HIS novels may be full of fictional tartan-clad swashing and buckling, but a very real verbal duel has broken out over what Sir Walter Scott really thought of Highlanders.

Stage director John Fulljames, whose version of Rossini's 1819 opera La donna del lago – based on Scott's poem The Lady of the Lake – opened at the Royal Opera House in London on Friday, is at the centre of the controversy after suggesting the great historical novelist saw Highlanders as hairy savages who had no place in the modern world.

Leading Scottish academics have jumped to the defence of Scott, one of the nation's most revered authors, by dismissing the interpretation as "absurd" and "in one word, b******s".

Scott did more than anyone else to integrate the Highlands into a single Scotland, they claim, and was the man responsible for bringing tourism to the area and establishing tartan as the national dress.

The row started when Fulljames said: "Turning Highlanders into savages is the clear choice of an author; that's what Rossini and Scott are saying.

"They are saying that these people cannot be taken into modernity."

Commenting on how his take on the opera is influenced by films like Highlander and Braveheart, Fulljames also said: "If you look at those films, the Highlanders are hairy. You do imagine they'd be smelly."

These views have riled some of Scott's biggest fans north of the Border. "That attitude can be summed up in one word – b******s," said Professor David Purdie, honorary fellow of Edinburgh University and chairman of the Sir Walter Scott Club. "Scott was a great admirer of the courage and characteristics of the Highlanders and lamented the fact they had been separated for so long from southern Scotland by geography, language, politics and religion.

"Scott more than anybody else helped to unite the Highlands and Lowlands. His great aim in life was the promotion of Scotland as a unity within the United Kingdom."

Purdie pointed to Scott's role in choreographing King George IV's official visit to Scotland in 1822 – the first time an English monarch had visited the country in more than a century.

Already a titan of the Scottish culture scene after the publication of his historical novels Waverley, Rob Roy and Ivanhoe, Scott was selected personally to plan the week-long visit and convinced the King to wear Tartan, a pattern associated with Highland clans.

Despite the odd hiccup – King George's infamous paunch made his Tartan kilt ride up to reveal a sizable amount of thigh, according to spectators – the move helped establish tartan as Scotland's national dress.

And what of the hairy and smelly Braveheart view of Highlanders? "Scott would have rejected that. The Highlanders had great personal assets in terms of their loyalty, their courage in battle. They're no more hairy then we are," Purdie said.

"Everyone was smelly in the 18th century. This is all before any personal odour cologne."

Professor David Hewitt, who formerly headed up the Sir Walter Scott Club and is currently editor-in-chief of a new edition of the Waverley novels, responded: "That statement from London is absurd."

John Fulljames refused to revise his position. Describing the plot of the opera, he said: "The Highlanders not only lose the battle in Lady of the Lake, but they are also killed – because Scott believes they are incapable of passing into modernity. His rather utopian world quietly expunges them from history."