The norse presence in the work of George Mackay Brown

Abstract

George Mackay Brown was born in Stromness in 1921 and died there in 1996. This bare sentence encompasses almost his entire life story, his home and his work remaining firmly Orcadian for his seven and a half decades. His family's riches were more cultural than financial. His father, John Brown, was Orcadian and worked as the postman in Stromness. He also worked part-time in his original trade as a tailor but as Mackay Brown writes, it 'is in his postman's uniform that I chiefly remember him.' He loved to raise his tenor voice to sentimental hymns and music hall songs, especially when the whisky flowed, so that 'to the Stromness folk, he was a cheerful man who could turn anything to laughter.' This cheerful image was tempered by 'a melancholy strain in him', which caused 'a kind of wonder and disquiet' George Mackay Brown, For the Islands I Sing (London: John Murray, 1997, reprinted 1998) hereafter abbreviated to Islands. pp. 16-17. for the young George, unforgettable when he began to write. His mother, Mairi, was the ninth child of a Gaelic-speaking crofter-fishing family on the North coast of Scotland. As Mackay Brown later wrote, 'It must have been a poor living that the Mackays wrung out of the straths, but life for them was enriched by poetry and legend and song as old as Homer perhaps.' Islands, p. 24 She came in her teens to work as a waitress at Stromness Hotel, an occupation in startling contrast to the strict Calvinistic mores of her upbringing, and in Stromness she met John Brown. They married in 1910, when she was nineteen and he thirty-four. By the time of John's death in 1940, George, the youngest of their six children, was a young man. He describes his mother in his autobiography: