The Maid of Elvar: A Poem in Twelve Parts

“The native legends of thy land rehearse.”  Allan Cunningham (1784–1842), the author of The Maid of Elvar, an epic written in the style of traveling bards from former eras, places this quotation on the title page of his book, giving his due to a kindred spirit from a prior generation, one William Collins (1721–1759), a fellow Scottish poet and student of the old epics like himself.  The epics recited by bards were an oral tradition and therefore likely to be lost to posterity.  Both Collins and Cunningham studied what they could find of the disappearing genre, occasionally written down over the centuries, and tried to preserve it.  But of course they were fighting an impossible battle without a time machine.

At some point Cunningham decided to take a well-known Scottish story of heroism and romance, and write his own epic.  This is the result—no doubt bards were reciting something similar in previous ages.  The Maid of Elvar tells the story of Eustace Græme, Scottish herdsman and farmer, also a poet and bard, who answers the call when Scotland is invaded by the hated English and leads the counter-charge that saves his land.  He then enters a contest for bards sponsored by the princess of Elvar, who wants to hear the heroic battle described in the words of poets.  He wins the contest and at the same time, of course—being a handsome lad—the heart of the princess.  But then, before their love is even admitted, many further adventures ensue.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.