe-Tennant had an unusual and remarkable life, it was lived largely away from the limelight. He spent his last 29 years as a Benedictine monk, perhaps a big disappointment to the dead founders of the SPR.

I was particularly struck that people at the heart of government could believe such things and act on them. I found myself wondering what people at the heart of government now might believe - well, apart from the obvious.

Andrew Conway told me about The Lovecraft Investigations, an updating of the stories and themes of H P Lovecraft in the form of a fake podcast from the BBC. I love it! Many films have started from Lovecraft's stories and few of them do him any sort of justice. By far the best adaptation I've seen is The Call of Cthulhu, an ultra-low-budget production of the H P Lovecraft Historical Society, a black-and-white, silent movie, the sort of film that would have been made at the time the stories were originally written. Short on gloss, long on atmosphere, it really catches the feel of the original story. We can't call it an updating, though, it's more like an attempt to fake an artifact from Lovecraft's own time.

A cinematic or televisual updating would demand images, CGI stuff, that would leave nothing to the imagination; even worse, would compete destructively with your own imaginings. The podcast form is utterly contemporary but doesn't suffer from this problem at all. Conversations and sounds can build atmosphere in a truly Lovecraftian way while leaving any amount of room for the listener's own mental images. Since they are gathering material the podcasters leave their microphones on all the time and provide narration for the listener. Recording machinery may of course prove more sensitive than the human ear.

All sorts of updatings become possible that don't break the Lovecraftian essentials. I just loved the detailed histories that blend almost imperceptibly into the real world so you start googling names to work out who's real and who's imagined for the story. It seems absolutely correct that followers of Nyarlathotep would be found at the heart of the British establishment, that the Esoteric Order of Dagon would melt into the British Union of Fascists.

I was amused also to discover that Kennedy Fisher, one of the two (fictional) podcast hosts, has her own blog. It leads in many disturbing directions, one of them the Wikipedia biography of Oswald Mosely. There in turn it was surprising to learn about Mosley's involvement with organic farming in Britain, the origins of the Soil Association and ... someone called Lady Eve Balfour. Yes, from the same Balfour family, one of the six children Gerald had with his wife, Lady Elizabeth Bulwer-Lytton. Henry Coombe-Tennant was her illegitimate half-brother.

There's no suggestion Eve Balfour had any fascist sympathies whatsoever. She lived for 50 years with another woman and may have been a sort of person the fascists would have preferred to stamp out. She and Mosley come together only in their shared interest in organic farming. But I was slightly spooked to follow a trail from these early 20th century psychical researchers and bump up against a famed British fascist, a real-world mirror of the sort of trail Dr Eleanor Peck would have drawn out so convincingly.

Michael Scot in Walter Scott's 'Lay of the Last Minstrel'

How many people nowadays would read a long narrative poem? Students of literature, compelled by reading lists? Maybe people interested in history? Seems likely such poems are a minority taste nowadays but when Walter Scott published The Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805 it was an instant best seller. With the further poems that followed it generated wealth and fame on the scale of a bestselling airport novelist nowadays.

We studied some poetry in school, of course. I enjoyed Tam O'Shanter but The Lay of the Last Minstrel is much longer. I don't believe I've ever read such a long story in rhyming form before - quite a new experience for a scientist. However it's the starting point for much of the more modern Michael Scot lore so I felt more or less obligated. A visit to the Old Bank Bookshop in Wigtown yielded a lovely old volume of Scott's poetry and I was set to go. There are digital versions available online but a physical book seems much more ... amenable. And look at that beautiful gothic font!

The Lay of the Last Minstrel tells a story of romance and conflict in the 16th century Scottish Borders, with added supernatural elements. It borrows heavily from real events and characters so Scott provided detailed notes fleshing out the historical underpinnings. I believe these notes have become a Michael Scot starting point for many people. They also include Scot stories and legends of the Border country. Some of these lack any written source. Where exactly Scott knew them from is unclear, at least to me. Perhaps they were stories everybody knew at that time, or that he heard from old people. I guess he may have invented some of them himself. I believe he was eager to see this renowned character as a forbear. Perhaps he wasn't above embroidering the historical tales in a way that suited his purposes.

In James Hogg's novel, Three Perils of Man, Scot is a major character, physically present, malign, powerful in magic, scary. In The Lay of the Last Minstrel, set a couple of centuries later, he's less a character, more of an all-pervading presence. He has two well-defined appearances. The first occurs fairly early when he is more or less dead, lying in 'a secret nook' in Melrose Abbey. We shouldn't open any coffin but his is particularly forbidding:

Within it burns a wondrous light,
To chase the spirits that love the night:
That lamp shall burn unquenchably,
Until the eternal doom shall be.

In the Notes Scott recalls old tales of such 'eternal lamps, pretended to have been found burning in ancient sepulchres.'

Dead for centuries, he is nonetheless remarkably well-preserved:

Before their eyes the Wizard lay,
As if he had not been dead a day.
His hoary beard in silver roll'd,
He seemed some seventy winters old;
A palmer's amice wrapp'd him round,
With a wrought Spanish Baldric bound,
Like a pilgrim from beyond the sea;
His left hand held his Book of Might;
A silver cross was in his right;
The lamp was placed beside his knee:
High and majestic was his look,
At which the fellest fiends had shook,
And all unruffled was his face:
They trusted his soul had gotten grace

Michael Scot - the real Scot, not the 'wizard' - first appears unambiguously in history in Toledo, Spain. He had joined the group of scholars translating works of classical Greece from Arabic into Latin and thus making them accessible to Christendom. Perhaps his garb here makes contact with this historical reality, hinting at years spent acquiring esoteric knowledge on mainland Europe. In the poem he is supposed to have died within living memory, an impossibility that Scott freely admits in the Notes: 'By a poetical anachronism, he is here placed in a later era.'

Why trouble this long-dead mage? His 'Book of Might' has been buried with him to keep it safe from all prying eyes, 'save at his Chief of Branksome's need.' The coffin is opened by the Abbott and the knight Deloraine to retrieve this book, at the request of the Lady of Branksome who believes it will help her divine the outcome of the forthcoming conflict. Here Scott is connecting Michael Scot to his personal family mythology, of the Border Scotts. It seems likely that 'Michael Scot' is just 'Michael the Scot', his origin distinguishing him from other Michael's among the scholars and savants of his time. There is no sound reason to believe he is related to anybody in Scotland with the surname Scott, or indeed that he would have regarded any high Lord or Lady in Branksome tower as his 'Chief'.

Anyway the scenes in Melrose Abbey are spectacular. Nowadays we might suspect Scott of writing with the film adaptation in mind. Deloraine takes the book from the dead wizard - 'He thought, as he took it, the dead man frown'd' - and it is free to play its role in subsequent events.

Michael Scot's second appearance, late in the poem, is equally insubstantial but also accompanied by dramatic scenes, thunder and lightning, apocalyptically dark clouds and blackness - a substantial damper on a happy wedding celebration.

It was not eddying mist or fog,
Drain'd by the sun from fen or bog;
Of no eclipse had sages told;
And yet, as it came on apace,
Each one could scarce his neighbour's face,
Could scarce his own stretch'd hand behold.

Gilpin Horner, the Earl of Cranstoun's mischievous goblin page, has sneakily taken possession of the Book of Might earlier in the tale. He is now zapped by a lightning bolt, heard across the whole of the Border country, and disappears completely. Some wedding guests think they glimpse an insubstantial presence:

Some heard a voice in Branksome Hall,
Some saw a sight, not seen by all;
That dreadful voice was heard by some,
Cry, with loud summons, 'GYLBIN, COME!'
And on the spot where burst the brand,
Just where the page had flung him down,
Some saw an arm, and some a hand
And some the waving of a gown.

The knight Deloraine glimpses beyond doubt the same wizard from whom he had taken the book in Melrose Abbey; a chilling experience. Poor Deloraine, implacable warrior though he is, doesn't have a good poem.

(An aside: I was sure some bored student of Scottish literature would have created a 'Gilpin Horner' internet presence. The malevolent goblin page is amusing, possibly even a role model for some anarchic characters, and I felt sure he would have caught somebody's imagination. But there is no Gilpin Horner on Twitter even although most Harry Potter characters, for instance have accounts; there are several Vanessa Ives; etc. Cthulhu of course is all over the place, a cult no longer. Facebook and Instagram are similarly Horner-free. I think this confirms my feeling that these long narrative poems of Scott's are very little read nowadays.)

There's less to say about Michael Scot than for Three Perils of Man because there is much less of a characterisation. There's no interaction with this Scot; he has more of the character of a feature of the natural world, something bigger than humans and with untameable power. Nonetheless his appearance in this - hugely popular - tale clearly caught many people's imaginations, no doubt contributing to an awareness of this medieval scholar, skewed possibly, that persists to the present day. The Notes certainly underlined this awareness. The folk tales are fun, even if their origins are obscure. They show how famous Scot still was in Scotland hundreds of years after his death. But Scott confounds the astrologer Michael Scot (~1175 - ~1235) with Michael Scot of Balwearie who flourished later in the 13th century and, unlike our Michael Scot, played a significant role in Scottish affairs.

I was wary of this tale but I mostly enjoyed reading it. Some of the most atmospheric scenes gain greatly from the poetic retelling. Again, what we learn about the real Scot is strictly limited, provisional, but I think it would make a great cult movie!

Michael Scot in Hogg's 'Three Perils of Man'

Regular readers - yes, both of you - will have spotted my current Michael Scot obsession. I'm intrigued by this medieval Scotsman who became one of the leading intellectuals of his time, renowned across Europe. Almost as intriguing as the reality of the man are his many appearances in fiction and the folk tales from which these emerged. Do we glimpse in these some of the long-forgotten reality, albeit filtered and refracted by centuries of imagining and recounting?

With such thoughts in mind I'm revisiting James Hogg's 1822 novel Three Perils of Man: War, Women and Witchcraft. I read it many years ago, when I knew nothing about Scot, and had forgotten most of the details. The siege of Roxburgh Castle in 1314 forms the starting point but principal actors are changed, real people turn up at times and in places they didn't, major new themes are added (the knights besieging and defending the castle are competing for their preferred princesses). In case any reader still suspects Hogg of historical realism there is a very large dose of the supernatural, centring particularly on 'the wizard' Michael Scot.

Hogg makes Michael Scot a feared presence in the Scottish Borders, a household name among the farmers and shepherds, invoked whenever something slightly uncanny happens. We learn (p.323) that the hardy Borderers are used to the ways of fairies and the several sorts of supernatural being that go by night, but 'these were the natural residenters in the wilds of the woodland, the aboriginal inhabitants of the country.' Appropriate precautions for warding off these gude neyboris were understood and practiced.

But ever since Master Michael Scot came from the colleges abroad to reside at the castle of Aikwood, the nature of demonology in the forest glades was altogether changed, and a full torrent of necromancy ... deluged the country all over - an art of the most appalling and malignant kind, against which no fence yet discovered could yet prevail.

'the colleges abroad' is a rare point of contact with the real Michael Scot. He certainly spent time in Toledo, Bologna, Palermo, possibly Paris, but there is no solid evidence he ever came back to Scotland. At the very end of the book we learn that 'he has not only kept the world in awe, but in dreadful agitation for the space of thirty years'. He died about 1235 and the siege of Roxburgh was in 1314 so 'thirty years' doesn't make much sense but there is little point agonising over chronology - Hogg's treatment of history is 'permissibly cavalier' says Douglas Gifford, in the excellent notes to this edition.

Aikwood Tower is his stronghold, a 'great gousty castle', a 'douth and an awsome looking bigging'. Aikwood certainly belonged to the Scott family (who probably weren't really connected to Michael but never mind) but it didn't exist until 1535.

Master Michael Scot the 'renowned magician' is a forbidding character, cold and cruel. When he first appears in person we have already met his few companions, the seneschal Gourlay and the imps Prim, Prig and Pricker, and seen with what malice they meet peaceably intended visitors. The Master's very first appearance etablishes what sort of person he is:

"Gourlay, what is the meaning of all this uproar?"
"It is only Prim, Prig and Pricker," said he, "making sport with a mendicant friar and his ass."
"Are they killing him?" enquired his Master, with the greatest composure, and without lifting his eyes from a great book that lay in front of him.
"I wot not, sire," said Gourlay, with the same indifference.
"Ay, it is no matter," returned the Master; "It will keep them in employment a little while."

The imps have great magical power but are barely controllable. They do Scot's bidding but only under certain rules; overuse may, and probably does, have terrible consequences. They are extremely mischievous and love chaos, even when it involves their master. If he summons them they must be given tasks, at risk of a heavy price:

Work, Master, work; work we need;
Work for the living, or for the dead:
Since we are called, work we will have,
For the master, or for the slave.
Work, Master, work. What work now?"

They're great fun, they could have a book to themselves but it would be a bit full-on, just unrelenting gleeful malice, chaos, torment. Back to Michael Scot. We're told of his most essential, nocturnal pursuits:

At such hours as these his capacious mind was abstracted from all worldy concerns, such as other mortals busy themselves about. If any thing sublunary engaged his studies and calculations, it was how to make the living die and the dead to live - how to remove mountains out of their places, to turn the sea into dry land, and the fields into a billowy and briny ocean, - or in any way counteract nature in her goings on.

There is a physical description:

He was a boardly muscular man, somewhat emaciated in his appearance, with a strong bushy beard that flowed to his girdle, of a hue that had once been jet black, but was now slightly tinted with grey. His eyes were uncommonly bright and piercing but they had some resemblance to the eyes of a serpent. He wore on his head a turban of crimson velvet, ornamented with mystic figures in gold, and on the front of it was a star of many dazzling colours. The rest of his body was wrapped in a mantle or gown, striped with all the hues of the rainbow, and many more.

(That's not a typo, by the way. The handy Scots glossary in this edition tells us 'boardly' means 'stalwart'.)

Generic cartoon wizard, really, isn't he? At least to our modern eyes.

Scot is opposed with an itinerant monk, the 'gospel friar', a mysterious figure who is gradually revealed to be Roger Bacon. In their magical contest Bacon uses scientific means to spectacular ends while Scot despatches Prim, Prig and Pricker to reshape the Eidon Hills, an action that (I think) leads the devil himself to take an active part in events, to Scot's ultimate detriment.

Born about 1214, Bacon's life barely overlaps with Scot's; more duff chronology. He seems to have been a pretty curmudgeonly character, commenting waspishly on many of his predecessors. He notes Scot as a translator of Aristotle and of Averroes' commentaries on him, but also considers him superficial, a pretender to knowledge, a plagiarist possibly, maybe even ignorant of Latin. None of this is in Three Pillars of Man but it does make him an interesting figure for Hogg to have woven in.

The friar is devoutly Christian while Scot has given himself over to the devil. A debate between the two (p.197) offers some origin story for the dark, wizardly Michael Scot met here:

(the friar) considered the Christian Revelation as the source of all that is good, wise or great among men. The other (Scot) had disbelieved it from his youth upward; and, not being able to come to any conclusion from ought he could learn among men, he had sought communion with the potent spirits of the elements; and, after seven years of unparalleled suffering, such as cannot be named, had attained what he sought. He had entered into a league with them, renouncing, for ever and ever, all right in a Redeemer, and signing the covenant with his own blood.

Exactly nothing is known about Scott's early life, where in Scotland he was born, what sort of people he lived among, how he was educated. All of this is Hogg's imagining, writing, after all, six centuries after Scot passed away.

Scot believes he can stand up to the Devil himself. Unsurprisingly things don't go well for him. The closing sentences link this book to others' Michael Scot stories:

They went, and found him lying as stated, only that his eyes were shut, some of his attendant elves having closed them over night. His book was in his bosom, and his wand in his hand, from either of which no force of man could separate them, although when they lifted the body and these together, there was no difference in weight from the body of another man. The King then caused these dangerous relics to be deposited along with the body in an iron chest, which they buried in a vaulted aisle of the Abbey of Melrose; and the castle of Aikwood has never more been inhabited by mortal man.

This brings us to Walter Scott and The Lay of the Last Minstrel; probably a much more substantial source for Hogg than any historical fact but that will be another story.

I enjoyed reading this book years ago and I equally enjoyed revisiting it. It's an unusual blend of couthy tales of Borders country folk, medieval battles, and wizardry and the supernatural. It's occasionally slightly garrulous for modern readers, as are the voices of the unsophisticated Borderers, and the archaic Scots words they use might be a further obstacle, but I feel it's entertaining and unjustly neglected. It should have an audience of beanied young people with purple hair, the sort of people who devour Harry Potter and ther Lord of the Rings. I'd love to see an illustrated edition. It tells us pretty much nothing about Michael Scot, except for how large he has loomed, over the centuries, in the imaginations of Scottish writers.