Epigraphs are like little appetizers to the great entrée of a story. They illuminate important aspects of the story, and they get us headed in the right direction.
EPIGRAPH:
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
'This is my own, my native land!'
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd
From wandering on a foreign strand?
— Sir Walter Scott
What's up with the epigraph?
In the novel, we learn that Campbell writes medieval romances—quest narratives with heroes, villains, and damsels in distress. His work sounds less like actual medieval texts, though, and more like 18th- and 19th-century renditions of medieval works.
This epigraph is a snippet of a longer 18th-century poem by Sir Walter Scott called The Lay of the Last Minstrel, which was inspired by medieval ballads. This portion is from Canto VI, called, um, "Patriotism." The lines basically say that if you're not patriotic and super proud to be from your homeland, then you're dead inside. Ouch.
One tricky bit here is that Scott is from Scotland (right—who'd have guessed?), so he's mainly thinking about the complicated situation in Great Britain. That is, he's proud to be from Scotland, even though the English took control over it; similarly, he thinks the English should be proud to be English even in the face of Norman French influence. He's not really concerned about people who are foreign to him being patriotic, though—as in, dude's not losing sleep about Italian civic pride or anything.
Yeah, well, all those foggy patriotic and nationalistic ideas come with consequences, and you need look no further than Nazi Germany to see what those consequences can be. What differentiates Scott's text from propaganda? Does anything, really?