There is a late, odd story by Sylvia Townsend Warner called ‘The Duke of Orkney’s Leonardo’.1 Like all her works it is acute about real places, for all that it is set in the parallel British Islands inhabited by the inventions of her latter years, the merciless courts of the Kingdoms of Elfin. A handsome Elfin Squireen marries disastrously into the royal family of Caithness and is exiled to its invisible castle on the north coast, snow-battered for six months of the year, dependent for luxuries on plunder from wrecks in the Pentland Firth. One ship yields the object which propels the story onwards on its strange course of mutilation, reconciliation, and incognito northern travels. This is a Leonardo portrait destined for the collections of the Duke of Orkney. In Warner’s finely imagined parallel reality, the historical Earls of Orkney, who built sumptuous palaces to defy the northern weather at Birsay and Kirkwall, have survived as dukes into her fictional eighteenth or nineteenth century, but they have retained the ancient sophistication which attended the court of the Northern Isles. Thus she catches the paradox of the Orkneys: their Scandinavian past is distinct from the Scottish past for all their proximity to the north coast of Scotland.
Even starting from the northernmost Lowlands, the journey to Orkney by road is long and attritive, a passage from one country to another. With the Black Isle and its still firths left far behind, the road runs along the length of the Sutherland coast, growing narrower and steeper until it corkscrews up and down the sides of the coastal fjords.
A point comes where there are no more trees. Then the one road junction for miles leads across the austere wonders of the flow country of Caithness – flat marsh and slate pavement, distant mountains always in view. Thurso feels overwhelmed by the immensity of the empty country at its back, for all the elegance of its stone architecture, its fine wide-spaced streets. The ferry port is cruelly exposed to the wind for all its sheltering bay. The great new pier, uncountable tons of hardcore tipped into rough water, was not yet finished when last I shivered there in May wind. The ferry is vast and sophisticated, for all that the journey is short, with the low shoulders of the Orkneys visible on the northern horizon. The bookshop on the ferry sells sagas.
Twilight landfall at Stromness feels like arrival at a far more distant place. This is the first, the southernmost of the small, perfectly placed coastal towns which stretch up the coasts of the Baltic and as far as the arctic coast of Norway. It has already the feeling of a harbour in the fiction of, say, Knut Hamsun. Stromness sits at the head of its bay, guarded by twin lighthouse-islands. The sense of arrival in another country is so strong, the latitude on the map suddenly so high, that it is a surprise to see familiar Scottish building-types: the baronial hotel, castellated bank, peripheral stone-built villas. The town is Scottish in architecture, but its whole placement in the lee of its hill and curving into the bay is Scandinavian. So are the warehouses by the water, each with its own wharf.
The main street is paved with handsome flagstones. The houses present a warily blank gable-end to the sea; small windows face into courtyards or into the protecting street. There are private mooring-places behind many of the houses. From the brow behind the town, mild, well-watered, treeless fields stretch away under the night.
To the mediaeval Scandinavians, before the climate hardened in the late Middle Ages, this was the south, the garden of the northlands. Now the absence of trees, the bare perfection of the lines of the hills, seem paradigmatically northern, as if one of the receding and subjective lines which define northness has been crossed at last. The signs of the north are all around: low stone houses with great slabs of coastal stone used as fences and roofing-tiles. Sparsity, clarity of light and air, sudden fierceness in the turns of the weather.
At Brodgar, the stone circle and the grave mounds, set amidst finely shelving land and lit by the reflections from the encompassing waters, are in their simplicity like a popular dream of the north made real. It is unsurprising that Orkney draws travellers from Europe and beyond, people in love with the debatable idea of an archaic world surviving at the point where the waters of the North Sea clash with those of the Atlantic. Stones, bare hills, sea. Yet Orkney is more complex in its history and development than many of its visitors apprehend: a pivotal place, a staging-post of the north and the sea road to the north. Kirkwall has absolutely its own atmosphere. Logistics of midwinter travel make it more than difficult to be in Kirkwall for the annual, free-for-all town ball game between uppies and downies, but the photographs of it are haunting, with clouds of breath hanging in the freezing air above the locked masses of players in the narrow wynds.
St Magnus’s Cathedral in Kirkwall is the most immediate manifestation of the apartness of the islands, of their Scandinavian, rather than their Scottish pasts. The dedication is to an island saint, a Christian Earl of Orkney murdered in a small dynastic war. The cathedral itself, narrow as it is, affirms the status of Kirkwall as a capital. Where the northernmost towns in Caithness, Wick and Thurso, have an identity which comes from remoteness – a few streets of fine Georgian buildings in the shelter of distant coasts, with the miles and miles of wind-blasted flow country between them and the next settlements to the south – Kirkwall seems sufficient to itself and central to its world. Its hinterland is not only all the Orkneys, but the open sea-routes beyond.
Kirkwall was the northernmost British port of call for the arctic expeditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many journals record dances and entertainments given there to the northward-voyaging explorers. There was sometimes an interim stop on the coasts of Norway, before the last call at the most northerly city of Tromsø, and then on towards the ice. In Kirkwall Cathedral, the tomb of the arctic explorer John Rae (1813–1893) is at the head of the aisle, in front of the modest pantheon of plaques – another manifestation of apartness – to the illustrious Orcadian dead. (Rae’s name is also inscribed on that most idiosyncratic of northern rolls of honour, the names lettered in gold around the polar maps painted in the domes of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge.)
The tomb itself, sculpted by Joseph Whitehead, is a highly romantic artefact, a visual expression of the long British affair with the polar wastes. Rae was a surgeon, cartographer, explorer. He mapped much of arctic Canada in the 1840s. In the following decade, he was on the expedition which found, at last, traces of the lost arctic expedition of Sir John Franklin – not that Rae received much in the way of public recognition for so doing, despite his fortitude and his sheer skill at living wisely in an arctic environment. On the same expedition, Rae also traced the last unknown link in the elusive and sacred obsession of arctic exploration, the North-West Passage. Through the nineteenth century, those three words became so much a shorthand for adventurous endeavour that by the 1930s, Auden and Isherwood could use them as a shorthand for the whole world of mountaineering, ice-climbing, dangerous expeditions, the futility and masochism of male heroics.
Rae’s tomb shows him lying on the marble sarcophagus as if encamped in the northern wilds of Canada: he is stretched full length in arctic clothing, wrapped in a mantle of buffalo-hide. His gun is beside him. At once the cathedral and the town which surrounds it seem repositioned: what had seemed a north is suddenly back in its ancient position as a south. To the north of the fertile islands of Orkney stretch the sea-routes to Iceland, the Greenland fisheries, northernmost Canada. Orkney and Ireland alike lie at the south of the world of the sagas.
Along the aisles of St Magnus’s Cathedral are tomb-slabs from the late seventeenth century. While these are related to the vigorous tradition of mainland Scottish tombstone-sculpture, these monuments are yet more deeply cut, yet more remarkable for their rough, unerring sense of design. The letters of the inscription are raised clear of their backgrounds, a device used throughout northern Europe to cut inscriptions in sandstone. Facing the northern weather, only raised letters have any chance of lasting more than a few generations. Incised lettering is for gentler climates or for harder stones. Some of the Kirkwall tomb-slabs have images in bas-relief. These are abstract and allegorical, as befits a Calvinist society: ultimately they derive from images of the Christian soul in such popular works of Protestant devotion as the 1638 Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man of Francis Quarles. But the child-soul of the emblem books is transfigured by the hand of the Orcadian carver into a wild-haired girl, either alone in the posthumous desert of smoothed sandstone, or else stretching up to the hand of God coming forth from the cloudy sky. The image is transformed in feeling as well: the meek child-soul has become the haunted, urgent dreamer of the Draumkvaede, the wandering soul passing through the arctic otherworld of the Scandinavian imagination.2
The Latinity of the inscriptions is both brusque and aureate: an Orcadian participation in the intensely Latinate culture of the Northern Renaissance, an echo of Rhetorics studied in the colleges of Aberdeen, the universities of Leiden or Utrecht. These are grim epitaphs, not far removed in their stoicism from the grim enduringness of mediaeval Scandinavia, as in this example from the 1682 memorial to John Edmonston:
Sero gallicante noctis medio et
Mane pulsat Dominus domus.
‘The midnight cockcrow comes too late / At dawn the Lord is thundering at the door.’
What was once a library shared by the clergy and gentry of Kirkwall has come to rest in the University of Aberdeen. It is an extraordinary, broad collection: theological and humanist as might be expected, but also containing a few unexpected splendours in festival books and engraved records of Baroque court and civic ceremonial.
George Mackay Brown (1921–1996) was historian and elegist of the islands. Most of his writing is concerned with Orkney and with Orcadian experience and history. He celebrated the tutelary saint of the islands in Magnus (1973), with its shifting chronology encompassing most of their known history. His verses focus on the Viking past, or on times yet more distant – poems on the Orcadian monuments which date from remotest antiquity.
In An Orkney Tapestry Mackay Brown described the ‘dome of quarried monoliths’, the prehistoric tomb of Maeshowe, with its alignment permitting the entrance of the midwinter light to the chamber.
It is a pledge that, after the long night of winter and death, the earth, with all its freight of seed and root and jewelled bones, will proceed to resurrection and the springtime.3
He developed this idea in his illustrated book of verses Orkney Pictures and Poems, in which he imagined the islands themselves as a burial ship:
In the last of the snow
A great one died. He lies
In that stone hollow in the east.
A winter sunset
Will touch his mouth. He carries
A cairngorm on his cold finger
To the country of the dead.4
In his imagination, the turn of the seasons was always an allegory of death and resurrection. His work shares with many of the Scottish arts the quality of a circling, obsessive set of variations on a single ground. In the same collection, the barley harvest (Orkney lies too far north for corn) has supernatural overtones, a part of the classic northern struggle against the personified winter:
The host keeps a shining order
on fields of harvest
against the Ice King,
against hunger in the ruined cities.5
In the ambitious novel Greenvoe, there are broader seasons and cycles which encompass more than the turn of one year. Allegorically, Mackay Brown touched upon the difficulties of the Northern Isles in his own time: depopulation, economic marginalisation, and dependence (like most of the rural north of Britain) on tourism. Even more troubling is dependence on international energy corporations, military tracking stations. The Ice King can manifest himself in things more destructive than the hardest weather, more insidious than the longest night. Mackay Brown saw vitality coming into the islands with skilled and sympathetic immigrants from the mainland and from much further abroad. He saw also that the traditional agriculture and economy of the Orkneys were marginal, dependent, irrelevant. As early as 1974, in the final story of his collection Hawkfall, his Orcadian character Colm writes from Edinburgh, in a sad recognition that the economic life of the islands has changed for ever:
I am not coming north this year [ … ] there are places that give me a pain at the heart when I think of them – the doorless houses in the village, the Godspeed rotting on the beach, the black forge, the mill with its great stones dusty and silent.6
Greenvoe is a chronicle of apparent descent into an irreversible winter, in which the islands are requisitioned, cleared of people, and destroyed. It is a knife-edge for the writer to tread. The Orcadians have little with which to oppose international wealth and power: a mode of life, mutual kindnesses, the rituals (open and secret) of the old agricultural order. It is a difficult ending for both writer and reader. The line between poetic resolution and sentimental evasion is a narrow one.
The end of the novel imagines the Orkneys already devastated to make a military-industrial station. The men of the island come back by night to a ruined broch to complete an urgent ritual of death and resurrection, its form based to some degree on the Horseman’s Word, transformed in imagination to the resonant ancient survival which the folklorists once imagined it to be. This scene unites most of Mackay Brown’s allegories for Orkney: the barley harvest and the old ballad of ‘John Barleycorn’; the death and resurrection of the barley grain combined with recollections of the bread and wine of the Mass, John Barleycorn shadowing Christ. Against the destruction wrought by the outside world on the integrity of the Northern Isles, there is set only the power of the working men’s rough poetry and the reminiscence which it carries of other, half-forgotten rituals against the dark. It is a large fictional risk: if the reader’s sympathy or belief should waver, the scene becomes farcical rather than sacral.
Yet, even if the writing fails, the end of Greenvoe can offer a representation of all remote provinces in the late twentieth century, to the extent that their rituals are viewed from outside as hopeless and primitive attempts to propitiate non-existent powers, and to obtain protection from progress, from international and corporate reality. That hideous, destructive, corporate impoverishment – the appalling unmaking strength of the Kingdom of Winter – is much worse now, sixteen years after his death, than when Mackay Brown wrote Greenvoe; worse and more powerful than he could have dreamed. But, but, as of the rained-off May evening when I write this, with the light moving round the fringes of the wood to sink, hours from now, far into the northern quadrant, the barley is still coming up in the fields, and there are alternatives and exceptions still.
In this last scene of Greenvoe, the initiate ploughman lies in a simulation of death. One of the Senior Horsemen has taken on himself the role of the Lord of the Harvest. He questions the dead young man. Suddenly, miraculously, the interrogation produces the right words of power against all-encompassing death and destruction. The young man finds the only words to bring the sun up again at midwinter, to take the islands forward into the light:
‘Rain. Share. Yoke. Sun.’7
Yet, this spell is nothing more than daily words from a way of life which was already economically marginal by the middle of the twentieth century. Even within the fiction, within the narrative of the midwinter ritual, the Senior Horseman doubts the possibility that four words can quicken the rebirth of everything which has been lost:
‘There is nothing,’ said the leader of the Master Horsemen.
‘There is Darkness. There is Silence …’
In the north-east a little colour seeped along the grey of the horizon – a tarnish of yellow, jet, a flush of rose …
The Master Horseman raised the Harvester to his feet. They put a white cloak over his shoulders. They brought him over to the niche where the bread and whisky stood.8
With the coming of the dawn, with this sacrament in bread and whisky – I cannot help remembering the viaticum in oatmeal and whisky administered on the field of Culloden – the wind carries the scent of the lost fields from beyond the razor-wire and the book ends (as Mackay Brown’s Magnus ends in miracle as the dead, blessed Earl stirs in Paradise to answer the tinker’s prayer) with a statement of the perdurability of some sort of humane human society:
The Lord of the Harvest raised his hands. ‘We have brought light and blessing to the kingdom of winter,’ he said, ‘however long it endures, that kingdom, a night or a season or a thousand ages. The word has been found. Now we will eat and drink together and be glad.’9
1 Sylvia Townsend Warner, ‘The Duke of Orkney’s Leonardo’, Selected Stories, ed. Susanna Pinney and William Maxwell (London: Virago, 1990), pp. 426–40.
2 Knut Liestol Guthmund, ‘Draumkvæde’, Studia Norvegica I/3 (1946), p. 11; Bengt R. Jonsson, ‘Oral Literature, Written Literature: The Ballad and Old Norse Genres’, in Joseph Harris (ed.), The Ballad and Oral Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
3 George Mackay Brown, An Orkney Tapestry (London: Gollancz, 1969), p. 129.
4 George Mackay Brown with Gunnie Moburg, Orkney Pictures and Poems (Grantown-on-Spey: Colin Baxter Photography, 1996), p. 40.
5 Ibid., p. 73.
6 Mackay Brown, ‘The Tarn and the Rosary’, Hawkfall (London: Hogarth Press, 1974), p. 194.
7 Mackay Brown, Greenvoe (London: Hogarth Press, 1972), pp. 278–9.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.