SOURCE: "Barbour, Blind Harry, and Sir William Craigie," Studies In Scottish Literature, Vol. I, No. 3, January, 1964, pp. 202-06.

In the following essay, Walker responds to William Craigie's evaluation of The Bruce, contending that Craigie misunderstood Barbour's work.

There is no doubt that Blind Harry's Wallace has suffered unduly through comparison with Barbour's Bruce, but the late Sir William Craigie,¹ in trying to redress the balance, upset it even further in the opposite direction, enhancing the reputation of his favourite only at the expense of denigrating those parts of Barbour's work that are in fact most worthy.

Craigie's evaluation may most conveniently be criticized under the headings of Prologue and Epilogue. Barbour's introduction, in Craigie's opinion, is coldly academic:—"Barbour opens with scholastic remarks on the pleasures of reading and a frigid distinction between truth and fiction."² But the opening lines of The Bruce are really invaluable as revealing...