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: The story of the life of Magnus Erlendsson, Earl of Orkney was one to which Brown frequently turned, [49] and it was the theme of his next novel, Magnus, published in 1973. [50] The story of Magnus's life is told in the Orkneyinga saga. [51] The novel examined the themes of sanctity and self-sacrifice. [50] Brown takes the theme of sacrifice into the 20th century by inserting in journalistic language an account of the death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. [52] While some critics see the work as "disjointed", [52] Peter Maxwell Davies, for example, marks it as Brown's greatest achievement. Davies used it as the basis of his opera The Martyrdom of St Magnus. [53] O'Donoghue, Bernard. "Under the Rooftrees." The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4627 (6 December 1991): 24.

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. In the following review, the critic describes the stories of Winter Tales as "always luminous if sometimes lifeless."] 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] 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.

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One of the experiences running through Beside the Ocean of Time is that of displacement—from the displacements of the islands' "original" people by emigrants from Alba, Cornwall, and Sicily nearly two thousand years ago, the conscription of young men by the press gangs of King George III, and the displacements initiated by the British government during World War II, when it requisitioned the entire island of Norday for an air force base (an event treated more fully in Brown's 1972 novel Greenvoe). Resistance is often passive and, with time, often successful. The emigrants from Alba, for example, build an impregnable castle and stow themselves away in it when invaders arrive. The islanders hide their young men in smugglers' caves until the press gangs leave. Even the commandeering of the island by the British is temporary. The islanders begin returning soon after the base is abandoned. Rowena Murray and Brian Murray, Interrogation of Silence, John Murray, 2004, ISBN 0-7195-5929-4 p. 13. Between 1987 and 1989, George travelled to Nairn, including a visit to Pluscarden Abbey, journeyed around Shetland – another world of wonder – and eventually took the train down to Oxford, making it the longest time he had left Orkney since his earlier studies in Edinburgh. 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.

George passed away on 13th April 1996 and his funeral took place on St Magnus Day three days later. St Magnus Cathedral, hosting a Catholic service for the first time since the reformation, was full. George dedicated his final collection of poems Following a Lark to me, but it was published shortly after his death and I never had the chance to thank him. In it is a beautiful poem:The Martyrdom of St. Magnus (opera libretto; music by Peter Maxwell Davies; adaptation of novel Magnus by Brown; produced in Kirkwall, Vienna, and London, 1977 ; produced in Santa Fe, 1979), Boosey and Hawkes (London), 1977. From his family, George inherited his mother’s Calvinist work ethic and his father’s talent for storytelling. In the tailor’s shop where his father worked, George listened to the men’s tales about the past and present folk of the town. Other influences came from George’s brother Norrie, my grandfather, who shared George’s love of poetry, and George’s sister Ruby, who taught him Scottish Ballads when he was very young. 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.

Having had poems published in several periodicals, his first volume of them, The Storm, appeared with the Orkney Press in 1954. Muir wrote in the foreword: "Grace is what I find in these poems.". Only three hundred copies were printed, and the imprint sold out within a fortnight. It was acclaimed in the local press. [18] Three Plays (contains The Loom of Light, The Well, and The Voyage of Saint Brandon), Chatto & Windus, 1984. One of Scotland's foremost contemporary authors, Brown incorporated in his writings elements from Norse sagas, Scottish ballads, medieval legends and myths, and Roman Catholic ritual. He commonly employed simple language and syntax and explored themes of history, religion, mysticism, and the people and life of his native Orkney Islands. Deeply committed to the values inherent in the elemental existence of Orkney's farmers and fishermen, Brown extolled the virtues that can be gained through hardship and emphasized the damaging effects of the forces of progress on Orkney society. While Brown's antiquated prose style and his preoccupation with Orkney were sometimes faulted for failing to engage contemporary realities, most critics complimented his intimate portrayal of a specific locality and his fundamental insight into the common concerns of human existence.By the late 1960s Brown's poetry was renowned internationally, so that the American poet Robert Lowell, for example, came to Orkney expressly to meet him. [42] Thorfinn Ragnarson is known on his island of Norday as a "lazy idle useless boy". But his dreams tell us that he is a storyteller, the ancient bard; he has the "gift of language". His island world is abruptly destroyed when the government decides to build a military aerodrome on it. Crofters are served with notice to vacate land that has run through families for generations; crops are flattened by Nissen huts and concrete. His short story Andrina was adapted and directed for BBC Scotland by Bill Forsyth; another individual who has never fitted easily into any mould. He left an indelible mark on Scotland Brown was also a prose writer, and produced a number of short story collections, novels, and essay collections. His first novel, Greenvoe (1972), describes the gradual decimation of a mythical Orkney fishing village after the construction of a secret military establishment on the island. By detailing the events of the five days preceding its final demise, Brown suggests that the banal existence of its inhabitants inadvertently contributed to the destruction of the village. Despite its bleak theme, Greenvoe concludes with an ambiguous but uplifting promise of resurrection. In Magnus (1973), Brown combines the starkness of Norse saga with the ornamentalism of the Roman Catholic mass. The story of the martyrdom and sanctification of twelfth-century Earl Magnus of Orkney, who was killed by his cousin and rival for supreme control of the Orkneys, Magnus extends Brown's fascination with the Christian theme of redemption. Brown's third novel, Time in a Red Coat (1984), is a fable that chronicles the experiences of a young Eastern princess as she journeys through distant countries and flees the devastation of her homeland by marauders. An innocent figure, the princess begins her travels in a white coat that gradually turns red due to the human folly and injustice she encounters. In Vinland (1992) "Brown has returned to the world of his beloved Orkneyinga Saga, that astonishing, bloody and darkly humorous chronicle of early Orkney which also provided material for his novel Magnus," Jonathan Coe remarked. Vinland chronicles the spiritual development of it hero, Ranald Sigmundson, from youthful seafaring adventures to old age. The fictional locale of Vinland "comes to symbolise a hope of release from the grip of the Orcadians' primitive, fatalistic Christianity, as well as providing a model of man in harmony rather than conflict with the physical world—a natural equivalent of the 'Seamless Coat' after which St Magnus was searching in the earlier novel," Coe noted. Beside the Ocean of Time (1994), which was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize, again presents an island hero, a young dreamer named Thorfinn whose adventure fantasies illuminate the Orkney lifestyle. 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.