The Bruce

by John Barbour

So we go back to Barbour (“the writ”), but in the final scene there is no mention of throwing the heart, any more than in the genuine Bruce, though it is stated that “His hardy men tuk the hart syne upon hand.”[122]

Obviously we have in these stanzas, and especially in the words underlined, the source of the lines in the Bruce, which are further in express contradiction to Barbour’s narrative, and have no place in it. The threefold argument leads inevitably to the one conclusion that these lines are an interpolation, and, as a corollary, that their source is the Howlat. Mr. Amours, in editing that poem,[123] has gone so far as to say that this is “almost certain.” I would remove the qualification.[124]

APPENDIX E
THE “ALEXANDER” AND THE “BRUCE”

The Buik of the Most Noble and Vailyeand Conquerour, Alexander the Great is an anonymous Scots translation of three French romances in the Alexander cycle, dated, in a rhyming colophon, 1438, and published for the Bannatyne Club in 1831. Between this translation and the Bruce there is a remarkably intimate and undisguised connection, not only in spirit and method, but in “the diction as a whole, the choice of words and the arrangement of the sentences, (and) the abundant use of alliteration,” to such an extent that “in reading the Buik of Alexander one would often think that he discerned the singer of the Bruce.”[125] A few examples have been given in the notes, but for a full survey of this literary phenomenon the reader must go to the dissertation quoted from above, or to Mr. J. T. T. Brown’s The Wallace and the Bruce Restudied, pp. 100-112 (Bonn, 1900), or Mr. Neilson’s John Barbour, Poet and Translator (London, 1900), which is devoted to the subject; or, for the parallels in the Bannockburn account, to Mr. Neilson’s article on Barbour in Chambers’s Cyclopædia of English Literature, vol. i.

On the facts there is no dispute; for explanation three hypotheses have been put forward. Hermann, accepting the 1438 date, concludes that the translator of the Alexander was so familiar with the language of the Bruce—“here and there, indeed, knew it by heart” (stellenweise es wohl auswendig wusste)—that his translation was necessarily strongly influenced thereby.[126] This is inadmissible; the French poems are earlier than the Bruce, and to these the links of connection ultimately go back. The relationship is really deeper than the mere language of the translation, as Hermann himself indicates. Mr. Neilson, accordingly, in a detailed and forcible argument, claims Barbour himself as the translator of the Alexander, arguing that, the literary proofs being so conclusive, the date given must be an error, “scribal or printer’s.”[127] Given Roman numerals to begin with, such a slip is not in the least unlikely; variations of this sort occur in the Bruce itself,[128] and 1438 may have been a misreading of 1338, or the date may be that of the scribe’s copy, not of the actual work. Mr. Neilson has an ingenious section on the wayward fortunes of dates.[129] Thus, reversing Hermann’s thesis, he holds that “Barbour’s mind and memory had been steeped in the Alexander when he wrote the Bruce.”[130] Mr. Neilson’s argument and conclusion are vigorously contested by Mr. Brown in a Postscript to the work cited. His more elaborate hypothesis is that David Rate translated the Alexander in 1437, and that “John Ramsay, Sir John the Ross, wishful to improve the plain song of John Barbour, used the translation of the Alexander extensively, taking freely whatever he required.”[131] Mr. Brown’s negative criticism is independent of this proposition which is involved in his wider theory regarding the construction of the Bruce. The eclectic conclusion of the writer in the Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. ii., is: “Either the book (i.e., the Alexander) is the work of Barbour preserved in a somewhat later form, or the author was saturated with Barbour’s diction, so that he continually repeats his phrases.”[132]

In the dust of the conflict a crucial fact has gone unobserved—namely, that one of the parallel lines enumerated by Brown and Hermann appears in the portion of the Bruce incorporated in his own work by Wyntoun.[133] Here, then, we have a line of the alleged translation of 1438 occurring in the “Bruce” as it existed before 1420. Thus the only outstanding difficulty of Mr. Neilson’s proposition disappears. The effect on the rival propositions is obvious.

APPENDIX F
MR. BROWN’S “SOURCES” FOR THE “BRUCE.”

In pursuance of his “hypothesis of fifteenth-century redaction” of the Bruce, Mr. Brown applies what he claims to be “fair and ordinary tests” to six “selected examples,” in order to show that his hypothesis “has a basis in demonstrable fact.”[134] I shall notice such of these very briefly, premising that I do not consider Mr. Brown’s use of his tests either “fair” or “ordinary.” So much, I think, will appear.