An odd mix of historical fiction, comedy of manners, and Gothic set pieces. The story of a young stranger who visits a small town on the Scottish coast, and the Antiquary who takes him in and presides over much of the town.

A good tale from Scotland, I would recommend it to anyone that would like to know a little of the Scottish history and at the same time enjoy a mysterious good novel!

Although it starts slow, it is captivating from about midway on! We really do need to use the substantial authors notes, though, unless you are a Latin scholar.

Started slowly, and ended in something of a rush, but overall, a good plot and interesting characters.

funny af

fantastic novel even if a bit hard to understand (thanks OE and Scotland to boot). Scott’s characters are so robust and his treatment of them was not only fair but masterful. you’ll have to read to understand the next part, but if i can only grow up to be as wise and mediating as Oldbuck, as daring and mysterious as Lovel, as confident and surprising as Hector, as gracious and steadfast as Miss Wardour, and as entertaining and unwaveringly humble as our hearty mendicant Edie, i’m sure to be juuuuuuust fine.

As you would expect from Scott.

Scott demonstrates here once again that he is very capable of writing strong scenes and peopling them with vivid and memorable characters. He is less able to string them together into a compelling story.

The book begins with the titular Antiquary - no doubt based partly on Scott himself - and a mysterious young man called Lovell purposing to stay some time in a Scottish coastal town. A gothic storm traps the local nobleman and his beautiful daughter Miss Wardour on a cliff-side. With much derring-do Lovell, with the help of a wandering mendicant - is able to save them. A love affair is hinted between Miss Wardour and our hero but owing to his obscure origins is discouraged by the lady as being socially inappropriate.

All of this is interspersed by the humorous prolixity of the Antiquary, apt to call his home a cenobitium and quote passages of Tacitus' Agricola to all and sundry. He meanwhile has enlisted Lovell's help in the writing of a Caledoniad to tell the tale of the northern revolt against the Roman legions.

One looks forward then to a tale which, if familiar, will be told in Scott's idiosyncratic way with plenty of pleasurable beats. How will the love affair be resolved? How will the epic poem be completed? Will the couple elope to the distress of the father? Whatever questions we have must be put on hold, because about halfway through the book all of this is suddenly laid aside and new elements are introduced.

There are a lot of scenes which are superfluous to the narrative, and others which will foreshadow the ending in a manner both obvious and unconvincing. Scott is often criticised for being verbose, but I find this is often enjoyable so long as it is in service of a narrative and characters one is interested in. This felt too much like reading two separate books awkwardly mashed together. However, I will say that the Antiquary himself is one of my favourite of Scott's creations.

If you think of Sir Walter Scott as a writer of sweeping adventure stories set in a romanticised version of the past, this book may come as a surprise. Essentially, `The Antiquary' is a comic novel which presents a very unromantic view of a cross-section of society in a small area of late 18th century Scotland. Apart from one heroic rescue and one, rather farcical, duel, there are no action scenes. There is a central love story but we don't get to spend much time with the aristocratic star-crossed lovers. Instead, the friends and servants who would normally be secondary characters take centre stage. The most notable of these are the kind-hearted antiquary, Jonathan Oldbuck, and the wise beggar, Edie Ochiltree, who both act as mentors to the melancholy hero.

I did find some of Scott's lengthy humorous passages rather tedious, and there is a comic subplot involving a German confidence-trickster which I could have done without, but all credit to Scott for poking fun at his own antiquarian tendencies. Among the things I particularly enjoyed in this novel are the embedded ghost stories and the vivid portrait of a matriarchal group of fisherfolk. Above all this is a book which examines false or mistaken interpretations of the past. Some of these misinterpretations are merely ridiculous but others create serious consequences both for people's personal lives and for national politics. Oldbuck is fascinated by Scottish history but interestingly Scott makes him the descendant of German immigrants fleeing from religious persecution. That alone teaches me that Scott was a more subtle and less nationalistic author than I thought he was.

The Antiquary was my first Sir Walter Scott novel. There was no particular reason I had not read him earlier; there were just other books ahead of him when I was ready to read from the nineteenth century. I had been looking forward to my first encounter but The Antiquary was a decided disappointment.
Much to the novel seemed contrived, from the false quotations at the start of some of the chapters, to the improbable names of many characters.
For me, the plot just seemed to be a very ordinary mystery story, primarily based around the identity of the stranger, Lovel, and then broadening out to questions of inheritances and property rights. The main element which recommended this book to me as my first Scott was the focus on antiquarian matters. Scott himself had an interest in antiquarian collections of found objects and epigraphy. Ultimately, this felt like a distraction and an opportunity for the author to display some of his knowledge.
The whole cliff-rescue episode lacked credibility, from the decision to walk along the beach, to the coincidental appearance of all the rescuers, and the resolution. And I know eighteenth century gentlemen had a strange sense of honour when it came to duelling; nevertheless I still found this duel improbable. I was also unconvinced by the need for the occasional appearance of ghosts and the supernatural.
I found the characters one-dimensional, dreary, and without development through the course of the plot. The conflict between Wardour and Oldbuck was simple and uninteresting.
The attempts to phoneticize local dialect were alienating and confusing and, at worst, impenetrable: “‘I just ken this about it, that about twenty years syne, I, and a wheen hallenshakers like mysell, and the mason-lads that built the lang dyke that gaes down the loaning, and twa or three herds, maybe, just set to wark…’” and so on.
Too often the descriptions were over-written: “The elderly lady rustled in silks and satins, and bore upon her head a structure resembling the fashion in the ladies’ memorandum-book for the year 1770 – a superb piece of architecture, not much less than a modern Gothic castle, of which the curls might represent the turrets, the black pins the chevaux de frise, and the lappets the banners. / The face, which, like that of the ancient statues of Vesta, was thus crowned with towers, was large and long, and peaked at nose and chin and bore, in other respects, such a ludicrous resemblance to the physiognomy of Mr Jonathan Oldbuck, that Lovel, had they not appeared at once, like Sebastian and Viola in the last scene of the ‘Twelfth Night’ might have supposed that the figure before him was his old friend masquerading in female attire.”
Or: “‘Ah, Mr Lovel! If it be your lot to reach the chill, cloudy, and comfortless evening of life, you will remember the sorrows of your youth as the light shadowy clouds that intercepted for a moment the beams of the sun when it was rising. But I cram these words into your ears against the stomach of your sense.’/’I am sensible of your kindness,’ answered the youth; ‘but the wound that is of recent inflection must always smart severely, and I should be little comforted under my present calamity – forgive me for saying so – by the conviction that life had nothing in reserve for me but a train of successive sorrows.’”
It felt as though Scott thoroughly enjoyed writing these; unfortunately I had less pleasure from wading through them.
In all, then, I found the general writing, the plotting and the characters uninteresting. It is no doubt due to my shortcomings, but I do not think The Antiquarian is a significant novel, nor even a very good one.

Una novela en la que el protagonista (Lovel) está extrañamente ausente durante la mayor parte de ella. Aunque si la novela se llama "El Anticuario" entonces realmente el protagonista es el anticuario (Oldbuck). De estilo muy inglés (el autor me querría matar, pues es escocés) y relajado, de esas novelas agradables que sanan el alma y te recuerdan el placer que siempre debería ser toda lectura. Con mucho humor (inglés, hay que decirlo) que te hace carcajearte y una trama interesante con varios misterios desarrollándose a la vez. Muy romanticismo todo. Reco.

I am not a big reader of Romantic fiction, so Walter Scott has never been much on my radar. Indeed, despite him being such a well-known author he doesn't seem to be particularly read these days, nor for some time. The Antiquary is the first of his novels that I've read and, according to the introduction that I skimmed, not entirely typical among his oeuvre.

It is certainly not a Romantic tale of heroism, but rather an amusing and often wry comedy that paints a picture of Scottish society in the late 18th century that is almost Realist at times. So, there are several things going on here and perhaps to the detriment of the novel as a singular work. Still, there are impressively dramatic scenes of kinetic energy that would not be out of place in Shakespeare - and Scott is clearly a Shakespeare obsessive - and the hints of Realism are tantalising, even if they never really get off the ground and grant the reader a more socially minded narrative.

What is most impressive, though, are the characters and the vernacular. Both come to their apogee in the figure of Edie Ochiltree, registered itinerant beggar - a gaberlunzie as they were termed at the time the novel is set - who roams this lowland part of Scotland and, in the style of one of those deeply human characters in Shakespeare, resolves most of the tensions and problems within the drama. His language, like that of other socially low-born characters, is dense in the vernacular of the time and place, and Scott is impressive in how the language does much of the work of portraying the society in which his characters live.

A major theme throughout is anxiety about paternity in a broadly understood sense. Who will continue on this or that great familial line, what is the pedigree of this or that historical object, and not least of all the ostensible story of a lost and found son to a great lord. This anxiety perhaps in part accounts for the offstage interest in the French revolution and general fear of French invasion that is often mentioned and hastily pushed aside by the characters. Indeed, the brief bits of the introduction that I glossed over seem to argue that this is really a novel about people trying not to think about bigger social and political issues of the day. That may as well be, but I do wonder if there is a real stretch going on there in trying to label this as a proto-Realist text and to rescue Scott from the dustbin of Romanticism. There's something of Realism going on here perhaps, but it might be overstating it a bit to try to draw a line to Tolstoy - as the author of the introduction does.

Enjoyable overall and often quite funny with some wonderfully drawn characters and dialogue. The end is terribly rushes, which I guess might be typical of Romantic fiction in some sense, and the impression I was left with was of a somewhat uneven novel that gets lost in some of its more dramatic scenes before trying to regrasp the thread of plot.