Today marks the death, over nine centuries ago, of St. Magnus, a jarl or earl of Orkney, those windswept isles off the coast of mainland Scotland. His holy life is recounted in the Orkneyinga Saga, which captures, in spare and forceful language, his Christian witness in an era when violence and ambition regularly upended the lives of ordinary crofters and fisherfolk.
The imaginative energies of Orcadian writer and convert George Mackay Brown were fired by the story of St. Magnus, resulting in numerous poems, a drama, an opera (with composer Peter Maxwell Davies), and shorter narratives. The Magnus muse is nowhere more evident than in Mackay Brown’s 1973 novel, Magnus.
It’s a strange work, at once innovative and imitative, proceeding through a succession of interwoven voices and symbols: the rise and fall of oars, scythes, weapons, the chanting of psalms, the web of light and harp and loom. I’m not sure it can even be called a novel. It’s more of a dramatic meditation, a stylized, lyrical evocation of meaning – closer to poetry. Perhaps unhelpfully, Brown himself says in his memoir, “Realism is the enemy of the creative imagination.”
He presents the martyrdom of St. Magnus, betrayed by his
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