Michael Scot in Scottish Folklore: The Eildon Hills and the Bridled Tweed

Alongside the documented scholar who translated Averroes at Toledo and served Frederick II at Palermo, the Scottish Borders kept a second Michael Scot, a wizard whose feats belong to local legend rather than to any court record. Rev. J. Wood Brown's 1897 study of the legend traces its best known episode to the Eildon Hills near Melrose: tradition holds that Scot, needing work to occupy a restless familiar spirit, ordered it to split the single conical hill into the three separate peaks that stand there today, a labor completed, the story insists, in a single night. The same restless energy is said to have been turned on the River Tweed, which Scot supposedly bridled with a curb of stone, a phrase Sir Walter Scott himself later used to describe the feat in verse. Neither claim appears in any record of the historical Scot's own life or writings; both belong to the oral tradition of the Scottish Borders, where his genuine reputation as an astrologer at a foreign court seems to have supplied a real name for feats of magic the region already told about other, nameless figures. The legend's persistence, still attached specifically to the Eildon Hills' three peaks centuries after Scot's death, is itself the kind of local, place-bound tradition folklore study treats as evidence of how a historical figure's name can be borrowed to anchor an older, otherwise anonymous local story.