Preface

Summary

A Critical text of Hary’s Wallace has long been needed. The best hitherto available has been that of John Jamieson, the lexicographer, which appeared in 1820, and the most recent that of James Moir, published in 1889. Neither editor attempted scrupulously to reproduce what the poet originally wrote, since neither believed that he could write. He was thought to have been blind and illiterate, if not wholly uninformed. The early sixteenth-century chronicler, John Mair, had represented him as a wandering storyteller blind from birth. The poet himself had pretended to be a historian and was manifestly a very bad one. The editors, therefore, believed themselves to be dealing with a dictated text, the not always understood utterance of someone who could not be expected always to talk sense. With such views it was natural that Jamieson should hesitate to correct the errors of the scribe of the only extant manuscript, and just as natural, if much less excusable, that Moir should be content to have another person confirm for him the general accuracy of Jamieson’s text. Both editors were more interested in Wallace as a historical document than as a poem, and it was perhaps for this reason that they failed to recognise its literary sources and literary character. It is this failure that chiefly accounts for the defects of Jamieson’s editing and Moir’s annotation. Only when G. T. T. Brown, in The Wallace and the Bruce Restudied (1900), revealed Hary’s familiarity with the poetry of his day, and Friedrich Brie, in his great work, Die Nationale Literatur Schottlands (1937), exposed his equal knowledge of what passed for history in his time, did it become possible to take a correct, and much more respectful, view of the poet and his poem. If the present edition is an improvement on previous ones it is mainly owing to this advantage.

These two factors, the romantic tradition of Hary’s native blindness, and his own misdirection of his readers’ attention to the historical aspect of his work, have caused him to suffer even more from his critics than from his editors. Appreciation of his achievement has hardly advanced beyond Mair’s recognition of his ability to tell a good story in verse.