I first encountered his story when my wife and I came upon the statue of him that, along with one of King Robert the Bruce, guards the entrance to Edinburgh Castle in Scotland. I am an American; I had grown p in the American South within a family I know to be Scotch-Irish, and although I had always been interested in history, I never through much about our roots extending beyond America. We were dirt farmers from Tennessee. What I am trying to say is that I never thought of our having famous relatives. Songs of William Wallace have been sung for hundreds for years, and not just by Scotland’s poets along- even Winston Churchill wrote, with keen admiration, about Wallace’s courage and sprit. But to me, an American, his story seemed lost, a great treasure of the past, utterly precocious of our time, lying neglected and forgotten. His story began to speak to me, to haunt me; it entered my live as divine gifts do, quietly, overwhelmingly irreversibly. Historians agree on only a few facts about Wallace’s life, and yet they cannot dispute that his life was epic.
