Scottish Authors > Sir Thomas Urquhart Man of letters & Translator 1611-1660

Urquhart records that he was born, heir to the estates of Cromarty five years after his father's marriage to Christian Elphinston. This suggests 1611 as the year in which one of the most eccentric and humorous of Scottish writers began his eventful life. At the age of eleven he matriculated at Aberdeen University. His lifelong enthusiasm for books on all sorts of subjects and his continuing love affair with words date from this period. Travel abroad followed - the "European tour" being an established way of rounding off a seventeenth century nobleman's education.

At home, one domestic and one national situation complicated his life. His father handled the estates disastrously, and debt and bitter family disputes ensued. Thomas, knighted by Charles I in 1641, consistently opposed the Commonwealth and was, indeed, imprisoned after the Battle of Worcester in 1651. His eventual release may have been contingent on his staying abroad. Certainly, he moved to Europe, living for some time in the Netherlands. The delightful tale that he died there of a fit of laughter on hearing of the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 may be apocryphal but he did die at that time and it accords with his known character.

Life and literature intertwine quite closely in Urquhart's case. His eccentricity and love of words resulted in a number of works which are witty, but so full of Urquhartian coinages, that they run the danger of becoming linguistically impenetrable. These include his mathematical discourse, Trissotetras, first published in 1645 and his proposed universal language Logopandecteision, which appeared in 1653.

His major claim to literary fame rests on two works. His Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653; 1693) - a racy translation of the first three books of Rabelais' comic masterpiece follows in a long line of creative Scottish translations of European literature. Urquhart intelligently chooses to outdo his source in exuberance and has both the vocabulary and the imagination to achieve that aim. His Romance, Ekskybalauron or The Jewel (1652), on the other hand is the first - very late - work of imaginative prose composed by a Scot. Ironically, it also betrays a keen parodic awareness of an already established tradition in English prose Romance - the high style of Sidney. Thus, when Urquhart's Scottish hero, the Admirable Crichton, finally makes love to his lady, they do not simply look and touch. Rather:

... by vertue of the intermutual unlimitedness of their visotactil sensation... the visuriency of either, by ushering the tacturiency of both, made the attrectation of both consequent to the inspection of either. Here was it that action was pasive and action passive, they both being overcome by either-and each the conqueror.

This is an extreme change from the serious theological and historical tracts which had defined Scottish prose until Urquhart's appearance. The path he forged, however eccentrically, would be followed by George MacKenzie and Smollett. With Sir Thomas, the Scottish novel is born.

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