SOURCE: "Barbour's Bruce and Harry's Wallace: Complements, Compensations, and Conventions," Studies in Scottish Literature, Vol. XXV, 1990, pp. 189-201.

In the following essay, Wilson compares and contrasts Blind Harry's Wallace with The Bruce, pointing out differences in historical reliability, time span, tone, and literary quality.

In 1488 and 1489, John Ramsay copied Hary's Wallace and John Barbour's Bruce into a pair of manuscripts.¹ John Jamieson edited them as a pair in 1820.² Before and after Jamieson, other readers felt a similar inclination to place the two poems side by side.³ This impulse is natural, for the Bruce and the Wallace are alike in several basic ways. The Bruce, finished by 1378, is the earliest long (13,645 lines in McDiarmid and Stevenson's edition) Scottish narrative poem to survive. It covers the period from 1290 to 1332 and treats Robert Bruce's coming to power and his reign a similar as King Robert I. The poem's expressions of patriotism...