George Mackay Brown

Product Information

Brown's hand has, I feel, been lighter, more subtle in his previous work. Although the language is as usual terse and austere, there are the odd times when he seems to be labouring his point. In his earlier short stories, one felt that the fire in the croft was life and must never go out. You did not need to be told. For about six months, she lent Brown prints of the photographs she had chosen for the book, which was to be published at the opening of a first retrospective of her work…. The images were propped on an easel, several at a time, in Brown's sitting room. Moberg had asked him just for short captions. But secretly—until the final drafts—he wrote full-fledged poems, 48 in all. 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.”

At first sight, Vinland seems taken up with moods, gestures and epiphanies; it does not signal excitedly when important ideas appear in its narrative. Thus, at one level, we follow the fortunes of Ranald the hero, as he moves determinedly but uncertainly from a sea-roving youth, through agrarian middle age and on to visionary and rheumatic senility. We register, too, the narrative fate of other young men, "splits" of the protagonist, who were either less fortunate or more rebellious—as when Ranald the dutiful son fathers Einhof the runaway heir. Gradually, a pattern of ideas—of themes and variations—emerges. Ranald roves the seas between Greenland, Vinland, Iceland and Orkney, but the dilemmas of Viking life follow him like porpoises. For all the novel's gloomy sense of fate's tight fist, the North Atlantic hero has endlessly to exercise his (all too) free will in making hard choices: heroic enterprise or agrarian domesticity, lobster-fishing or learning Latin, ship or farmhouse, crew or family. He might also decide between the conflicting wishes of father and mother and loyalty to foreign king or to homeland—a fraught choice in a homeland in which "there are always two earls, sometimes three". Are the prizes worth the prices? Is civilization really just like old age; that is, tolerable only when you consider the alternative? It is no wonder that many a grizzled Orcadian soul took refuge in the strong libations supplied by Ord, the surly malt-maker of Papa Stronsay. With Peter Maxwell Davies) Apple-Basket, Apple-Blossom: For Unaccompanied Choir SATB (musical score), Chester Music (London), 1992. Editor with Neil Miller Gunn and Aonghas MacNeacail), A Writers Celidh for Neil Gunn, Balnain Books (Nairn, Scotland), 1991. Beside the Ocean of Time (1994) shortlisted for Booker Prize and judged Scottish Book of the Year by the Saltire Society 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.But Brown's poem suggests that these feats of engineering (built by "Italian prisoners, Glasgow navvies") meant that every islander woke one morning to say, "I am an islander no more!" and consequently that an "enchantment is gone from his days."

The museum stands on its own pier within spitting distance of the small ex-council flat where Brown spent the latter half of his life. By the 1990s he was obliged to pin notices on his front door. "No callers before 2pm", or "WORKING ALL DAY", but still people came. In one letter Brown, ever a seeker after solitude and silence, notes wearily that "200 people have called this summer". Some came clutching copies of Greenvoe or An Orkney Tapestry to be signed, others merely to clap eyes on this near-mythic island bard. Today, a decade after his death, he is being further woven into the Orkney tourist experience - landscape photographs with lines from his poetry decorate the ferry which serves the islands.

Robb offered his own elaboration on Brown’s sensibilities. “In Brown’s eyes the immense materialism of the current age and its craving for novelty are directly opposed to all his favorite values, which are, at base, religious,” the essayist wrote. “Brown’s values stress at least three equally important strands. He holds to the age-old religious rejection of material things as distracting, irrelevant novelties; his ideal of human life is of simplicity and, indeed, poverty. At both the personal and communal levels, furthermore, he sees human life in the present as requiring a rootedness in knowledge of the past and in the traditions deriving from the past.” New York Times Book Review, April 28, 1968; July 19, 1970; September 9, 1984, pp. 9, 32; March 22, 1987, p. 9; March 31, 1996, p. 18. An eminent chronicler of Orkney life and geography, Brown has published numerous collections of essays, including An Orkney Tapestry (1969), which Seamus Heaney described as "a spectrum of lore, legend, and literature, a highly coloured reaction as Orkney breaks open in the prisms of a poet's mind and memory." In Portrait of Orkney (1981), Brown intertwines contemporary descriptions and facts with history, legend, and anecdote. Brown's works for the stage include A Spell for Green Corn (1970), which is concerned with symbolism, ritual, and the supernatural, and The Loom of Light (1972), an adaptation of Magnus. He has also written radio and television plays and published several children's books, including The Two Fiddlers: Tales from Orkney (1974) and Pictures in a Cave (1977), and a biographical work, Edwin Muir: A Brief Memoir (1975). Portrait of Orkney, photographs by Werner Forman, Hogarth, 1981, revised edition with photographs by Gunnie Moberg, drawings by Erlend Brown, J. Murray, 1989.

It is interesting to know that while Moberg recently had a period when she gave up photography because she felt it was too tied to "what's there," Brown was preoccupied undeviatingly with a theme and a subject, and he knew it. He never ceased to explore and re-explore its meanings and implications. Master Ru by Peter Knobler | Four Poems on Affairs of State by Peter Robinson | 5×7 by John Matthias | Y ou Haven’t Understood and two more poems by Amy Glynn | Long Live the King and two more by Eliot Cardinaux, with drawings by Sean Ali Shostakovich, Eliot and Sunday Morning by E.J. Smith Jr. :: For much more, please consult our massive yet still partial archive. The Two Fiddlers: Tales from Orkney (also see below), illustrations by Ian MacInnes, Hogarth, 1974. 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.

In the following tribute, Feeney explores Brown's career, noting Seamus Heaney's remark that Brown could "transform everything by passing it through the eye of the needle of Orkney."]