SOURCE: "Get Price Off Chewalry: Barbour's Debt to Fordun," Studies in Scottish Literature, Vol. XXIV, 1989, pp. 7-29.

In the following essay, McKim focuses on the influence of John Fordun's Chronica Gentis Scotorum on Barbour.

We know very little about the origins of the Scottish literary tradition: the paucity of surviving medieval manuscripts and the dearth of biographical detail about those authors who can be identified make our earliest writers seem curiously isolated from one another. This is strikingly so in the case of John Barbour who composed The Bruce in the vernacular and in verse in the second half of the fourteenth century. We do know that later Scottish writers knew and drew upon his biography of Robert Bruce, in particular the fifteenth-century chroniclers Andrew of Wyntoun (who wrote in the vernacular) and Walter Bower (who wrote in Latin), and succeeding biographers, notably Hary in his life of...