The central figure in Allan Massie’s One Night in Winter (1984) is Fraser Donnelly, putative leader of a Scottish Nationalist movement which he claims will bring about ‘a real revolution, a revolution of consciousness, a revolution of morals’, one that will allow Scots to escape ‘the auld Scotland of kirk and kailyard’ and produce a country ‘that’s free and rich too’ (43). What Donnelly actually surrounds himself with, however, is not a modern political machine but ‘a Court’ (124), as full of intrigue and sexual corruption as any in Renaissance Italy. That archaic social structure is gateway to even more atavistic emotion – ‘sometimes you have to go back in time to make the next leap’ (124), he tells one of his courtiers, Jimmy, who later explains its significance:

In Fraser Donnelly, nationalism is figured as a return to paganism, as an invitation to the dark gods of the primitive to erupt again into the modern world. This Fraser re-enacts the return to the past that J. G. Frazer had undertaken in The Golden Bough at the beginning of the twentieth century: