Use and functions of formulaic language in John Barbour’s Bruce

The article examines the presence of formulaic language in John Barbour’s Bruce, highlighting the reasons why the poet used formulae for a text which was conceived as a written buk with a fundamentally propagandistic purpose, and was intended to be delivered to the audience by an oral performance. The formulae appearing in Barbour’s poem will be analysed using the taxonomy sketched out by David Robert Groves (2005), first describing them on the basis of their semantic relevance and typology and then examining their syntactical, metrical and lexical features. The results of my analysis will show that formulae were probably used both for stylistic and ‘ideological’ reasons and to make the composition process more rapid.