A Study Guide for Walter Scott's "Wandering Willie's Tale"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Walter Scott's "Wandering Willie's Tale," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535842372

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Wandering Willie’s Tale

Sir Walter Scott

1824

Introduction

Wandering Willie’s Tale, by Sir Walter Scott, first appeared in Scott’s 1824 novel, Redgauntlet. The tale is not directly part of the action of the novel; it is simply a story told by one of the characters to another, and in fact is merely the most developed of such stories contained in the novel. Several other times in Redgauntlet the action stops while one character tells another the story of his life or of one specific event. In this case, Wandering Willie, a blind fiddler, tells Darsie Latimer, a young man traveling in the Border region of Scotland, a cautionary tale to warn him to be wary of whose company he accepts on his travels, for even a friendly traveler may turn out to be the devil in disguise.

Later in the novel it is revealed that the story Willie told concerns some of Darsie’s ancestors, but Darsie and the reader do not know this at the time, and so the story seems at first to be something almost entirely separate from the rest of the novel. Indeed, some early readers of the novel and some later commentators regarded the tale as being quite distinct from the larger work, sometimes praising it at the expense of the novel. Later commentators, however, have tended to see thematic connections between the two. Critics have noted that they both reflect Scott’s ambivalent interest in Scottish traditions, and have drawn a parallel between the tale’s account of a trip to hell and the novel’s depiction of Darsie’s encounter with his dark, mysterious uncle. Commentators new and old have praised Scott’s handling of Scottish dialect in the tale, and in general have described the story as one of the best ever written.

Author Biography

Born in Edinburgh in 1771, Scott was interested all his life in Scottish history, folk tales, and the super-natural, three of the major components of Wandering Willie’s Tale. As a child, he listened to stories and songs about the Jacobite rebellions in which some of his distant relatives had fallen, and he developed a lifelong sympathy for the lost cause of Jacobitism, writing about it in several of his novels, including Redgauntlet, the novel in which Wandering Willie’s Tale is found. However, his attitude to Jacobitism and the old feudal and heroic ways was ambivalent; he became a lawyer like his father, and was very much a part of the modern world