Mapping the world of Burns Suppers

He is Scotland’s national bard and international icon whose life and legacy is commemorated every year on 25 January with haggis, whisky and poetry.

Ever since the first memorial supper was held by close friends of Robert Burns to mourn his passing the tradition they started in 1801 has morphed into a worldwide annual event celebrating Scotland’s distinctive heritage and culture.

It is estimated that over nine and a half million people around the world take part in a Burns Supper every year.

Now, academics at the University of Glasgow plan to pull together a worldwide map of contemporary Burns Supper activity. For the first time ever they will create a digital resource of events, past and present, with detailed information on format, food and drink products used, speeches, toasts, and all elements of the performance by men, women and children throughout the various diverse communities involved.

Through the generosity of Frank and Susan Shaw of Atlanta, the research project, which starts this year and will run until 2022 is being carried out by the Centre for Robert Burns Studies (CRBS), which has the world’s largest concentration of Burns experts.

Professor Gerard Carruthers, Co-Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies based at the University’s College of Arts, will be leading The History of the Burns Supper project.

“Robert Burns is a writer whose life and work have given rise to one of the great world cultural phenomena – the Burns Supper. It is a testimony to the bard’s enduring appeal not only within Scotland but around the world. And at the centre of the supper of course is his great body of work from poetry to song which speaks so strongly to people,” he said.

“On 21 July 1801, close friends of Burns held the first Burns supper to mark the fifth anniversary of the bard’s death. They would never have guessed nearly 220 years on that this would have grown into such a worldwide phenomenon.

“We feel it is fitting to launch this research project during Burns Season 2020 and we will produce our findings across 2021-22, as we mark the 220th anniversary of the first Burns Supper.

“By the end of the project we aim to have a one-stop shop for everything you want to know about the Burns Supper, past and present.”

Bill Nolan, Secretary of the Irvine Burns Club, one of the oldest continually existing Burns Clubs in the world and Immediate Past President of the World Burns Federation, said: “Burns Suppers are a very special part of Scotland’s social fabric that we have exported successfully to the rest of the world. I can’t think of any other writer or poet who is remembered annually in this way and that’s why Robert Burns is uniquely Scotland’s international icon.

“It’s a myth that there’s any formal protocol that has to be followed other than the basic one that every Burns Supper has to be fun and that’s easily assessed by asking one question ‘Would Robert Burns have enjoyed this event?’ To which the answer should always be a resounding ‘Yes - and he’s coming back next year’”

The History of the Burns Supper project will build on the pioneering work of Dr Clark McGinn, an advisor on the project who did his PhD with the CRBS.

“Within a few years of the first dinner, Burns Suppers were being held across Scotland, but in England, India, America, and Jamaica too; with Canada, Australia and New Zealand following. This spontaneous, global growth was because the Burns Supper was the kind of party Burns himself would have enjoyed, so what better way to showcase and celebrate his life, poems and songs?” said Dr McGinn.

The first Burns Supper was celebrated in Burns' Cottage, Alloway on the 21 July 1801 commemorating the date of the bard’s passing rather than his birth, and those friends met again, as did the founders of Greenock Burns Club holding Burns Suppers on 29 January 1802, getting the poet’s date of birthday wrong by four days.

The research will collate and track the elements of the Burns Suppers from those first dinners, such as the Grace, the Immortal Memory and other kinds of poems, songs and speeches performed to understand the patterns of growth over the last 200 years.

Poems and songs about Burns used over the 200 years at these occasions will be gathered. Burns Suppers will be detailed through the 19th century, across the British Empire, by missionaries, soldiers, reformers and others, across America, Asia, Australia and Europe and right up to the present day.