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Page 80
Muscatine, Charles.
Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.
Patterson, Lee.
Chaucer and the Subject of History.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.
Robertson, D. W., Jr.
A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962.
 
Page 81
Poetry in Scots: Barbour to Burns
David Daiches
The language we call Scots has a common origin with English in that it is in large measure derived from the speech of the Anglian peoples who settled in northern Northumbria. In the seventh century Northumbrian kings established themselves and their language in southeast Scotland. However, the Gaelic-speaking Scots of the West pushed east and south to the Lowlands, and by the eleventh century Gaelic had become the dominant language of Scotland. Then came another change. From the twelfth century, kings of Scotland came under strong Norman influence. Though Norman French now became the language of the Court, northern English influence as well as Anglo-Norman immigration into Scotland altered the picture. When we add the Scandinavian influence from Viking settlers in northern England who moved north to Scotland, the product was a development of northern English or Anglian considerably influenced by Anglo-Danish (or Scandinavianized northern English). The result was the language we know as Scots.
Scots developed differently from English in many ways. It preserved certain Anglo-Saxon vowels that changed in English, or it developed them in a different way: it preserved a considerable vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon origin that was lost in English. Scots developed its own grammatical forms and its own ways of borrowing from other languages (e.g., verbs from the Latin infinitive instead, as in English, from the perfect participle passive: "dispone," "propone"; English: "dispose," "propose"). It retained or developed its own pronunciation. At the same time, English was close enough to Scots to be fully intelligible to edu
 
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cated Scots people and to provide Scottish writers an alternative in pronunciation and an enrichment of vocabulary where these might help to increase expressiveness. On the other hand, English writers could not use Scots as a source of enrichment: the language of the smaller and poorer country did not impinge on their consciousness in the way English did on that of Scots. The Scots had the advantage there: they were free of two kindred languages, and while the language they wrote was certainly Scots and not English, they could plunder English whenever it seemed advantageous.
In medieval and early Renaissance Scotlandapart from the Gaelic-speaking areaspeople spoke Scots, and the poets built on that spoken language with borrowings from English, Latin, and French, with all kinds of rhetorical devices and "aureation," to construct a richly expressive literary medium capable of great range and subtlety. This was the language of the poets of Scotland from Barbour to Gavin Douglas and Sir David Lindsay, with Robert Henryson and William Dunbar at the center of the picture.
The earliest significant literary work in Scots to survive is
The Bruce
by John Barbour (d. 1395). Composed between 1375 and 1377, this long narrative poem tells the story of King Robert the Bruce, who fought successfully against great odds to prevent annexation by the English kings Edward I and Edward II. The poem is infused with high national feeling. The lines in the early part of the poem beginning, "A! Freedome is a noble thing," ring out as a remarkable affirmation of the significance of national independence for personal fulfillment. Indeed, "freedom" is here used to mean national independence probably for the first time anywhere.
The Bruce
is written in octosyllabic couplets, a favorite verse form in early Scots poetry that remained so for centuries.
The Bruce
combines echoes of the Old French
chansons de geste
and certain formulaic devices with a tone, almost colloquial at times, of direct address to the reader. Barbour is recounting recent Scottish history and draws on oral rather than written tradition. Bruce's great victory at Bannockburn was won in 1314, a few years before Barbour's birth, but vivid memories of Bruce's struggle persisted in Barbour's day, and the poem has the flavor of a contemporary account, as well as some of the features of a folk narrative.
One of Barbour's motives was probably to inculcate lessons of kingship and patriotism. Barbour was writing his poem in the reign of Robert II, a king with none of Bruce's strong nationalist drive or charis-
 
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ma, and the poem may well have been a bid to arouse that earlier patriotic feeling. Bruce and his loyal helper, Sir James Douglas, appear as model heroic characters (although Bruce's guilt in slaying Comyn in church is admitted), and it is this sense of a mission carried through against all the odds that redeems
The Bruce
from the tedium of some of the detail. There are inevitably some dull moments in the nearly fourteen thousand lines, but the poem as a whole glows with a commitment to its subject in a way that distinguishes it from other heroic narrative poems of the age.
Barbour's narrative poem in octosyllabic couplets seems to have been a model for Scots poets and translators for over half a century. Andrew Wyntoun (1350?-1424?) wrote his
Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland
in this form. It starts with the Creation and attempts to set both the legendary and the more recent factual history of Scotland in the framework of Christian world history, but in spite of its ambitious scope the verse is pedestrian. Other works that show Barbour's influence include translations of
Legends of the Saints
, a
Troy Book
(of which only fragments survive), and a Scots version of parts of the
Roman d' Alexandre
cycle entitled
The Buik of the Most Noble and Valiant Conqueror Alexander the Grit
, completed in 1438.
The other hero of the Scottish Wars of Independence, Bruce's predecessor Sir William Wallace, is the subject of another long narrative poem, written some eighty years after
The Bruce
. Its full title is
The Actis and Deidis of the Illuster and Vailyeand Campioun, Schir William Wallace, Knicht of Ellersleie
, and it is traditionally attributed to "Blind Harry" or "Henry the Minstrel," who, according to John Major's
Historia Majoris Britanniae
(1521), was an itinerant minstrel who collected and recited legends about Wallace. It is in decasyllabic couplets, and has an appealing naïveté in its deployment of narrative and its admiration for the valor and fighting skill of the hero.
The Wallace
is much further removed in time from its subject than
The Bruce
. Although it uses traditions about Wallace that survived in the areas where he operated, it possesses many fewer elements of genuine history than the earlier poem. Its language has the sound of common speech, and the feeling that lies behind the story, as Harry tells it, is one of pride in his hero and his cause, not quite the high patriotism of Barbour, but what might be called a more popular version of that sentiment. The poem is in eleven books with a total of almost twelve thousand lines. It was turned into a modernized Scots by William Hamilton of Gilbertfield in 1722: this
 
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was the version read by Robert Burns which, as Burns wrote in his autobiographical letter to Dr John Moore, "poured a Scottish prejudice in my veins which will boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest."
There must have been many verse romances in Scots in the late Middle Ages, but few have survived. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish a Scots poem from an English poem transcribed with simple orthographic changes into a work that looks like Scots. Some Arthurian romances come into this category. The liveliest of surviving Scots romances is
The Taill of Rauf Coilyear
, the story of Charlemagne, lost in a mountain storm, given shelter by a charcoal burner, and the socially interesting consequences. The poem is written not in Barbour's couplets but in an alliterative rhyming stanza of considerable artfulnessa notable example of the alliterative revival that was a feature of both English and Scottish poetry in the late fourteenth century.
The prestige and influence of Chaucer had an obvious effect on Scottish poetry from the beginning of the fifteenth century, although the title of "Scottish Chaucerians," which used to be given to fifteenth-century Scottish poets, has been discarded as inaccurate. It is difficult to pinpoint the influence of Chaucer (and also of Lydgate) on the Scottish poets. Middle Scots in the fifteenth century was a rich and flexible language, sufficiently akin to English to enable the Scottish poets to draw on English vocabulary to enrich and even decorate their Scots. There is no doubt that all the great Scottish "makars" (as the Middle Scots poets were called) regarded Chaucer as a master poet and rhetorician and learned from his craftsmanship. But they were all their own men, using their own language and having their own relationship with common European traditions.
Perhaps the most "Chaucerian" of all Middle Scots poems is
The Kingis Quair
, attributed to King James I of Scotland (1394-1437). King James was captured by the English in 1406 as a boy of eleven, and spent eighteen years in captivity in England. The poem describes the king's falling in love with the English Lady Jane Beaufort, whom he first saw from his prison window and eventually married, in a language that shows just the mixture of Middle Scots and literary and spoken Middle English we would expect from someone with King James's history. For all its Chaucerian qualities,
The Kingis Quair
is unique among both Scots and English poetry of the age for the freshness and individuality with which the poet's feelings are expressed (whether or not it is
 
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an autobiographical poem), even though this story of courtship is set within the medieval courtly love tradition.
The poem's verse form is the stanza of seven pentameter lines rhyming
a b a b b c c
known as "rime royal," probably first used in English in Chaucer's "Complaint unto Pity." The style and language owe something to both Chaucer and Lydgate (although the poet mentions only Chaucer and Gower as "my maisteris dere" in his concluding stanza), but the voice is very clearly the poet's own. The description of his emotion on seeing the lady from his prison window effectively combines stylization with spontaneity of feeling:
And in my hede I drewe ryght hastily,
  And eftsones I lent it forth ageyne
And sawe hir walk, that verray womanly,
  With no wight mo bot onely wommen tweyne.
  Than gan I studye in myself and seyne:
"A, swete, ar ye a warldly creature
Or heavinly thing in likeness of nature?"
Throughout the poem the fluctuations of the poet's emotion are shown with a wry vigor. References to classical gods and goddesses have a certain sprightliness, and descriptions of natural objects are often both formulaic and vivid, as in this scene on a river bank:
That full of lytill fischis by the brym,
  Now here, now there, with bakkis blewe as lede,
Lap and pleyit, and in a rout can swim
  So prattily, and dressit tham to sprede
  Thair curall fynnis, as the ruby rede,
That in the sonne on thair scalis bryght
As gesserant ay glitterit in my sight.
The animals observed, partly heraldic and partly natural, are listed in the other parts the poem, beginning (in a formula derived ultimately from Statius) with "There saw I" and going on to evoke the essence of each creatureas in "The lytill squerell, full of besyness."
The Kingis Quair
, with 1379 lines in 197 stanzas, lacks the sheer craftsmanship of the mature Chaucerindeed, there is an amateurish tone about it. But if it has neither the brilliant virtuosity of Dunbar nor the subtlety and complexity of Henryson, it is nonetheless an accomplished poem and makes a worthy opening to the age of the makars.

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