Scotland: The Story of a Nation
Near Stirling, Scotland, stands a memorial to the warrior William  Wallace, put to death at the orders of the English king Edward I in 1305. Within  that memorial stands a glass case, and inside of it stands a broadsword 1.7  meters long. Legend has it that the hero himself wielded the weapon, and so  "Wallace's Sword" it is.Magnus Magnusson, a native of Iceland who has long lived in and written about  Scotland, may spoil it for some readers when he writes that Wallace's Sword  probably wasn't Wallace's. To use it, Wallace would have had to have stood at  least 6-foot-6 in height and to have lived two centuries later. The business of  the sword is just one of the "cherished conceptions" about Scottish history that  Magnusson picks apart and then, corrected and improved, restores. At other turns  he considers the true identity of the legendary king Macbeth (and entertains  some surprising but plausible theories about the king's alter ego); reconstructs  decisive battles such as Otterburn, Flodden, and Glencoe; and looks closely at  the complicated negotiations (and, many would say, treacheries) that led to the  union with England of 1707. Magnusson closes with an account of modern  independence movements and the recent return of some measure of national  autonomy, opening a "new chapter in a nation's story, which the people of  Scotland are now beginning to write."Lucid, witty, and unafraid of controversy, Magnusson's book does a fine job of  condensing a complex history, stretching out for 10 millennia, into a single  volume.--Gregory McNamee--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.