Wallace; Or, The Life and Acts of Sir William Wallace, of Ellerslie

Composed by the traveling minstrel Blind Harry in the late fifteenth century, this sprawling Scots epic preserves the legend of William Wallace in verse that crackles with fury and sorrow. Long before Mel Gibson drew global attention to Scotland's hero, Blind Harry was already weaving Wallace's tale into the fabric of national identity: a man of enormous stature and even larger grief, who watched his wife murdered by English soldiers and swore to burn England to the ground in reply. The poem follows Wallace from boyhood vengeance through his legendary victories at Lanark and Stirling Bridge, rendering the Wars of Independence not as distant politics but as visceral, personal war. Blind Harry's Wallace is a holy terror, a man so fierce that enemies mistake him for the devil himself. Yet the text also carries genuine pathos, especially in Wallace's doomed love for his queen and his tragic final betrayal. This is not history as dry chronicle, but history as battle-cry, a work that Scots memorized and recited to remember who they were.