ABSTRACT
The Gaels were even fonder of fighting than the Saxons, but they could have loved it half so much had they loved poetizing about, it more. They fought with their imaginations as well as with their bodies. As Gaels point out, it was natural that when a clever people and a dull people had to do business with each other, the speech they used should be that of the dullards, who could not learn the language of the clever folk. A century later, that Scots note of freedom was sounded again, even more insistently, in Blind Harry’s “Wallace,” a poem in a more pleasing measure than Barbour’s, and of greater concrete interest. The opening phase of Scots literature which was uninfluenced by Chaucer is known as Early Scots. Barbour, its chief figure, essayed a task which was in some ways more difficult than Chaucer’s.
