George Mackay Brown

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In the Times Literary Supplement, Dunn remarked upon Brown’s traditional qualities in prose as well: “Brown has perfected a narrative style of great simplicity, its virtues drawn more from the ancient art of telling tales than from new-fangled methodologies of fiction.” Cleaving to “a collective tradition which rests on the work of old oral tale-tellers,” said O’Faolain, “his stories make no concession to contemporary taste.” And yet, according to Robb, to read a Brown story “is to experience life as an endless sequence of fresh starts. He communicates a sense of the limitless possibilities of human life. Interest, wonder, and even miracle lie around the next corner, be it ever so familiar and prosaic.” We will never know what they mean. I am making marks on a piece of paper that will have no meaning 5,000 years from now. A mystery abides. These have all become essential parts of modern Orkney and its tourism. Yet Brown and Moberg have not pieced together some trite tourist brochure, anything but. They potently insist that in spite of daytrippers and vacation-home dwellers, in spite of traffic and technology, Orkney survives as an ancient place of deep meditation.

The Skarf is an inshore creelman – his boat is the Engels – taking lobsters with his uncle. ‘You with all that brains. You should have gone on to the school, then the university.’ (I heard some of my clients say, ‘These islands have turned out just too many Professors, what’s the good of them?’) The Skarf is shiftless, irresponsible, he avoids going to the lobsters whenever he can, he draws National Assistance – means-tested benefit – rather than work. He says ‘the sun of socialism’ warms him, ‘however feebly’. But he is a writer: ‘Anyone looking in through his webbed window could see The Skarf moving between boxes of books and a table covered with writing paraphernalia.’ He writes the history of the islands in an old cashbook that was found on the foreshore, preaches socialism and atheism to any youngsters who will hear him. The line quoted at the beginning of this article is from a poem in the book called Churchill Barriers. These barriers were built during World War II, partly to protect Scapa Flow, where a Nazi submarine had torpedoed a British battleship with great loss of life, and partly to make road crossings (instead of boat crossings) between several of the southern islands.

His novels Greenvoe and Magnus, which emerged in 1972 and 1973, stamped him as a unique voice, whose work was every bit as ingrained in his roots and where he grew up as Sunset Song was to Lewis Grassic Gibbon. A settled home, which he rarely left, a settled religion, which he loved – and a dram or two – were to sustain him and his writing till his death in Stromness on 13 April 1996. He wrote regularly for the local newspaper – lively articles and essays – produced several short story volumes (some say his best work), and novels, and of course the poems on which his reputation rests.

Editor with Neil Miller Gunn and Aonghas MacNeacail), A Writers Celidh for Neil Gunn, Balnain Books (Nairn, Scotland), 1991. Orkney, at the northeastern tip of mainland Scotland, across the Pentland Firth, is not, strictly speaking, "an" island. It is 67 islands. Sixteen of them are inhabited by people and cows; many more by birds. Even a hasty visitor (the only kind of visitor I have so far been) to this remote outpost of Britain immediately senses that to Orcadians, the archipelago is unquestionably the center of the known universe. It makes all those other places elsewhere seem peripheral and distant. The Two Fiddlers (opera libretto; music by Davies; adaptation of story by Brown; produced in London, 1978), Boosey and Hawkes, 1978. I also admired the novel's highly physical yet deeply religious sense of sacrifice, both primitive and Christian. In ancient Orkney, Brown wrote, "the animals honoured the god … with their broken flesh and spilled blood … I speak of priests, a solemn sacred ritual, lustrations, sacrifice. The kneeling beast, the cloven skull, the scarlet axe, the torrent of blood gurgling into the earth at the time of the new sun, the hushed circle of elders." And "when the hands of the priest and the elders dabble in the blood, the whole tribe is washed clean of its blemishes." Centuries and civilizations later, a newer and ultimately similar sacrifice graced a 12th-century kirk: Brown was awarded an OBE in the 1974 New Year Honours List. The period after completing Magnus, however, was marked by one of Brown's acute periods of mental distress. [53] Yet he maintained a stream of writing: poetry, children's stories, and a weekly column in the local newspaper, The Orcadian, which ran from 1971 to the end of his life. [54] A first selection of them appeared as Letter from Hamnavoe in 1975. [55]There is a certain rightness about the Scandinavian nationality of the photographer. Although the Orkney Islands have been Scottish since 1468, their links before that were all with Scandinavia. As with Shetland, farther north still, Gaelic is not spoken in Orkney. Most of the place names here have a Norse ring to them. (Hypothetically, the Viking occupation was preceded by Piets and the "first Orcadians" spoke a Celtic language.) The main island used to be called "Hrossey." Norse for "horse island." GMB's poems are punctuated with such local names as Scapa Flow, Rinansay, Swona, Hamnavoe, and Egilsay. In the late 1980's he also began publishing books of short stories, beginning with A Calendar of Love and Other Stories. Among his other anthologies are Hawkfall and Other Stories and Andrina and Other Stories. The story "Andrina" was made into a television film by Bill Forsyth. In 1994, his novel Beside the Ocean of Time was one of six works of fiction shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The poet, who was famously reclusive and disinclined to leave his beloved Orkney, was nonetheless kind in offering his condolences and began chatting about my dad’s brother, Bill, in terms which came as close to excitement as he could muster.