In Lang's work history, biography and Scottishness are deeply connected, and there are strong relationships, too, with his work on folklore, mythology and psychical research. The Celtic Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew his interest and he considered it both in relation to literature and to his anthropological theories of the origins of peoples and their beliefs. His introduction to Walter Scott's novel Waverley, Or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since strongly places Scott's work in the language, landscape and traditions of Scotland. It was first published as the introduction to volume 1 of the Border Edition of the Complete Works of Sir Walter Scott (London: Macmillan, 1893), pp. lxxxi–cxi. Lang wrote separate introductions for each of the twenty-four volumes of the edition, the last in the year of his death, 1912. There are numerous other published pieces on Scott, including one of the Letters to Dead Authors (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1886), pp. 152–61, and the short Life of Sir Walter Scott (New York: Charles Scribner, 1906). Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1910) is a long and detailed consideration of the content and authenticity of the ballads in Scott's collection.

The short pieces from Lang's column ‘At the Sign of the Ship’ selected here show some of the range of Lang's writings on Scotland and the connections that he makes with psychic phenomena as well as his fierce defence of the Scots language and identity. These were first published in Longman's Magazine 9:49 (November 1887), pp. 107–9, Longman's Magazine 28:165 (July 1896), pp. 320–2 and Longman's Magazine 28:166 (August 1896), pp. 416–22. His detailed consideration of the question of the Celt, ‘The Celtic Renascence’, first appeared in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 161:976 (February 1897) pp. 181–91 and he returns to it in the introduction to A Study in Nationality (London: Chapman and Hall, 1911), pp. iii– xx. The author of the book, John Vyrnwy Morgan (1860–1925), was a Welsh Congregationalist minister. He had published a number of books on Welsh history and theology before A Study in Nationality and went on to produce several more, including The Philosophy of Welsh History (London: John Lane, 1914), The Church in Wales in the Light of History (London: Chapman & Hall, 1918) and The Welsh Mind in Evolution (London: H. R. Allenson, 1925).