a failure for which of course neither he nor it can be held responsible. The point is, it did not happen four hundred years ago. The Lorimer translation is the product of a twentieth-century mind – a mind which, moreover, though steeped in a rich and intense Christian tradition, both personal and national, had moved away from religious faith. The late Professor John Gibson made an astute assessment in 1988 when he wrote that, for all its vigour and lyricism, Lorimer’s translation had ‘come too late to be a genuinely religious or even popular event’. However, Professor Gibson continued, its real role in the future would be to serve the Scots literary renaissance pioneered by MacDiarmid. ‘But where that renaissance will lead, and whether it will effect a rapprochement with the still surviving dialects of the Scottish regions and go on from there to achieve authentic success and a revival of Scotland’s brightness – and, if it does, where along the line religious Scotland will join in – only time will tell.’7
The regret is not that The New Testament in Scots was published in 1983 rather than in, say, 1583. However convincing the argument that the confused linguistic condition of modern Scotland is directly related to missed opportunities in the past, it will change nothing. The regret, and the shame, is that when this book appeared in the late twentieth century only a tiny percentage of the Scottish people were sufficiently equipped to read it, and that thirty years on the same situation prevails. The education system of Scotland has never seriously addressed the anomaly that virtually all Scots are educated in one language (English) while huge numbers of them (possibly a majority) articulate their lives outside education in another language (Scots, in different forms and at different levels of density). Scots, until very recently, was encouraged in the classroom only by a handful of brave individual teachers who recognised its value and the value of the children who spoke it. For the most part, it was vigorously suppressed through the application of ridicule and legalised violence (in the form of the tawse or ‘belt’, not finally abolished until 1987) when a child dared to use it or could not help doing so. This was not just tolerated but approved – by the authorities who oversaw the system and even by the very people who passed through it, who were thus persuaded that their own tongue was an impediment to self-improvement.
Scottish people have never been taught how to read, write and express themselves to their fullest capability in Scots, as some of them have been in English. This is not, of course, to suggest that there are not plenty of capable and articulate Scots speakers, but that has nothing to do with their educational experience. A situation persists in which the population generally believes Scots to be ‘bad English’, ‘slang’ or – to use a phrase once common in the corridors of Scottish schools –‘the language of the gutter’. There are recent signs of more enlightened attitudes in the teaching profession, among educationalists and in both national and local government, and these are welcome. We are still, however, a long way from Scots – despite its being the language of the ‘national bard’ Robert Burns, the language of the world’s song of fellowship ‘Auld Lang Syne’, the language of a magnificent oral culture of song and story, the language of daily usage for hundreds of thousands of people, and the language of a six-hundred-year-old literature, one of the richest in Europe, of which the vast bulk of the population are kept in utter ignorance – getting the recognition and protection as a priceless national asset that it deserves.
Nobody, on taking up this book, can read a paragraph or a page from it and seriously conclude that the medium of William Laughton Lorimer’s translation is bad English, slang or the language of the gutter. Nor is it good enough to differentiate between Lorimer’s Scots and everyday spoken Scots, applauding one while denigrating the other as if there were no connection between them. Here is a work in a language that is articulate, literate, ornate, delicate, robust, cheerful, moving and profound, capable of capturing and liberating all the rich wonders of its subject matter. It should be a book savoured and enjoyed by tens of thousands, not by a select few. If Scotland should develop into a culturally and linguistically self-respecting, self-confident society, The New Testament in Scots will remain in print for many years to come, for the best of reasons: because there will be an increasing demand from the people, of all faiths and of none, to read it.
James Robertson, 2012
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
MY FATHER’S PARENTS were the Rev. Robert Lorimer, Free Church Minister of Mains & Strathmartine, a rural parish situated on the northern outskirts of Dundee, and Isabella Lockhart Robertson, who were married at Berne, Switzerland, in 1869, and during the next seventeen years had five sons and three daughters. He was the seventh of these eight children, was born at Strathmartine in 1885, and lived for most of his life within sight of the Sidlaws. When they grew up, his two eldest brothers, John Gordon Lorimer and David Lockhart Robertson Lorimer, both made distinguished contributions to Oriental linguistic studies; his eldest sister, Hilda Lockhart Lorimer, made an equally distinguished contribution to Homeric studies, and latterly became Vice-Principal of Somerville College, Oxford; and if he had died without having made the Scots translation of the New Testament printed in this memorial volume, his name might never have become quite so well known as any of theirs.8
Until towards the end of the eighteenth century, his eponymous ancestors had been farmers in Nithsdale: but his father’s paternal grandfather was the Rev. Robert Lorimer, LL.D., nicknamed the Pope of Haddington, who was born in 1765 and died in 1848. He was the son of Robert Lorimer, farmer in Cleughfoot and Gateside, near Sanquhar, but was educated at Glasgow University, and then entered the ministry of the Church of Scotland. In 1792, when he was twenty-six or twenty-seven, the estates of the defunct Marquisate of Annandale devolved upon the Earl of Hopetoun, one of the principal heritors of the wealthy parish of Haddington. In 1793 the Rev. Robert Lorimer was appointed Chaplain to the Hopetoun Fencibles; in 1796 he was ordained Minister of Haddington; and in 1801 he married Elizabeth Gordon, daughter of John Gordon of Balmoor, W.S., and Margaret Stuart, through whom she was descended from James, fourth Earl of Moray, the Bonnie Earl’s grandson. Their son, the Rev. John Gordon Lorimer, D.D., was born in 1804 and died in 1868. After having been educated at Glasgow University, he was ordained Minister of Torryburn, Fife, in 1828, but only three years later became Minister of St David’s (commonly called the Ram’s Horn Kirk), Glasgow. He married Jane Campbell, daughter of the Rev. John Campbell, D.D., who had been Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1819. One of the Rev. Dr John Campbell’s first cousins was Thomas Campbell the poet; and amongst her second cousins Jane Campbell numbered both the classical scholars Lewis Campbell and Charles Badham.
Ever since the Anglo-Scottish Parliamentary Union of 1707, the clergy of the Established Church had not only occupied a much more dignified social position, but had also been much better-off, than most of their parishioners. The Pope of Haddington and his son had both risen in the world, and had both seemingly become pillars of the Establishment. But in 1843, when ten years of mounting conflict between Church and State culminated in the Disruption, the Rev. John Gordon Lorimer instantly renounced his emoluments, and soon became the first Free Church Minister of St David’s, Glasgow. Only a few weeks later, the Pope followed his son’s example, and in due course became Haddington’s first Free Church Minister. What the Earl of Hopetoun may perhaps have had to say about his defection from the Establishment has not been recorded.
The Rev. John Gordon Lorimer’s elder son, Robert, was born in 1840 and died in 1925. Like both his father and his paternal grandfather before him, he was educated at Glasgow University, and then, not without some preliminary hesitation, entered the ministry. In 1866 he was ordained Minister of Mains & Strathmartine; in 1900, when the Free Church and the United Presbyterian Church together formed the United Free Church, he became Strathmartine’s first United Free Church Minister; and in 1909 he retired from active service. Although his ministry had thus lasted for forty-two years, the stipend on which he had brought up a family of eight children had never exceeded £400 a year: but none of them ever questioned the validity of the principles for which his father and grandfather had sacrificed the security which their merits had earned. He was dignified, but not ambitious; and, although he was both considerate and conscientious, he
