II.

Early Works

The earliest literature in the northern dialect of English known as Scottish or Lowland Scots is a fragment of an anonymous 13th-century poem on the condition of Scotland after the death of King Alexander III. One of the first major Scottish poets was John Barbour, archdeacon of Aberdeen, who wrote The Bruce (1375); its 14,000 lines tell the story of the heroic Scottish king Robert Bruce. Harry the Minstrel also wrote in the tradition of military epic and wrote the 12,000-line poem Sir William Wallace in the late 15th century.