'Blind Harry' (c.1440-1492)
The Life and Acts of the Most Famous and Valiant Champion, Sir William Wallace
£1,638
Auction: 05 February 2025 from 10:00 GMT
Description
Knight of Ellerslie. Maintainer of the Liberty of Scotland. Glasgow: Robert Sanders, 1699. 12mo (11.8 x 7cm), [28], 317 [3] pp., sigs. *-2*6 3*2 B-O12 P4, 18th-century tan morocco gilt, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt, title-page soiled and with traces of old ownership inscriptions, slight loss to upper fore corners of quires *-b affecting pagination and a few letters of main text, a few headlines trimmed, large ink-stain to 3*2 (last page of ‘The Printer to the Reader’), last few leaves a little frayed along edges, a few other marks
Provenance
From the library of the Murrays of Dollerie House, Crieff, Perthshire. Ownership inscription of Anthony Murray to initial blank.
Footnote
Rare black-letter edition of the work responsible for establishing William Wallace as a Scottish national hero of semi-legendary stature; the first edition was printed at Edinburgh by Chepman and Myllar c.1508 and apparently survives in a single fragmentary copy. 'Despite the lack of contemporary evidence regarding Harry himself, his poem has proved to be one of the most enduringly popular and most influential in all Scottish literature. John Mair and Hector Boece used it in the sixteenth century as a historical source; Robert Burns remarked on how it had inflamed his patriotic feeling; Sir Walter Scott drew on it for his Tales of a Grandfather; and its influence is visible in the hugely popular film Braveheart (1995). The place held to this day by Wallace in the popular imagination is principally due to Harry's portrayal; and on a more general level, his contribution to the Scottish sense of national identity is fundamental, matched only by that of Scott. This has long been recognized, but recent critical reassessments of his poem have materially raised his accepted standing as a writer, demolishing the notion of an untutored "minstrel" and revealing him as a poet of genius' (ODNB).