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Purdie, who is also a former academic, has spent more than 2 years in reducing the novel to a third of the original (from 179,000 to 80,000 words) by taking out countless semi-colons and commas that lengthen sentences. Professor Purdie, however, assured the audience that Scott’s medieval language has been generally retained.

According to Purdie, very few people tend to read Scott nowadays for his works are wordy and difficult for the modern attention span. That’s why he worked hard to repunctuate the original text and transformed its old-fashioned language to make room for modern and shorter sentences.



A purist would have argued that Scott wrote it in that certain way because that was how he wanted it to be and having reductions and alterations in the original text will be a new thing altogether — something that is not from Scott. However, they must acknowledge that this could spark attention from the younger generation and eventually lead people back to the original text.



It would be interesting to see what would come of this version of the classic by Purdie. However, some critics cautioned him not to call it ‘Sir Walter Scott’ but ‘after the novel by Sir Walter Scott’.



Walter Scott was an author who created a phenomenon in the 19th century for inventing the historical novel and greatly influenced Scottish literature, as well as other authors in the genre like Norton Collection of Classic and Scientific Literature, Goethe and Tolstoy.