The title is from Byron’s poem
Lochnagar
:
Away, ye gay landscapes, ye gardens of roses,
In you let the minions of luxury rove,
Restore me the rocks where the snow-flake reposes, …
… I sigh for the valley of dark Lochnagar.
Lord Byron
Lord Byron, in an Armenian outfit
George Gordon Byron, the 6th Baron Byron (1788–1824) was a poet and one of the leading lights of British romanticism. His father was Captain John (“Jack”) Byron – a somewhat unsavoury character – and his mother Catherine Gordon of Gight (Gight is an estate in Aberdeenshire). Catherine was Jack’s second wife, and he married her in 1785 probably mostly on account of her fortune, which is why he adopted “Gordon” as an additional surname. Their son George spent the first years of his life in Scotland. Jack Byron died in 1791, and George inherited the title of Baron Byron of Rochdale from his great-uncle in addition to the family seat, Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, which was, however, in a nearly uninhabitable state. Even though the family was in somewhat dire straits – most of Catherine’s inheritance had been lost in repayment of Jack Byron’s debts – George attended the posh public school (private school, for our non-English readers) in Harrow and later Trinity College in Cambridge. He wasn’t the brightest scholar and spent his time in sexual adventures (including, at the time, salaciously and not without considerable danger, with other men), riding, boxing, and gambling.
Byron got into poetry while he was still at school; his first volume of poems, when he was seventeen, was burned on the advice of a vicar of his acquaintance because the content was considered too scandalous. Various of the included poems, together with others, appeared in 1809 under the title
Hours of Idleness
, and were promptly anonymously savaged in the
Edinburgh Review
, which inspired Byron to his first grand satire,
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
. From 1809 to 1811 he undertook a “grand tour“, which at the time was the done thing for young noblemen; due to the war against Napoleon not through France, Germany, and Italy, but from Portugal to Sevilla, Jerez de la Frontera, Cádiz and Gibraltar and then by boat to Sardinia, Malta, Albania, and Greece. From there he eventually went to Smyrna and Constantinople, and via Malta back to England. Once there he published the first two parts of a long poem,
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
, in which he processed elements of his Mediterranean travels in a somewhat autobiographical fashion, and which made him an instant celebrity (the first printing of 500 copies was sold within three days). He continued composing poetry in England, but was considered a scandalous person; after a conjectured affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, which resulted in the birth of a daughter, he married Anne Isabella (“Annabella”) Millbanke in January, 1815. (Annabella had a rich uncle and Byron hoped to be able to appease his creditors.) At the end of the same year, his only legitimate child, his daughter Ada, was born. His continued infidelity, however, infuriated his wife; Annabella considered him mentally ill, left him together with their daughter in 1816, and filed for divorce. This scandal caused Byron to leave England and never come back.
This time he travelled through Belgium and up the river Rhine, until he settled in the summer of 1816 on Lake Geneva together with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s future wife Mary Godwin, and some other British bohemians. They spent the utterly rainy summer in a villa and passed the time reading and writing fantastic literature – Mary penned
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus
, John William Polidori (Byron’s personal physician) wrote
The Vampyre
, practically the initial seed of the Romantic vampire literature, and Byron the third part of
Childe Harold
. Byron wintered in Venice, where he had several lovers and developed an interest in Armenian culture. He learned Armenian and co-authored an English-language Armenian textbook as well as a dictionary. Byron spent the next years mostly in Italy (in Rome, Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, and Genova) until he was talked by some supporters of Greek independence – Greece was part of the Ottoman empire at the time – into supporting their cause in Greece. Byron was not quite sure what he was supposed to do there, but after some back and forth he agreed and threw in his lot virtually completely with the Greeks’ cause, to a point where he sold his remaining holdings in England in order to raise money for Greek independence. First, in 1823, he arrived in the island of Kefalonia, off the west coast of Greece (a British possession since 1809) and at the beginning of 1824 in Messolonghi on the Greek mainland. He spent more time trying to make peace between the quarreling leaders of various Greek separatist factions than actually fighting the Turks, but also cared (with money) for the humanitarian victims of the war, both Christians and Muslims. Unfortunately in February of 1824 he became ill and eventually died on 19 April 1824, probably also through the incompetence of his physician, Julius van Millingen. Byron being a famous poet, his presence in Greece and especially his tragic death raised awareness of the plight of the Greeks and led to more engagement for Greek independence in Western and Central Europe. His memory is still held in high esteem in Greece – since 2008, 19 April is celebrated there as “Byron Day”.
Lord Byron considered himself “half Scots by birth, whole by upbringing” and purportedly had a slight Scottish accent throughout his whole life. Many of his contemporaries also considered him Scottish. Even in Greece, most of his closest friends had strong connections to Scotland.
From “Anselm's Notes on Dances”, by Anselm Lingnau
(Used by permission.)