Anne McKim's selection of fragments from the National Library of Scotland MS Advocates 19.2.2 is the fourth modern edition of the only surviving manuscript of The Wallace, a Middle Scots verse biography of the Scottish national hero William Wallace composed c. 1471-79 by a poet traditionally known as Blind Hary. Earlier editions of his work came from John Jamieson (1869), James Moir (1889) and Matthew P. McDiarmid (1968-69), but were all addressed to specialist audiences. Anne McKim's TEAMS edition is intended for a much wider group of readers and has every chance of becoming the definitive edition of the poem.
The editor's choice of almost two thirds of the 11,000 lines of the poem allows all the major events of Wallace's war against the English to be fully represented. Only Book 9 (Wallace's adventurous visit in France) is cut in its entirety. However, all fragments omitted in the edition receive concise and clear summaries. Hary's William Wallace is first seen gaining support and becoming the leader of his army and then progressing from victory to victory over the chronologically confusing period from 1296, when, at eighteen, he takes arms against the English in Dundee, until 1305, when, at the age of forty five, he is executed. Hary's treatment of chronology and history receives due attention in McKims's "Introduction" and her rich and detailed "Explanatory Notes". The editor helps the reader to follow the author's construction of his hero, the "defendour of Scotland", by showing how history, legend, literary tradition, and Hary's own imagination, contributed to the picture of Wallace created by the text. McKim reads Hary's life of Wallace as an instance of an impassioned, patriotic eulogy, in which historical truth gives way to the promotion and celebration of a national hero, whose deeds and fame are seen by Hary as equal to those of the Nine Worthies of the medieval world (Book 8, ll. 961ff). Hary's Scottish pride, his admiration of Wallace and his hatred of the English are viewed by KcKim as important factors shaping the tone of the poem.
Literary parallels and influences are fully annotated, rooting Hary's work within the medieval tradition of historiography and romance and showing its intertextual discourse with such obvious sources as John Barbour's The Bruce or the chronicles of Andrew of Wyntoun and Walter Bower, but also others, less obvious though equally enlightening, such as Chaucer, Henryson, Boethius or the Alliterative Morte Arthure.
The discussion and evaluation of Hary the storyteller, the poet, and the Scottish patriot, is carried out in the "Introduction" and the "Notes" with ample reference to recent and older scholarship on the subject. The "Select Bibliography" appended to the "Introduction" offers a representative list of important literature on The Wallace.
Anne McKim's edition shows some indebtedness to Mathew P. McDiarmid's complete edition for the Scottish Text Society of 1968-69. Yet McKim's informative commentary guides the reader much better through the meanders of Scottish medieval history as it is re-written by Hary. Her reader-friendly explanations offer a helping hand to an uninitiated student of medieval literature but can also be inspiring to a specialist reader.
Hary's Middle Scots reads relatively easily due to the consistently normalized spelling (following the METS conventions), the modern punctuation practice, and the clarifying textual emendations imported from Robert Lekpreuik's 1570 printed version of the poem. Important textual variants are meticulously shown in the "Textual Notes" appended to the text. The glossary and the translations of difficult words and passages make the book ideal for classroom use even with less experienced readers of Middle Scots.
Hary's The Wallace was one of the first books printed in Edinburgh (1507-08) and remained, in later versions and paraphrases, one of the few books kept in every Scottish cottage well into the nineteenth century. Anne McKim's learned but approachable edition will bring the story back to every classroom of medieval literature and correct the Hollywood image of William Wallace produced in the minds of students (and teachers) by the film Braveheart.