The Wallace

Edited and Introduced by Anne McKim. This extraordinary poem has been widely popular and influential ever since it was written in the fifteenth century, and its heroic account of the swordfighter Wallace was to symbolise the cause of liberty and independence to many other countries and cultures in the centuries to come. Looking back to the days of the Bruce and the war of independence, Blind Harry’s poem is not an aristocratic tale of chivalry and nobility, but a vivid account of the vagaries of war and the brutal realities of battle, wounding and betrayal, all seen from the point of view of the troops in the field. The fruit of many years of scholarship, Anne McKim has produced what is unquestionably the definitive edition of this truly epic work. ‘The story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice in my veins which will boil along there till the floodgates of life shut in eternal rest.’ Robert Burns