[Rarebooks] FS: 13th and 14th century Scottish epics--The Bruce and Wallace, privately printed 1820

[Greg Powers]

I can offer...

The Bruce, published from a MS. dated 1489, with Notes and a Life of the Author, &c.  To which is added, Wallace, or the Life of Sir Wm Wallace of Ellerslie, from a MS. of 1488, by John Wallace Jamieson.  Edinburgh: Printed by James Ballantyne and Co., 1820.  Two 4to volumes, recently bound in quarter black morocco and cloth, a.e.g.  With a general title and separate vignette title-page to each volume. xxx, 495; xx, 444 pp.  The two general titles are bound in the wrong volumes (that to Vol. 1 is bound in Vol 2, etc.), some slight foxing to the prelims and terminal leaves, otherwise a very clean, handsome set.  One of 250 copies printed for subscribers.
 
Lowndes I, p. 111.  Jamieson is best-known for his Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808).  In 1820 he issued this “well-edited versions of Barbour’s ‘Bruce’ and Blind Harry’s ‘Wallace,’ which [Sir Walter] Scott commended to his friends” (DNB).  Indeed, Scott is in the List of Subscribers as having requested two sets.
 
These volumes tell, in a mixture of historical anecdote and romance, the stories of William Wallace (1272?-1305), the Scottish patriot of the time of Edward I, who devoted his life to resistance to the English and was finally captured by treachery and executed in London (as portrayed by Mel Gibson in “Braveheart”); and King Robert the Bruce, who in 1314, led a Scottish army before a ceremonial line of English troops on the fields of Bannockburn, where he was to formally accept English rule, but instead, invoking the memory of Wallace, opened battle against the stunned English and won the Scots their freedom.
 
Barbour’s ‘Bruce’ was originally composed in the thirteenth century, and Blind Harry’s ‘Wallace’ around 1375.  This is the first edition of Jamieson’s version (a different recension of The Bruce was published in 1790), but in a nod to his own etymological labors, Jamieson says in his Preface: “It has been supposed, that the Editor had it in his power to give a more correct edition of both works than any one that has yet been published, as he had bestowed much attention on the antiquated language in which they are written."
 
Although this privately printed edition is reasonably well-represented in institutions (28 copies located in OCLC), it is rather scarce on the market.

$1350 plus shipping

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