While it is true that the Grimm brothers can be said to have established the modern idea of folklore as an area of research and study, there are examples of people in earlier ages whom we would described as folklorists, that is, collectors and publishers of stories and traditions. 

In a sense, the earliest Scottish historians were doing this because history and story were seen as one and the same tradition. It was only in the early modern period (roughly 16^th to 18^th centuries) that scholars began to separate the two and insist that history should be backed up with facts. 

Perhaps the earliest Scot we would now describe as a folklorist is Robert Kirk (1644-1692) who was a native of Aberfoyle, in Stirlingshire. He studied at the universities of Edinburgh (1661) and St Andrews (1664) and was successively minister of the parishes of Balquhidder and Aberfoyle. Because he was native to Aberfoyle it meant that Kirk was familiar with both the Scots and Gaelic languages and was evidently fascinated with the traditional lore sprung from these tongues, and in particular the supernatural world. 

Among the other prominent Scottish folklorists are Walter Traill Dennison (1826-1894) who was a farmer at Sanday in the Orkneys. He collected many traditional stories, of which many were in the Scots dialect of Orkney, and had them published in 1880. Indeed, Orkney has proven to be a rich source in this respect producing both stories and a number of folklorists of Orcadian background. 

Another more recent folklorist was Andrew Lang (1844-1912) who is perhaps remembered today chiefly as a historian. A native of Selkirk in the Scottish Borders, Lang graduated from St Andrews University and held a life-long interest in the traditional lore of his country. 

Scotland sits in an almost unique position because it is at the crossroads between the Celtic, Germanic and Latin worlds and its customs, traditions, lore and stories have been shaped by the experiences of the Angles, Britons, Danes, Gaels, Norse, Normans, Picts and others. A core of Anglo-Saxon (Germanic) and Gaelic (Celtic) lore has been added to and developed by Danish and Norwegian (Germanic) Viking tradition, subsequently overlaid with the Latin culture of the Christian church and romantic traditions of Norman French (also Latin). So to label Scotland solely as Celtic as the 19^th century romantic writers attempted to do is to cut Scotland off from her diverse cultural traditions, and deny her past. 

Dennison, Traill and others understood the diverse origins of the traditions of their country but tried to draw these together, preserve them, and present them to the public. In doing so they were folklorists following in the path of the Grimm brothers. The idea of folklore has often been difficult to pin down, but may be taken to mean any group of people who share a common set of beliefs and set ways of doing things (traditions) particularly when these beliefs and ways are used to make sense of the world around them. As times change, people change and take on new ideas. When set ways of doing things, or ways of looking at the world change, we believe that a culture is being lost, and this is when the folklorist steps in to collect and save what is believed to be disappearing.

There are a number of online resources available if you would like to look in more detail at folklore in Scotland. Among the more accessible are the School of Scottish Studies (based in Edinburgh) who have an audio archive recorded throughout the 20^th century and which is at www.pearl.arts.ed.ac.uk . 

A second source is the Kist o Riches (Tobar an Dualchais) which has over 30,000 oral recordings in both Scots and Gaelic, dating from the 1930s onwards. This project is based at the Gaelic College on Skye and may be accessed at www.tobarandualchais.co.uk but please note that only English and Gaelic versions of the site are available. 

Lastly, there is also the Aberdeen-based Elphinstone Institute which is home to the Elphinstone Kist devoted to material primarily in the North East dialect of Scots, known as Doric. This can be accessed at www.abdn.ac.uk/elphinstone .