Reliquiae Trotcosienses was one of Scott’s last works, and, after his death, was suppressed by his literary executor and his publisher. Although extracts were published in 1889 and 1905, this is the first complete edition, and has been edited from the manuscript recently relocated in the library at Abbotsford, the house near Melrose in the Scottish Borders which Scott built for his library and museum.Reliquiae Trotcosienses (the relics of Trotcosey) is a guide to Abbotsford and to its collections, and illustrates in miniature all the different ways in which Scott tried to recover the past: in building, in collecting, and in the multiple acts of narration which invest objects with significance. But it is simultaneously a work of fiction, which satirises the impulses of antiquarian collection. Scott would not take himself seriously, and through the learned buffoonery of this extraordinary work he mocks the kind of activity in which he was engaged as writer and collector.Yet this is also a personal, elegiac creation, for the narrator as he approaches death recognises that the house, its artefacts, and above all the writings will live on to mourn their begetter: they are fragments shored against his ruin.

The book's publication is, one hopes, a sign that a serious scholarly return to Scott is underway! in recent years, the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels has attempted to reintroduce the Waverley Novels in their original, pre-Magnum Opus form, and one hopes that a new generation of readers will discover the author's remarkable descriptions of historical battles, deadly storms, and colorful Scottish villages without the distraction of footnotes and authorial asides The book's publication is, one hopes, a sign that a serious scholarly return to Scott is underway! in recent years, the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels has attempted to reintroduce the Waverley Novels in their original, pre-Magnum Opus form, and one hopes that a new generation of readers will discover the author's remarkable descriptions of historical battles, deadly storms, and colorful Scottish villages without the distraction of footnotes and authorial asides

Sir Walter Scott, was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright and poet. Many of his works remain classics and include Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor. Gerard Carruthers is Reader and Head of Department in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is General Editor of the forthcoming multi-volume Oxford University Press edition of the works of Robert Burns and is Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies. He is also the author of Robert Burns (Northcote, 2006), editor of The Devil to Stage: Five Plays by James Bridie (ASLS, 2007), Burns: Poems (Everyman, 2006) and co-editor of Beyond Scotland: New International Contexts for Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature (Rodopi, 2004), Walter Scott's Reliquiae Trotcosienses (Edinburgh University Press, 2004) and English Romanticism and the Celtic World (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Alison Lumsden is a senior lecturer in the School of Language & Literature at the University of Aberdeen and co-director of the Walter Scott Research Centre. She was for many years research fellow and then General Editor for the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels and has published on several Scottish authors including Robert Louis Stevenson, Nan Shepherd and Louis Grassic Gibbon. She is about to begin work on a scholarly edition of Scott's poetry.