Truly magical, 15 Aug 2008
I read this book a couple of months ago and found it absolutely engrossing. I too thought it may have been written for younger people, but I think it will appeal to anyone who likes good strong tale telling and characters you come to care about, I love the narration of this book.
I am fortunate to live in Orkney, a recent move, and GMB's descriptive narrative is really spot on in capturing these islands and her own people.

The Charm of the Orkneys, 26 Mar 2008
Like the previous reviewers, I have only just discovered G M Brown, and I certainly expect to read more of his work in the future.

His writing is more lyrical than that of Neil Gunn, but like that great storyteller of Caithness, he succeeded admirably in capturing the atmosphere of northern Scotland, awakening a sense of its long history and opening the minds of its people.

I cannot help comparing this book with Gunn's "Morning Tide", because both works centre on the life of a young boy in the early years of this century, but the two books are different, for, while Gunn creates a convincing character and tells his story, Brown's Thorfinn somehow does not come alive in the same way. He is more of a literary device, a pivotal awareness, through whose reveries we explore the island landscape and come to meet the adult inhabitants. There is, of course, another difference. While Gunn is always conscious of his country's history and culture, the present is what matters; Brown, in this book at least, leads us constantly out of the present and into the more distant past. It is only in the concluding pages that we move into the twentieth century and Thorfinn begins to emerge as a real person.

As I began reading the book and became aware of Brown's simple language and the magical atmosphere of time-travel, I actually wondered whether it was really for children, but his simplicity of style is a means by which he represents the mind of a young child and makes the novel accessible to a very wide public. This is a work of great charm which will appeal to readers of almost any age.


simply magificent, 21 Feb 2007
This is the first book by George Mackay Brown that I have read. It won't be the last. Superb storytelling, wonderful, lyrical language. I bought this out of curiosity on Amazon - an impulse purchase to get over my free delivery point when I was buying WS Graham's collected poems. If you too have stumbled across this book, then take a chance - you won't regret it!

I do wish I had discovered him sooner..., 16 Feb 2006
I have come to George Mackay Brown very late in life and find it rather fascinating that, once a fortnight, I flew over everything he writes of on my way to and from North Sea oil platforms situated north of the Shetlands. I am now too old and infirm to manage to travel to the Orkney Isles which he describes so well, so must content myself with seeking out his works in Amazon's lists. They are well worth the hunt. Anyone with an interest in such things as the sea, small communities, folk, and life in general should take a peek into his books. They are all great volumes to have at the bedside, especially for those interminable insomniac hours: never waste those hours again if you have his books to hand.

spellbinding storytelling by a true bard, 11 Sep 2001
A moving tale suffused with magic, poetry and a deep wisdom. From Orkney's greatest Bard, the pages reveal the life of an islander from birth to death, as straighforward and extraordinary as any life.

As with all GMB's work the language is remarkably simple and yet deeply symbolic. Shortlisted for the Booker prize, this work speaks as perfectly and poetically of our green islands as it does of the nature of man and his place in the universe.

This is the work of a truly great poet. Read it!

Truly magical, 15 Aug 2008
I read this book a couple of months ago and found it absolutely engrossing. I too thought it may have been written for younger people, but I think it will appeal to anyone who likes good strong tale telling and characters you come to care about, I love the narration of this book.
I am fortunate to live in Orkney, a recent move, and GMB's descriptive narrative is really spot on in capturing these islands and her own people.

The Charm of the Orkneys, 26 Mar 2008
Like the previous reviewers, I have only just discovered G M Brown, and I certainly expect to read more of his work in the future.

His writing is more lyrical than that of Neil Gunn, but like that great storyteller of Caithness, he succeeded admirably in capturing the atmosphere of northern Scotland, awakening a sense of its long history and opening the minds of its people.

I cannot help comparing this book with Gunn's "Morning Tide", because both works centre on the life of a young boy in the early years of this century, but the two books are different, for, while Gunn creates a convincing character and tells his story, Brown's Thorfinn somehow does not come alive in the same way. He is more of a literary device, a pivotal awareness, through whose reveries we explore the island landscape and come to meet the adult inhabitants. There is, of course, another difference. While Gunn is always conscious of his country's history and culture, the present is what matters; Brown, in this book at least, leads us constantly out of the present and into the more distant past. It is only in the concluding pages that we move into the twentieth century and Thorfinn begins to emerge as a real person.

As I began reading the book and became aware of Brown's simple language and the magical atmosphere of time-travel, I actually wondered whether it was really for children, but his simplicity of style is a means by which he represents the mind of a young child and makes the novel accessible to a very wide public. This is a work of great charm which will appeal to readers of almost any age.


simply magificent, 21 Feb 2007
This is the first book by George Mackay Brown that I have read. It won't be the last. Superb storytelling, wonderful, lyrical language. I bought this out of curiosity on Amazon - an impulse purchase to get over my free delivery point when I was buying WS Graham's collected poems. If you too have stumbled across this book, then take a chance - you won't regret it!

I do wish I had discovered him sooner..., 16 Feb 2006
I have come to George Mackay Brown very late in life and find it rather fascinating that, once a fortnight, I flew over everything he writes of on my way to and from North Sea oil platforms situated north of the Shetlands. I am now too old and infirm to manage to travel to the Orkney Isles which he describes so well, so must content myself with seeking out his works in Amazon's lists. They are well worth the hunt. Anyone with an interest in such things as the sea, small communities, folk, and life in general should take a peek into his books. They are all great volumes to have at the bedside, especially for those interminable insomniac hours: never waste those hours again if you have his books to hand.

spellbinding storytelling by a true bard, 11 Sep 2001
A moving tale suffused with magic, poetry and a deep wisdom. From Orkney's greatest Bard, the pages reveal the life of an islander from birth to death, as straighforward and extraordinary as any life.

As with all GMB's work the language is remarkably simple and yet deeply symbolic. Shortlisted for the Booker prize, this work speaks as perfectly and poetically of our green islands as it does of the nature of man and his place in the universe.

This is the work of a truly great poet. Read it!

great wisdom and great beauty; a collection that celebrates life, 04 Apr 2007
George Mackay Brown died at the age of 74 in the 1990s. He lived very nearly all of his life on the Orkney Islands, where he was born, and most of his poetry is a kind of dialogue between poet and place, with the past as real a presence as the present. He wanted no more than to be in the place where he was born and to commune with its physical reality, its light, its sunsets, its storms, its people, their customs, its folk lore and its history. He had a spell down in Edinburgh and one visit, I think, to London, but he was not adventurous in any sense that most people would recognise. His adventures were of the imagination and the spirit and their medium of exression were prose and poetry. His novels and short stories, his column for 'The Orcadian' and above all his poetry stand as his memorial ; and we learn from Maggie Fergusson's recent biography that his poetry was ranked most highly by Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and others. It is unique and life-enhancing, this poetry of the Islands, and it is wonderful to have it in one well-presented volume as here. It is very easy to represent his work as insular - by definition, that is indeed what most of it was. But I would suggest that every human feeling and longing is here, and the beauty of the imagery, the old stories, the patterns of verse, the varied repetitions, the warmth and coldness, involvement and detachment of the lines embody human life and relationships between man and man and man and his surroundings as truly as any body of modern poetry can be said to do. This is a wonderful book offering a lifetime's observation and wisdom in memorable forms and language, and it will give pleasure to readers for many lifetimes to come.

timeless wisdom and beauty, 19 Dec 2005
The modest Orkney poet George Mackay Brown was faithful throughout his writing life to the central themes he explored - the land and sea, the cycle of the seasons, the relationship between man and the world around him, the power and meaning of stories, the spiritual dimension which made sense, to him, of all these things. I have read his poems over many years without quite realising what an impressive body of work they came to form. It is wonderful to come across this volume which so amply demonstrates this. This is art concealing art, the power of understatement, less meaning more, and always his love of the Orkneys, land, sea, customs, history and legends. It's a marvellous book and a fine memorial to a lovable writer who fully deserves such a tribute.

Truly magical, 15 Aug 2008
I read this book a couple of months ago and found it absolutely engrossing. I too thought it may have been written for younger people, but I think it will appeal to anyone who likes good strong tale telling and characters you come to care about, I love the narration of this book.
I am fortunate to live in Orkney, a recent move, and GMB's descriptive narrative is really spot on in capturing these islands and her own people.

The Charm of the Orkneys, 26 Mar 2008
Like the previous reviewers, I have only just discovered G M Brown, and I certainly expect to read more of his work in the future.

His writing is more lyrical than that of Neil Gunn, but like that great storyteller of Caithness, he succeeded admirably in capturing the atmosphere of northern Scotland, awakening a sense of its long history and opening the minds of its people.

I cannot help comparing this book with Gunn's "Morning Tide", because both works centre on the life of a young boy in the early years of this century, but the two books are different, for, while Gunn creates a convincing character and tells his story, Brown's Thorfinn somehow does not come alive in the same way. He is more of a literary device, a pivotal awareness, through whose reveries we explore the island landscape and come to meet the adult inhabitants. There is, of course, another difference. While Gunn is always conscious of his country's history and culture, the present is what matters; Brown, in this book at least, leads us constantly out of the present and into the more distant past. It is only in the concluding pages that we move into the twentieth century and Thorfinn begins to emerge as a real person.

As I began reading the book and became aware of Brown's simple language and the magical atmosphere of time-travel, I actually wondered whether it was really for children, but his simplicity of style is a means by which he represents the mind of a young child and makes the novel accessible to a very wide public. This is a work of great charm which will appeal to readers of almost any age.


simply magificent, 21 Feb 2007
This is the first book by George Mackay Brown that I have read. It won't be the last. Superb storytelling, wonderful, lyrical language. I bought this out of curiosity on Amazon - an impulse purchase to get over my free delivery point when I was buying WS Graham's collected poems. If you too have stumbled across this book, then take a chance - you won't regret it!

I do wish I had discovered him sooner..., 16 Feb 2006
I have come to George Mackay Brown very late in life and find it rather fascinating that, once a fortnight, I flew over everything he writes of on my way to and from North Sea oil platforms situated north of the Shetlands. I am now too old and infirm to manage to travel to the Orkney Isles which he describes so well, so must content myself with seeking out his works in Amazon's lists. They are well worth the hunt. Anyone with an interest in such things as the sea, small communities, folk, and life in general should take a peek into his books. They are all great volumes to have at the bedside, especially for those interminable insomniac hours: never waste those hours again if you have his books to hand.

spellbinding storytelling by a true bard, 11 Sep 2001
A moving tale suffused with magic, poetry and a deep wisdom. From Orkney's greatest Bard, the pages reveal the life of an islander from birth to death, as straighforward and extraordinary as any life.

As with all GMB's work the language is remarkably simple and yet deeply symbolic. Shortlisted for the Booker prize, this work speaks as perfectly and poetically of our green islands as it does of the nature of man and his place in the universe.

This is the work of a truly great poet. Read it!

great wisdom and great beauty; a collection that celebrates life, 04 Apr 2007
George Mackay Brown died at the age of 74 in the 1990s. He lived very nearly all of his life on the Orkney Islands, where he was born, and most of his poetry is a kind of dialogue between poet and place, with the past as real a presence as the present. He wanted no more than to be in the place where he was born and to commune with its physical reality, its light, its sunsets, its storms, its people, their customs, its folk lore and its history. He had a spell down in Edinburgh and one visit, I think, to London, but he was not adventurous in any sense that most people would recognise. His adventures were of the imagination and the spirit and their medium of exression were prose and poetry. His novels and short stories, his column for 'The Orcadian' and above all his poetry stand as his memorial ; and we learn from Maggie Fergusson's recent biography that his poetry was ranked most highly by Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and others. It is unique and life-enhancing, this poetry of the Islands, and it is wonderful to have it in one well-presented volume as here. It is very easy to represent his work as insular - by definition, that is indeed what most of it was. But I would suggest that every human feeling and longing is here, and the beauty of the imagery, the old stories, the patterns of verse, the varied repetitions, the warmth and coldness, involvement and detachment of the lines embody human life and relationships between man and man and man and his surroundings as truly as any body of modern poetry can be said to do. This is a wonderful book offering a lifetime's observation and wisdom in memorable forms and language, and it will give pleasure to readers for many lifetimes to come.

timeless wisdom and beauty, 19 Dec 2005
The modest Orkney poet George Mackay Brown was faithful throughout his writing life to the central themes he explored - the land and sea, the cycle of the seasons, the relationship between man and the world around him, the power and meaning of stories, the spiritual dimension which made sense, to him, of all these things. I have read his poems over many years without quite realising what an impressive body of work they came to form. It is wonderful to come across this volume which so amply demonstrates this. This is art concealing art, the power of understatement, less meaning more, and always his love of the Orkneys, land, sea, customs, history and legends. It's a marvellous book and a fine memorial to a lovable writer who fully deserves such a tribute.

magnus martyr and a modern parallel memorably linked, 04 Apr 2007
In this novel, George Mackay Brown links the mediaeval story of St. Magnus, martyred on the Island of Egilsay in the Orkneys in a power struggle, and that of the philospher Dietrich Bonhoeffer, murdered by the Nazis during the Second World War. The story of Magnus is a most compelling one , and it is told here by a man with a poet's way with words ; the scent of the spray, the rich brown of the tilled fields, the distant songs of the monks and the social divide between the people and the Earls of Orkney in the time of Norse rule are all vividly present. Magnus expected to die and went to his death with a sense that it was necessary, head held high. The martyrdom of Bonhoeffer was a more squalid, hole-in-the-corner affair, but essentially its message was the same : that evil can destroy the embodiment of good physically but not the nature of good or our response to the courage and example of the martyr. Mackay Brown's story is only one of countless martyrdom stories, but it has a freshness and poignancy all its own.

Medieval politics for today, 23 Jan 2002
Magnus is a powerful story of sacrifice. Brown uses several poetic devices to tell the tell. They include using language reminiscent of Norse sagas and placing his characters in a Nazi prison, where Magnus becomes Bonhoeffer. I'm not certain it all works, but Brown's poetic sensibility and eloquence make the novel compelling.

Truly magical, 15 Aug 2008
I read this book a couple of months ago and found it absolutely engrossing. I too thought it may have been written for younger people, but I think it will appeal to anyone who likes good strong tale telling and characters you come to care about, I love the narration of this book.
I am fortunate to live in Orkney, a recent move, and GMB's descriptive narrative is really spot on in capturing these islands and her own people.

The Charm of the Orkneys, 26 Mar 2008
Like the previous reviewers, I have only just discovered G M Brown, and I certainly expect to read more of his work in the future.

His writing is more lyrical than that of Neil Gunn, but like that great storyteller of Caithness, he succeeded admirably in capturing the atmosphere of northern Scotland, awakening a sense of its long history and opening the minds of its people.

I cannot help comparing this book with Gunn's "Morning Tide", because both works centre on the life of a young boy in the early years of this century, but the two books are different, for, while Gunn creates a convincing character and tells his story, Brown's Thorfinn somehow does not come alive in the same way. He is more of a literary device, a pivotal awareness, through whose reveries we explore the island landscape and come to meet the adult inhabitants. There is, of course, another difference. While Gunn is always conscious of his country's history and culture, the present is what matters; Brown, in this book at least, leads us constantly out of the present and into the more distant past. It is only in the concluding pages that we move into the twentieth century and Thorfinn begins to emerge as a real person.

As I began reading the book and became aware of Brown's simple language and the magical atmosphere of time-travel, I actually wondered whether it was really for children, but his simplicity of style is a means by which he represents the mind of a young child and makes the novel accessible to a very wide public. This is a work of great charm which will appeal to readers of almost any age.


simply magificent, 21 Feb 2007
This is the first book by George Mackay Brown that I have read. It won't be the last. Superb storytelling, wonderful, lyrical language. I bought this out of curiosity on Amazon - an impulse purchase to get over my free delivery point when I was buying WS Graham's collected poems. If you too have stumbled across this book, then take a chance - you won't regret it!

I do wish I had discovered him sooner..., 16 Feb 2006
I have come to George Mackay Brown very late in life and find it rather fascinating that, once a fortnight, I flew over everything he writes of on my way to and from North Sea oil platforms situated north of the Shetlands. I am now too old and infirm to manage to travel to the Orkney Isles which he describes so well, so must content myself with seeking out his works in Amazon's lists. They are well worth the hunt. Anyone with an interest in such things as the sea, small communities, folk, and life in general should take a peek into his books. They are all great volumes to have at the bedside, especially for those interminable insomniac hours: never waste those hours again if you have his books to hand.

spellbinding storytelling by a true bard, 11 Sep 2001
A moving tale suffused with magic, poetry and a deep wisdom. From Orkney's greatest Bard, the pages reveal the life of an islander from birth to death, as straighforward and extraordinary as any life.

As with all GMB's work the language is remarkably simple and yet deeply symbolic. Shortlisted for the Booker prize, this work speaks as perfectly and poetically of our green islands as it does of the nature of man and his place in the universe.

This is the work of a truly great poet. Read it!

great wisdom and great beauty; a collection that celebrates life, 04 Apr 2007
George Mackay Brown died at the age of 74 in the 1990s. He lived very nearly all of his life on the Orkney Islands, where he was born, and most of his poetry is a kind of dialogue between poet and place, with the past as real a presence as the present. He wanted no more than to be in the place where he was born and to commune with its physical reality, its light, its sunsets, its storms, its people, their customs, its folk lore and its history. He had a spell down in Edinburgh and one visit, I think, to London, but he was not adventurous in any sense that most people would recognise. His adventures were of the imagination and the spirit and their medium of exression were prose and poetry. His novels and short stories, his column for 'The Orcadian' and above all his poetry stand as his memorial ; and we learn from Maggie Fergusson's recent biography that his poetry was ranked most highly by Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and others. It is unique and life-enhancing, this poetry of the Islands, and it is wonderful to have it in one well-presented volume as here. It is very easy to represent his work as insular - by definition, that is indeed what most of it was. But I would suggest that every human feeling and longing is here, and the beauty of the imagery, the old stories, the patterns of verse, the varied repetitions, the warmth and coldness, involvement and detachment of the lines embody human life and relationships between man and man and man and his surroundings as truly as any body of modern poetry can be said to do. This is a wonderful book offering a lifetime's observation and wisdom in memorable forms and language, and it will give pleasure to readers for many lifetimes to come.

timeless wisdom and beauty, 19 Dec 2005
The modest Orkney poet George Mackay Brown was faithful throughout his writing life to the central themes he explored - the land and sea, the cycle of the seasons, the relationship between man and the world around him, the power and meaning of stories, the spiritual dimension which made sense, to him, of all these things. I have read his poems over many years without quite realising what an impressive body of work they came to form. It is wonderful to come across this volume which so amply demonstrates this. This is art concealing art, the power of understatement, less meaning more, and always his love of the Orkneys, land, sea, customs, history and legends. It's a marvellous book and a fine memorial to a lovable writer who fully deserves such a tribute.

magnus martyr and a modern parallel memorably linked, 04 Apr 2007
In this novel, George Mackay Brown links the mediaeval story of St. Magnus, martyred on the Island of Egilsay in the Orkneys in a power struggle, and that of the philospher Dietrich Bonhoeffer, murdered by the Nazis during the Second World War. The story of Magnus is a most compelling one , and it is told here by a man with a poet's way with words ; the scent of the spray, the rich brown of the tilled fields, the distant songs of the monks and the social divide between the people and the Earls of Orkney in the time of Norse rule are all vividly present. Magnus expected to die and went to his death with a sense that it was necessary, head held high. The martyrdom of Bonhoeffer was a more squalid, hole-in-the-corner affair, but essentially its message was the same : that evil can destroy the embodiment of good physically but not the nature of good or our response to the courage and example of the martyr. Mackay Brown's story is only one of countless martyrdom stories, but it has a freshness and poignancy all its own.

Medieval politics for today, 23 Jan 2002
Magnus is a powerful story of sacrifice. Brown uses several poetic devices to tell the tell. They include using language reminiscent of Norse sagas and placing his characters in a Nazi prison, where Magnus becomes Bonhoeffer. I'm not certain it all works, but Brown's poetic sensibility and eloquence make the novel compelling.

A lyrical, yet ominous portrait of island life, 22 Nov 1998
Greenvoe is well worth reading for anyone interested in issues of island communities. It weaves ancient Orkney myth and legend, sometimes written in the literary style of the ancient "Orkneyinga Saga",with the dynamics of everyday life in a dwindling, island community. There are portents throughout of impending doom to the island. I especially like the character of Mrs. Elizabeth McKee, mother of the local minister and her struggle with her "demons of memory". I ended the book , moved and saddened by the theme of the disappearance of a local culture. Highly recommended Susan Richardson

Truly magical, 15 Aug 2008
I read this book a couple of months ago and found it absolutely engrossing. I too thought it may have been written for younger people, but I think it will appeal to anyone who likes good strong tale telling and characters you come to care about, I love the narration of this book.
I am fortunate to live in Orkney, a recent move, and GMB's descriptive narrative is really spot on in capturing these islands and her own people.

The Charm of the Orkneys, 26 Mar 2008
Like the previous reviewers, I have only just discovered G M Brown, and I certainly expect to read more of his work in the future.

His writing is more lyrical than that of Neil Gunn, but like that great storyteller of Caithness, he succeeded admirably in capturing the atmosphere of northern Scotland, awakening a sense of its long history and opening the minds of its people.

I cannot help comparing this book with Gunn's "Morning Tide", because both works centre on the life of a young boy in the early years of this century, but the two books are different, for, while Gunn creates a convincing character and tells his story, Brown's Thorfinn somehow does not come alive in the same way. He is more of a literary device, a pivotal awareness, through whose reveries we explore the island landscape and come to meet the adult inhabitants. There is, of course, another difference. While Gunn is always conscious of his country's history and culture, the present is what matters; Brown, in this book at least, leads us constantly out of the present and into the more distant past. It is only in the concluding pages that we move into the twentieth century and Thorfinn begins to emerge as a real person.

As I began reading the book and became aware of Brown's simple language and the magical atmosphere of time-travel, I actually wondered whether it was really for children, but his simplicity of style is a means by which he represents the mind of a young child and makes the novel accessible to a very wide public. This is a work of great charm which will appeal to readers of almost any age.


simply magificent, 21 Feb 2007
This is the first book by George Mackay Brown that I have read. It won't be the last. Superb storytelling, wonderful, lyrical language. I bought this out of curiosity on Amazon - an impulse purchase to get over my free delivery point when I was buying WS Graham's collected poems. If you too have stumbled across this book, then take a chance - you won't regret it!

I do wish I had discovered him sooner..., 16 Feb 2006
I have come to George Mackay Brown very late in life and find it rather fascinating that, once a fortnight, I flew over everything he writes of on my way to and from North Sea oil platforms situated north of the Shetlands. I am now too old and infirm to manage to travel to the Orkney Isles which he describes so well, so must content myself with seeking out his works in Amazon's lists. They are well worth the hunt. Anyone with an interest in such things as the sea, small communities, folk, and life in general should take a peek into his books. They are all great volumes to have at the bedside, especially for those interminable insomniac hours: never waste those hours again if you have his books to hand.

spellbinding storytelling by a true bard, 11 Sep 2001
A moving tale suffused with magic, poetry and a deep wisdom. From Orkney's greatest Bard, the pages reveal the life of an islander from birth to death, as straighforward and extraordinary as any life.

As with all GMB's work the language is remarkably simple and yet deeply symbolic. Shortlisted for the Booker prize, this work speaks as perfectly and poetically of our green islands as it does of the nature of man and his place in the universe.

This is the work of a truly great poet. Read it!

great wisdom and great beauty; a collection that celebrates life, 04 Apr 2007
George Mackay Brown died at the age of 74 in the 1990s. He lived very nearly all of his life on the Orkney Islands, where he was born, and most of his poetry is a kind of dialogue between poet and place, with the past as real a presence as the present. He wanted no more than to be in the place where he was born and to commune with its physical reality, its light, its sunsets, its storms, its people, their customs, its folk lore and its history. He had a spell down in Edinburgh and one visit, I think, to London, but he was not adventurous in any sense that most people would recognise. His adventures were of the imagination and the spirit and their medium of exression were prose and poetry. His novels and short stories, his column for 'The Orcadian' and above all his poetry stand as his memorial ; and we learn from Maggie Fergusson's recent biography that his poetry was ranked most highly by Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and others. It is unique and life-enhancing, this poetry of the Islands, and it is wonderful to have it in one well-presented volume as here. It is very easy to represent his work as insular - by definition, that is indeed what most of it was. But I would suggest that every human feeling and longing is here, and the beauty of the imagery, the old stories, the patterns of verse, the varied repetitions, the warmth and coldness, involvement and detachment of the lines embody human life and relationships between man and man and man and his surroundings as truly as any body of modern poetry can be said to do. This is a wonderful book offering a lifetime's observation and wisdom in memorable forms and language, and it will give pleasure to readers for many lifetimes to come.

timeless wisdom and beauty, 19 Dec 2005
The modest Orkney poet George Mackay Brown was faithful throughout his writing life to the central themes he explored - the land and sea, the cycle of the seasons, the relationship between man and the world around him, the power and meaning of stories, the spiritual dimension which made sense, to him, of all these things. I have read his poems over many years without quite realising what an impressive body of work they came to form. It is wonderful to come across this volume which so amply demonstrates this. This is art concealing art, the power of understatement, less meaning more, and always his love of the Orkneys, land, sea, customs, history and legends. It's a marvellous book and a fine memorial to a lovable writer who fully deserves such a tribute.

magnus martyr and a modern parallel memorably linked, 04 Apr 2007
In this novel, George Mackay Brown links the mediaeval story of St. Magnus, martyred on the Island of Egilsay in the Orkneys in a power struggle, and that of the philospher Dietrich Bonhoeffer, murdered by the Nazis during the Second World War. The story of Magnus is a most compelling one , and it is told here by a man with a poet's way with words ; the scent of the spray, the rich brown of the tilled fields, the distant songs of the monks and the social divide between the people and the Earls of Orkney in the time of Norse rule are all vividly present. Magnus expected to die and went to his death with a sense that it was necessary, head held high. The martyrdom of Bonhoeffer was a more squalid, hole-in-the-corner affair, but essentially its message was the same : that evil can destroy the embodiment of good physically but not the nature of good or our response to the courage and example of the martyr. Mackay Brown's story is only one of countless martyrdom stories, but it has a freshness and poignancy all its own.

Medieval politics for today, 23 Jan 2002
Magnus is a powerful story of sacrifice. Brown uses several poetic devices to tell the tell. They include using language reminiscent of Norse sagas and placing his characters in a Nazi prison, where Magnus becomes Bonhoeffer. I'm not certain it all works, but Brown's poetic sensibility and eloquence make the novel compelling.

A lyrical, yet ominous portrait of island life, 22 Nov 1998
Greenvoe is well worth reading for anyone interested in issues of island communities. It weaves ancient Orkney myth and legend, sometimes written in the literary style of the ancient "Orkneyinga Saga",with the dynamics of everyday life in a dwindling, island community. There are portents throughout of impending doom to the island. I especially like the character of Mrs. Elizabeth McKee, mother of the local minister and her struggle with her "demons of memory". I ended the book , moved and saddened by the theme of the disappearance of a local culture. Highly recommended Susan Richardson

A Different Kind of Saga , 07 Jan 2007
There was a time when saga novels (based on the old Norse literature, in some fashion or other) were hard to come by. I can remember combing the bookstores for them. Yes, there was E. R. Eddison's STYRBIORN THE STRONG and H. Rider Haggard's ERIC BRIGHTEYES. And, if you were lucky, you also found the little known but truly wonderful tale of Harold and William and their struggle for the throne of England in 1066: THE GOLDEN WARRIOR by Hope Muntz. But there wasn't much else besides. Eventually I stumbled on Cecelia Holland's TWO RAVENS (on a remainders table) and Jane Smiley's THE GREENLANDERS, but it was always tough going looking for novels like this. (I wrote my own saga type novel in 1996, partly in answer to what I had come to think was a dearth of interest in the saga world and its literary traditions because of this.)

But lately vikings are all the rage. Cecelia Holland has given us her own three-book series about the Gaelic and Norse world, taking us to all the well-known areas of viking history including the North American coast. And Bernard Cornwell has given us a series of three, as well, dealing with the Danish invasions of England and the valiant defense mounted by King Alfred of Wessex (who would come to be called the Great by those who succeeded him). Irish travel writer Tim Severin has given us his own trilogy about a certain Thorkel (mentioned briefly in Erik the Red's Saga as an illegitimate son of Leif Eriksson) who starts out as a youngster in Greenland and eventually goes nearly everywhere and meets nearly everyone who's anyone in the viking world of his day. And then there are some older and forgotten works like Margaret Elphinstone's THE SEA ROAD, about Gudrid, Leif Eriksson's sister-in-law, and Joan Felicia Henriksen's ASTRID: A VIKING SAGA about the mother of the future King Olaf Trygvesson, one of the heroic Norwegian kings of saga legend. These can still be found if you look hard enough. But there are plenty more new ones, too. I can no longer count them all on two hands. But that's a good thing for those of us who love the Norse thing.

VINLAND, by Scottish writer George MacKay Brown, is in this tradition. Written in the early nineties, I was yet unaware of it in the days when I was actively searching out saga-based fiction in every used and new bookstore I could find. But now I've gotten hold of, and read, it.

It's a moving, poetic tale, written in a way that evokes the old saga literature from which it is sprung. Tracing the life of Ranald Sigmundson, an Orkney farmer, from his boyhood, when he is taken to sea by a fierce father against his will (and rebelliously finds his way to the North American coast -- Vinland in the old sagas -- on Leif Eriksson's ship) until old age and hermit-like seclusion on his Orkney farm, this is, in a very real sense, an anti-saga.

Relying on the saga tone and many of its conventions, Brown's story of Ranald is not one of action, as is so often found in the original sagas, but of contemplation in the shadow of the great events and violent men recalled primarily in the Orkneyinga Saga, that violent Icelandic tale of the strivings of the Orkney earls and Norwegian kings for primacy over the islands immediately north of the Scottish coast. Ranald Sigmundson eventually finds himself with Leif and his crew in Vinland, in the midst of a violent clash with local natives and later lives for a year or so in the Norse colony of Greenland, a guest of Leif and his family. Homesick and worried about his mother and grandfather, Ranald takes ship back east on a Norwegian bound trading vessel where he finds himself a surprise guest of the Norwegian King Olaf Trygvesson. There he is treated to a bird's eye view of the royal court and tastes its delights. Olaf, it seems, enjoys his company, enhancing Ranald's reputation who, though still but a boy, goes on to take over management of the merchant vessel he has booked passage on, as he works his way back to his family home in the Orkneys.

But once home, Ranald abandons the sea and the trading life to find a place for himself as a farmer. But for a brief venture to support his liege lord, Earl Sigurd of Orkney, at the Battle of Clontarf (which saw the final defeat of the viking alliance against the native Irish), Ranald never leaves his home islands again. His is a life of withdrawal from the great events of his day because he is revolted by the greed and violence that seem to drive the great men. As Earl Sigurd's remaining sons strive for rule over Orkney, Ranald withdraws more and more from the political disputes that characterize his native land. He grows old as Sigurd's youngest son eventually consolidates his power through bloodshed and ruthlessness, leaving the dead and broken in his wake.

In the end, Ranald is drawn to the monks who have settled on the islands and the contemplative life they represent, becoming their patron and friend and separating himself from the family he has raised to farm the land after him. Pining all his years for the life of the sea he has abandoned, and for a vision of Vinland which has become idealized in his own mind, Ranald eventually is drawn to a deeper vision of that mysterious western land, seeing it as a place beyond human life itself, a metaphor for the peace and salvation that is only attainable, he believes, through the promise of faith.

Although superficially about vikings and such, this book is really something more. There are battles in it but one never really sees or feels them, even in the midst of them, as Ranald cleaves his way through the enemy host at Clontarf, slashing blindly with his sword like all the others, killing men without even realizing what he is about.

There are some jarring moments, too. For instance, in his interview with King Olaf, Ranald is asked by the king if the Vinland natives live in such and such a way and Ranald affirms that they do. Yet, the saga literature tells us Leif's was the first voyage to Vinland and that Leif never went back. According to Brown's tale, neither did Ranald. But on the one voyage Ranald participated in, their contact with the native "Skraelings" was limited to a few coastal meetings and attacks. They never got to the Skraeling villages so Ranald couldn't have confirmed what the king asks him about. In fact, the king couldn't have known any of it because the later voyages which were to have more extensive contacts with the Skraelings hadn't taken place yet!

King Olaf, too, is something of a problem in this tale. He is, of course, Olaf Trygvesson who ruled in Norway from about 995 to 1000, a very short stint. Yet Brown continuously refers to the king of Norway as Olaf throughout the years. In fact there was a later and more famous Christianizing King Olaf, dubbed Olaf the Saint by posterity and known in his lifetime as Olaf the Stout, but Brown makes no real differentiation (except for a brief comment much later on telling us that he is speaking of a different King Olaf). Brown, indeed, leaves us with the sense that Olaf is a single king for most of this time though the two Olafs were very different in their appearance, their comportment and their actions. And he gives us no sense of the intervening years between the two.

Brown also tells us about villages in Greenland and Iceland though there is no evidence from the sagas or archaeologically that the Norse lived in villages in these places at this time. In fact, they seem to have lived in scattered, isolated farms, coming together for periodic gatherings to deal with legal and other societal issues. But otherwise, they lived apart though some of the farms were quite large with many inhabitants to maintain them.

Along with certain modernisms, I found these issues a bit off-putting since they didn't jibe with what I know of the era and made me think Brown was a bit sloppy or overly loose with his narrative. But, on balance, they did not diminish the tale for me by much. I found this story of Ranald Sigmundson's aging, and his quest for life's meaning, moving and compelling, perhaps because I am not so young as I once was myself.

If you're looking for a fast paced, action packed viking tale, this is not the one. But if you want to read about a man's inner quest against a background of worldly concerns which retains the feel of the old Norse sagas, you'll find that sort of tale here.

SWM

[...]

A tale that haunts the memory, 07 Jun 2001
This is a wonderful novel, suffused with an aching melancholy for what might have been. As in all of George Mackay Brown's prose, the greatness of the author is shown by the wealth of meaning which inhabits what is, on the surface, a simply told, straightforward tale.

A spellbinding journey back into the Dark Ages of the north, 25 Jan 2001
George Mackay Brown's fourth novel Vinland is the story of Ranald, son of Sigmund Firemouth, who sets sail from his native Orkney to ply trade with Greenland, Norway and Iceland as his forefathers did before him. Through a stroke of fate young Ranald stows away on Leif Ericson's ship the Westseeker, finally to step ashore in America, which Ericson calls Vinland. There the Viking crew encounter an American Indian tribe, calling them the 'skraelings' ('savages'). Young Ranald befriends a skraeling boy, but through a terrible misunderstanding, friendship turns to hatred and the crew of the Westseeker must leave the shores of Vinland.

Thus begins the epic saga of Ranald Sigmund, of his travels in Norway and Ireland, and of his eventual return to Orkney to reclaim the farm of his ancestors. Along the way we meet kings and poets, monks and warriors, we hear the magical tale of St. Brandon and the Isle of the Blessed, and we find ourselves midst the bloody battle of Clontarf in Ireland.

It has been said of Mackay Brown's work that it possesses "a strangeness and magic rare anywhere in literature today", and after reading this short novel you will be convinced of the truth of this. If it were not for the fact that the author hails from Orkney rather than South America, he would have been acknowledged as a master of 'magic realism' long ago. There is a poetic intensity and a visionary quality about his prose that makes you realise that you are reading the work of a contemporary bard or 'skald' as the Vikings would have called him.

The description of the battle of Clontarf and the carrying of the raven banner is one of the most frightening and incandescent descriptions of pitched battle that I have ever read. Few writers today could take you to the heart of a bloody confrontation - fought only with axes, swords and arrows - and simultaneously describe both the horror and the ecstasy experienced by the warriors on the battlefield.

Neither you nor I will ever be able to visit the Dark Ages of the north, but reading Vinland is as good as first-class ticket to the time of the Vikings, when Christianity and the Old Gods vied for the souls and flesh of crofters and warriors alike.George Mackay Brown evokes the sights, the sounds, the smells, even the very tastes of the times in a way that few writers today seem capable of.

If you have ever dreamed of being transported back in time, and if you want to be utterly spellbound by the journey, you cannot afford not to read this book.

Truly magical, 15 Aug 2008
I read this book a couple of months ago and found it absolutely engrossing. I too thought it may have been written for younger people, but I think it will appeal to anyone who likes good strong tale telling and characters you come to care about, I love the narration of this book.
I am fortunate to live in Orkney, a recent move, and GMB's descriptive narrative is really spot on in capturing these islands and her own people.

The Charm of the Orkneys, 26 Mar 2008
Like the previous reviewers, I have only just discovered G M Brown, and I certainly expect to read more of his work in the future.

His writing is more lyrical than that of Neil Gunn, but like that great storyteller of Caithness, he succeeded admirably in capturing the atmosphere of northern Scotland, awakening a sense of its long history and opening the minds of its people.

I cannot help comparing this book with Gunn's "Morning Tide", because both works centre on the life of a young boy in the early years of this century, but the two books are different, for, while Gunn creates a convincing character and tells his story, Brown's Thorfinn somehow does not come alive in the same way. He is more of a literary device, a pivotal awareness, through whose reveries we explore the island landscape and come to meet the adult inhabitants. There is, of course, another difference. While Gunn is always conscious of his country's history and culture, the present is what matters; Brown, in this book at least, leads us constantly out of the present and into the more distant past. It is only in the concluding pages that we move into the twentieth century and Thorfinn begins to emerge as a real person.

As I began reading the book and became aware of Brown's simple language and the magical atmosphere of time-travel, I actually wondered whether it was really for children, but his simplicity of style is a means by which he represents the mind of a young child and makes the novel accessible to a very wide public. This is a work of great charm which will appeal to readers of almost any age.


simply magificent, 21 Feb 2007
This is the first book by George Mackay Brown that I have read. It won't be the last. Superb storytelling, wonderful, lyrical language. I bought this out of curiosity on Amazon - an impulse purchase to get over my free delivery point when I was buying WS Graham's collected poems. If you too have stumbled across this book, then take a chance - you won't regret it!

I do wish I had discovered him sooner..., 16 Feb 2006
I have come to George Mackay Brown very late in life and find it rather fascinating that, once a fortnight, I flew over everything he writes of on my way to and from North Sea oil platforms situated north of the Shetlands. I am now too old and infirm to manage to travel to the Orkney Isles which he describes so well, so must content myself with seeking out his works in Amazon's lists. They are well worth the hunt. Anyone with an interest in such things as the sea, small communities, folk, and life in general should take a peek into his books. They are all great volumes to have at the bedside, especially for those interminable insomniac hours: never waste those hours again if you have his books to hand.

spellbinding storytelling by a true bard, 11 Sep 2001
A moving tale suffused with magic, poetry and a deep wisdom. From Orkney's greatest Bard, the pages reveal the life of an islander from birth to death, as straighforward and extraordinary as any life.

As with all GMB's work the language is remarkably simple and yet deeply symbolic. Shortlisted for the Booker prize, this work speaks as perfectly and poetically of our green islands as it does of the nature of man and his place in the universe.

This is the work of a truly great poet. Read it!

great wisdom and great beauty; a collection that celebrates life, 04 Apr 2007
George Mackay Brown died at the age of 74 in the 1990s. He lived very nearly all of his life on the Orkney Islands, where he was born, and most of his poetry is a kind of dialogue between poet and place, with the past as real a presence as the present. He wanted no more than to be in the place where he was born and to commune with its physical reality, its light, its sunsets, its storms, its people, their customs, its folk lore and its history. He had a spell down in Edinburgh and one visit, I think, to London, but he was not adventurous in any sense that most people would recognise. His adventures were of the imagination and the spirit and their medium of exression were prose and poetry. His novels and short stories, his column for 'The Orcadian' and above all his poetry stand as his memorial ; and we learn from Maggie Fergusson's recent biography that his poetry was ranked most highly by Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and others. It is unique and life-enhancing, this poetry of the Islands, and it is wonderful to have it in one well-presented volume as here. It is very easy to represent his work as insular - by definition, that is indeed what most of it was. But I would suggest that every human feeling and longing is here, and the beauty of the imagery, the old stories, the patterns of verse, the varied repetitions, the warmth and coldness, involvement and detachment of the lines embody human life and relationships between man and man and man and his surroundings as truly as any body of modern poetry can be said to do. This is a wonderful book offering a lifetime's observation and wisdom in memorable forms and language, and it will give pleasure to readers for many lifetimes to come.

timeless wisdom and beauty, 19 Dec 2005
The modest Orkney poet George Mackay Brown was faithful throughout his writing life to the central themes he explored - the land and sea, the cycle of the seasons, the relationship between man and the world around him, the power and meaning of stories, the spiritual dimension which made sense, to him, of all these things. I have read his poems over many years without quite realising what an impressive body of work they came to form. It is wonderful to come across this volume which so amply demonstrates this. This is art concealing art, the power of understatement, less meaning more, and always his love of the Orkneys, land, sea, customs, history and legends. It's a marvellous book and a fine memorial to a lovable writer who fully deserves such a tribute.

magnus martyr and a modern parallel memorably linked, 04 Apr 2007
In this novel, George Mackay Brown links the mediaeval story of St. Magnus, martyred on the Island of Egilsay in the Orkneys in a power struggle, and that of the philospher Dietrich Bonhoeffer, murdered by the Nazis during the Second World War. The story of Magnus is a most compelling one , and it is told here by a man with a poet's way with words ; the scent of the spray, the rich brown of the tilled fields, the distant songs of the monks and the social divide between the people and the Earls of Orkney in the time of Norse rule are all vividly present. Magnus expected to die and went to his death with a sense that it was necessary, head held high. The martyrdom of Bonhoeffer was a more squalid, hole-in-the-corner affair, but essentially its message was the same : that evil can destroy the embodiment of good physically but not the nature of good or our response to the courage and example of the martyr. Mackay Brown's story is only one of countless martyrdom stories, but it has a freshness and poignancy all its own.

Medieval politics for today, 23 Jan 2002
Magnus is a powerful story of sacrifice. Brown uses several poetic devices to tell the tell. They include using language reminiscent of Norse sagas and placing his characters in a Nazi prison, where Magnus becomes Bonhoeffer. I'm not certain it all works, but Brown's poetic sensibility and eloquence make the novel compelling.

A lyrical, yet ominous portrait of island life, 22 Nov 1998
Greenvoe is well worth reading for anyone interested in issues of island communities. It weaves ancient Orkney myth and legend, sometimes written in the literary style of the ancient "Orkneyinga Saga",with the dynamics of everyday life in a dwindling, island community. There are portents throughout of impending doom to the island. I especially like the character of Mrs. Elizabeth McKee, mother of the local minister and her struggle with her "demons of memory". I ended the book , moved and saddened by the theme of the disappearance of a local culture. Highly recommended Susan Richardson

A Different Kind of Saga , 07 Jan 2007
There was a time when saga novels (based on the old Norse literature, in some fashion or other) were hard to come by. I can remember combing the bookstores for them. Yes, there was E. R. Eddison's STYRBIORN THE STRONG and H. Rider Haggard's ERIC BRIGHTEYES. And, if you were lucky, you also found the little known but truly wonderful tale of Harold and William and their struggle for the throne of England in 1066: THE GOLDEN WARRIOR by Hope Muntz. But there wasn't much else besides. Eventually I stumbled on Cecelia Holland's TWO RAVENS (on a remainders table) and Jane Smiley's THE GREENLANDERS, but it was always tough going looking for novels like this. (I wrote my own saga type novel in 1996, partly in answer to what I had come to think was a dearth of interest in the saga world and its literary traditions because of this.)

But lately vikings are all the rage. Cecelia Holland has given us her own three-book series about the Gaelic and Norse world, taking us to all the well-known areas of viking history including the North American coast. And Bernard Cornwell has given us a series of three, as well, dealing with the Danish invasions of England and the valiant defense mounted by King Alfred of Wessex (who would come to be called the Great by those who succeeded him). Irish travel writer Tim Severin has given us his own trilogy about a certain Thorkel (mentioned briefly in Erik the Red's Saga as an illegitimate son of Leif Eriksson) who starts out as a youngster in Greenland and eventually goes nearly everywhere and meets nearly everyone who's anyone in the viking world of his day. And then there are some older and forgotten works like Margaret Elphinstone's THE SEA ROAD, about Gudrid, Leif Eriksson's sister-in-law, and Joan Felicia Henriksen's ASTRID: A VIKING SAGA about the mother of the future King Olaf Trygvesson, one of the heroic Norwegian kings of saga legend. These can still be found if you look hard enough. But there are plenty more new ones, too. I can no longer count them all on two hands. But that's a good thing for those of us who love the Norse thing.

VINLAND, by Scottish writer George MacKay Brown, is in this tradition. Written in the early nineties, I was yet unaware of it in the days when I was actively searching out saga-based fiction in every used and new bookstore I could find. But now I've gotten hold of, and read, it.

It's a moving, poetic tale, written in a way that evokes the old saga literature from which it is sprung. Tracing the life of Ranald Sigmundson, an Orkney farmer, from his boyhood, when he is taken to sea by a fierce father against his will (and rebelliously finds his way to the North American coast -- Vinland in the old sagas -- on Leif Eriksson's ship) until old age and hermit-like seclusion on his Orkney farm, this is, in a very real sense, an anti-saga.

Relying on the saga tone and many of its conventions, Brown's story of Ranald is not one of action, as is so often found in the original sagas, but of contemplation in the shadow of the great events and violent men recalled primarily in the Orkneyinga Saga, that violent Icelandic tale of the strivings of the Orkney earls and Norwegian kings for primacy over the islands immediately north of the Scottish coast. Ranald Sigmundson eventually finds himself with Leif and his crew in Vinland, in the midst of a violent clash with local natives and later lives for a year or so in the Norse colony of Greenland, a guest of Leif and his family. Homesick and worried about his mother and grandfather, Ranald takes ship back east on a Norwegian bound trading vessel where he finds himself a surprise guest of the Norwegian King Olaf Trygvesson. There he is treated to a bird's eye view of the royal court and tastes its delights. Olaf, it seems, enjoys his company, enhancing Ranald's reputation who, though still but a boy, goes on to take over management of the merchant vessel he has booked passage on, as he works his way back to his family home in the Orkneys.

But once home, Ranald abandons the sea and the trading life to find a place for himself as a farmer. But for a brief venture to support his liege lord, Earl Sigurd of Orkney, at the Battle of Clontarf (which saw the final defeat of the viking alliance against the native Irish), Ranald never leaves his home islands again. His is a life of withdrawal from the great events of his day because he is revolted by the greed and violence that seem to drive the great men. As Earl Sigurd's remaining sons strive for rule over Orkney, Ranald withdraws more and more from the political disputes that characterize his native land. He grows old as Sigurd's youngest son eventually consolidates his power through bloodshed and ruthlessness, leaving the dead and broken in his wake.

In the end, Ranald is drawn to the monks who have settled on the islands and the contemplative life they represent, becoming their patron and friend and separating himself from the family he has raised to farm the land after him. Pining all his years for the life of the sea he has abandoned, and for a vision of Vinland which has become idealized in his own mind, Ranald eventually is drawn to a deeper vision of that mysterious western land, seeing it as a place beyond human life itself, a metaphor for the peace and salvation that is only attainable, he believes, through the promise of faith.

Although superficially about vikings and such, this book is really something more. There are battles in it but one never really sees or feels them, even in the midst of them, as Ranald cleaves his way through the enemy host at Clontarf, slashing blindly with his sword like all the others, killing men without even realizing what he is about.

There are some jarring moments, too. For instance, in his interview with King Olaf, Ranald is asked by the king if the Vinland natives live in such and such a way and Ranald affirms that they do. Yet, the saga literature tells us Leif's was the first voyage to Vinland and that Leif never went back. According to Brown's tale, neither did Ranald. But on the one voyage Ranald participated in, their contact with the native "Skraelings" was limited to a few coastal meetings and attacks. They never got to the Skraeling villages so Ranald couldn't have confirmed what the king asks him about. In fact, the king couldn't have known any of it because the later voyages which were to have more extensive contacts with the Skraelings hadn't taken place yet!

King Olaf, too, is something of a problem in this tale. He is, of course, Olaf Trygvesson who ruled in Norway from about 995 to 1000, a very short stint. Yet Brown continuously refers to the king of Norway as Olaf throughout the years. In fact there was a later and more famous Christianizing King Olaf, dubbed Olaf the Saint by posterity and known in his lifetime as Olaf the Stout, but Brown makes no real differentiation (except for a brief comment much later on telling us that he is speaking of a different King Olaf). Brown, indeed, leaves us with the sense that Olaf is a single king for most of this time though the two Olafs were very different in their appearance, their comportment and their actions. And he gives us no sense of the intervening years between the two.

Brown also tells us about villages in Greenland and Iceland though there is no evidence from the sagas or archaeologically that the Norse lived in villages in these places at this time. In fact, they seem to have lived in scattered, isolated farms, coming together for periodic gatherings to deal with legal and other societal issues. But otherwise, they lived apart though some of the farms were quite large with many inhabitants to maintain them.

Along with certain modernisms, I found these issues a bit off-putting since they didn't jibe with what I know of the era and made me think Brown was a bit sloppy or overly loose with his narrative. But, on balance, they did not diminish the tale for me by much. I found this story of Ranald Sigmundson's aging, and his quest for life's meaning, moving and compelling, perhaps because I am not so young as I once was myself.

If you're looking for a fast paced, action packed viking tale, this is not the one. But if you want to read about a man's inner quest against a background of worldly concerns which retains the feel of the old Norse sagas, you'll find that sort of tale here.

SWM

[...]

A tale that haunts the memory, 07 Jun 2001
This is a wonderful novel, suffused with an aching melancholy for what might have been. As in all of George Mackay Brown's prose, the greatness of the author is shown by the wealth of meaning which inhabits what is, on the surface, a simply told, straightforward tale.

A spellbinding journey back into the Dark Ages of the north, 25 Jan 2001
George Mackay Brown's fourth novel Vinland is the story of Ranald, son of Sigmund Firemouth, who sets sail from his native Orkney to ply trade with Greenland, Norway and Iceland as his forefathers did before him. Through a stroke of fate young Ranald stows away on Leif Ericson's ship the Westseeker, finally to step ashore in America, which Ericson calls Vinland. There the Viking crew encounter an American Indian tribe, calling them the 'skraelings' ('savages'). Young Ranald befriends a skraeling boy, but through a terrible misunderstanding, friendship turns to hatred and the crew of the Westseeker must leave the shores of Vinland.

Thus begins the epic saga of Ranald Sigmund, of his travels in Norway and Ireland, and of his eventual return to Orkney to reclaim the farm of his ancestors. Along the way we meet kings and poets, monks and warriors, we hear the magical tale of St. Brandon and the Isle of the Blessed, and we find ourselves midst the bloody battle of Clontarf in Ireland.

It has been said of Mackay Brown's work that it possesses "a strangeness and magic rare anywhere in literature today", and after reading this short novel you will be convinced of the truth of this. If it were not for the fact that the author hails from Orkney rather than South America, he would have been acknowledged as a master of 'magic realism' long ago. There is a poetic intensity and a visionary quality about his prose that makes you realise that you are reading the work of a contemporary bard or 'skald' as the Vikings would have called him.

The description of the battle of Clontarf and the carrying of the raven banner is one of the most frightening and incandescent descriptions of pitched battle that I have ever read. Few writers today could take you to the heart of a bloody confrontation - fought only with axes, swords and arrows - and simultaneously describe both the horror and the ecstasy experienced by the warriors on the battlefield.

Neither you nor I will ever be able to visit the Dark Ages of the north, but reading Vinland is as good as first-class ticket to the time of the Vikings, when Christianity and the Old Gods vied for the souls and flesh of crofters and warriors alike.George Mackay Brown evokes the sights, the sounds, the smells, even the very tastes of the times in a way that few writers today seem capable of.

If you have ever dreamed of being transported back in time, and if you want to be utterly spellbound by the journey, you cannot afford not to read this book.

Under Brinkie's Brae, 30 Jun 2005
I am just back from a week travelling among the enchanting Orkney Isles, based on Stromness, the home of its author. His collected articles from The Orcadian newspaper February 1976 to July 1979 take us through the history of the islands, his everyday life, as well as his childhood, which we feel priveleged to share. Having toured the mainland and the Isle of Hoy, touched the Magnus Festival at the breathtaking St. Magnus Cathedral, his past writings, feed the present moment so adequately, his writtings suddenly take on new life, new texture.
Sharing the life of this working journalist and poet, his treasured and sometimes very ordinary moments,(for me the amature writer)'Under Brinkie's Bray', was a privilege indeed. It has become my guide to the islands as well as the hidden literature. I could not rise to the £35 for his Collected Poems at the Orcadian Bookshop in Kirkwall, but by tapping into Amazon I have discovered a new resource, at affordable prices.
Tapping into Sue Tordoff's website on GMB I have also discovered that GMB's early novel is in the 100 top Scottish Books running alongside Harry Potter and other current sell outs. GMB certainly deserves your attention if you are an Island lover, a lover of wild places, and simple heartfelt renditions of such out of this world places.
My journey planned for 2006 will be Benbecula and the Uists. Thus I will have completed my own Odyssey to all the islands - pity they don't have a poet of their own - or have they? Maybe you know of one.

Bernard Walker
North Lincolnshire
Living with his wife, Japaneses Koi, on his own wild acre; in an ancient cottage the at foot of the wolds
see (www.write-away.co.uk)