Fiction · 1810
The Lady of the Lake
In the Trossachs of the Scottish Highlands, a huntsman separated from his party on the shore of Loch Katrine is sheltered by Ellen Douglas, whose father lives there in secret exile under the outlawed clan chief Roderick Dhu. The stranger, James Fitz-James, is not what he seems — and as clan loyalty collides with the King’s own hunt for rebels, six cantos carry the poem from courtship to mustering armies to battle and pardon.
Walter Scott published the poem in 1810, already Britain’s most popular living poet; eight thousand copies sold in its first four months, and it did more than any other book to send readers travelling to Loch Katrine. Ellen’s hymn to the Virgin, sung in the third canto, is the piece Schubert set as his “Ave Maria.”
This edition follows William J. Rolfe’s 1883 annotated school text: his preface and canto-by-canto notes stand alongside Scott’s six cantos and his 1830 introduction.
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1771–1832 · Romantic
Walter Scott (1771–1832) was born in Edinburgh, practised as an advocate, and held the offices of Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire and Clerk of Session for most of his life. He was the most popular poet in Britain — The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion, The Lady of the Lake — before turning, anonymously, to the Waverley novels in 1814. Ivanhoe (1819) was the first he set outside Scotland. Made a baronet in 1820, he was ruined by his publishers’ failure in 1826 and wrote on to pay the debts.
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