Sir Walter Scott's Fame- The Lay of the Last Minstrel
Sir Walter Scott, born in 1771 in Scotland, started his career in the Romantics by translating German and Scottish Romantic Poems and Ballads. While some of them were done poorly, Scott drowned the translations in the Romanticism flare, gaining quick popularity to his translations. So much so, that in 1805, Scott published his first Romanticism work called the Lay of the Last Minstrel, permanently establishing his place among Romance poets of the time. The Lay of the Last Minstrel was a story narrative based on a Scottish Legend of a goblin named Gilpin Horner. While Gilpin Horner is just a fairy tale, his master, the "wizard" Michael Scott (1175-1235) was indeed real. The Lay of the Last Minstrel had added on to Michael Scott's reputation of being magical, something that left him in many Scottish tales of heroes and magical beasts. The Lay of the Last Minstrel has six cantos and starts with a mother refusing her daughter to marry a man who has killed her husband (a pair of star-cross lovers) and the journey of one minstrel in search for Micheal Scott's tomb for his spellbook. The rest of the story includes battles, mischief, and the supernatural, all very romantic and fitting for this period in time.