George Mackay Brown

Product Information

O'Donoghue, Bernard. "Under the Rooftrees." The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4627 (6 December 1991): 24. 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. 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] As he wrote in his autobiography: “There are mysterious marks on the stone circle of Brodgar on Orkney and on the stones of Skara Brae village from 5,000 years ago. In the following review, Henry describes Brown's chronicling of island life in Beside the Ocean of Time.]

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). 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. In the following review, Andreae considers Brown's posthumously published Following a Lark and Orkney: Pictures and Poems.]Editor with Neil Miller Gunn and Aonghas MacNeacail), A Writers Celidh for Neil Gunn, Balnain Books (Nairn, Scotland), 1991. Mostly, it was a quietly difficult life of the imagination. "Sacrificed" is too strong a word. As is "cowardice". Brown could do nothing else. He has been well served by his biographer, as he was by his friends. He was held in such affection by the Orkney people that his funeral in St Magnus Cathedral was the first Catholic mass to have been held there since the Reformation. Furthermore, it fell on April 16, St Magnus's Day. As the minister said: "If you call that a coincidence, I wish you a very dull life."

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. In the following review, the critic describes the stories of Winter Tales as "always luminous if sometimes lifeless."] Scottish poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, dramatist, scriptwriter, journalist, librettist, and author of children's books. Bardic and mystical, Brown found Orkney a "microcosm of all the world." Born in 1921 in the town of Stromness, he developed tuberculosis at the age of 20. Only a decade later could he resume his formal education, studying under the Orkney poet Edwin Muir at Newbattle Abbey near Edinburgh. Despite recurring illness, he did an English degree at Edinburgh University (1956–60) and graduate work on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1962–64). In 1961, rejecting what he called a "life-denying" Scots Calvinism, he became a Roman Catholic—a rarity in Presbyterian Orkney—and deepened his sense of sacramentality and of liturgical festival.

Beginnings

The Two Fiddlers (opera libretto; music by Davies; adaptation of story by Brown; produced in London, 1978), Boosey and Hawkes, 1978. A Spell for Green Corn (radio play; broadcast, 1967; produced in Edinburgh, 1970; adaptation produced at Perth Theatre, 1972), Hogarth, 1970. A Celebration for Magnus (son et Lumiere text by Brown, music by Davies; produced in Kirkwall, Orkney, 1988), Nairn, Balnain, 1987. In the following review, Olson finds the stories of Brown's Winter Tales "as poetic as any of his verse."]