“The Lady of the Lake” is Sir Walter Scott’s epic poetic tale of two, or possibly three, men who seek the hand of Ellen Douglas, the beautiful daughter of a Scottish nobleman (?). She lives with her father and retainers on a remote island on Loch Katrine, a lake in southwestern Scotland. One of the men, Malcolm Graeme, has been wooing her for a while; the second, James Fitz-James, is presented as a hunter who discovers Ellen and the isle after getting lost while chasing a deer; and the possible third suitor, Roderick Dhu, is the chief of a rebellious Scottish clan.
Conflict ensues between the men, of course, while at the same time Dhu is making trouble for the English king at Stirling Castle, not far away. The end of the tale is more or less happy (depending on your point of view), with the rebellious clan defeated, the hunter’s true identity revealed, and the long-time suitor winning the fair maiden’s hand.
I’m not used to reading long-form poetry. The combination of the sing-songy iambic quadrameter of the rhyming paired couplets that make up most of the poem, the turns of phrase needed to make the words fit into the lines, and the archaic and foreign terms, made the story hard for me to follow. For that reason, it’s hard for me to give a fair or complete evaluation of the poem, which is one of Scott’s most popular.
On top of that, my copy is a 1915 book for students. (That explains the odd cover image above.) The pages are fragile, the binding failing, and many pages at the end, containing explanatory notes and instructions for those students, are missing. I’m not even sure which side of my family originally owned the book. There’s no student name written inside it—although whoever had it certainly scribbled all over many of the pages—and it was printed the year my late mother was born. Perhaps if I’d had a more complete edition that was in better shape, I would have been able to concentrate more on the story.
“The Lady of the Lake” is considered a classic, so if long-form poetry written in the 1800s is your thing, I suppose this is one you have to check out.
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