Winter Tales (Magna Large Print Series) - Hardcover

Brown, George Mackay

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0750510900 ISBN 13: 9780750510905

Publisher: Magna Large Print Books, 1997

Synopsis

Winter and its festivals predominate in this collection of short stories by George Mackay Brown, who looks at the effect of new ways of thinking and working on the ancient patterns of Orkney life. Christmas was a time for telling stories round the hearth fire and the author and his Scottish island community are part of that living tradition. He values it and engages in it, a story-teller for all seasons, transforming everything by passing it, as Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney has put it, "through the eye of the needle of Orkney".

About this title

About the Author

George Mackay Brown was born in Stromness, Orkney (the 'Hamnavoe' of his stories and poems), in 1921. He was at Newbattle Abbey College while Edwin Muir was Warden. He read English at Edinburgh University and afterwards did postgraduate work on Gerard Manley Hopkins. He became a Catholic in 1961. He died in Orkney in 1996.

From Kirkus Reviews

Noted Scottish poet, novelist, and playwright Brown (A Time to Keep, 1987, etc.) celebrates the dark season of the year in the Orkney Islands with 18 always luminous if sometimes lifeless stories. Suffused with old Norse and Christian beliefs, the tales are all set in the northern islands once ruled by the Vikings. Many characters, like the stubborn farmer in ``The Paraffin Lamp,'' who uses the electric light only when he needs to fill his old lamp, still observe the traditional rituals, especially those of the Yule season, that ease the passing of winter. Inured to hardship and frugality, the islanders must contend with weather that is always changing (``one day is wind and flung spindrift, the next is loveliness beyond compare''). And this protean weather is sometimes center stage, as storms and blizzards dramatically take lives: In ``A Boy's Calendar'' and ``Dancey,'' two babies, the sole survivors of ships wrecked by terrible storms, are adopted by childless women and become islanders. In other pieces, the weather is simply part of the fabric of daily life: Men and women race to harvest crops before the rain comes, or to harvest fish before a blizzard strikes. Three notables are ``Lieutenant Bligh and Two Midshipmen,'' ``The Woodcarver,'' and ``A Boy's Calendar,'' in which, respectively, Bligh, of Mutiny on the Bounty fame, visits the islands and signs on two local men; an imaginative husband, who finds refuge from his acerbic wife in drink and carving, becomes an unwilling cultural icon; and a young boy describes the round of work and celebration in a typical year. Stories such as ``St. Christopher'' and ``The Road to Emmaus'' give the saint's life and the Crucifixion a local setting, while ``A Crusader's Christmas'' recalls the Viking era. Cumulatively, an affectionate but muted portrait of a far place where both heart and spirit are strong, though the days are often short and bitter. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Magna Large Print Books
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0750510900
• ISBN 13: 9780750510905
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 324