The next fortnightly book is Blind Harry's The Wallace, one of the three fundamental pillars of Scottish literature. (The other two are the Bible and John Barbour's The Bruce.) We know almost nothing about the man who wrote the work, whose original title was The Acts and Deeds of the Illustrious and Valiant Champion Sir William Wallace, beyond the fact that his name was Hare or Hary or Harry or Henry or something like it. We do know that he was paid by King James IV for poetic services; he seems to have died in the 1490s. Some early authors say he was blind from birth, although this is often doubted.
The work itself is usually thought to have been written in the 1470s; our one extant manuscript of it is from 1488. However, the poet had the fortune of good timing; the first printing press in Scotland was set up in 1507, and print publishing was extremely good to the book. The Wallace was among the first books printed and it kept being one of the most popular books in Scotland for a very long time. It describes the fight of William Wallace against the English. The author's sense of geography is famously good -- scholars can literally trace the routes of armies on a map using the poem's descriptions -- and he is often thought to have been a soldier, because of a very vivid and accurate grasp on the tactics, logistics, and horrors of war. He also is extremely familiar with the historical events of the period. However, within this very historical framework, he invents freely to fill the gaps between Wallace's most famous achievements, and later historians often complain about just how freely he makes things up. (The volume I am using has an introduction by the editor, Anne McKim, who notes that some of the complaints about the accuracy of the movie Braveheart are actually due to the fact that the movie gets some of its major features directly from The Wallace.) But no one complains about the interest and excitement of the story.
This fortnightly book will likely take more than a fortnight; I am reading the Canongate Classics edition, which is not modernized. That is to say, I'm reading it in the fifteenth-century Scots. Fortunately, this edition is fairly generous with marginal glosses of the less obvious Scots words, and has a good set of notes in the back.
