The Last Things

The book’s epilogue revisits the key features of Brown’s Catholic sacramental universe. It notes the significance of biblical echo, allusion, and Brown’s saints, martyrs, reformers, and transformative moments of grace. The epilogue stresses the importance of Brown’s use of ceremony and ritual, and emphasises his interest in (and create use of) apocrypha, midrash, and folklore. The epilogue contends that Brown’s work has been critically framed in incomplete and even damaging ways, but that Brown was a Scottish Catholic artist whose grammar of devotion was global.

The Nativity of Christ

This chapter explores Brown’s depiction of the babe of Bethlehem in his winter ‘homilies’, or festive journalism. The chapter examines Brown’s fusion of the folkloric and magical rituals of late medieval popular religion with the modern short story form. It outlines Brown’s knowledge of nativity poetry, fine art, and drama, and studies the ways in which he inserts these earlier traditions into his nativity poetry and prose. It focuses especially on the Eucharistic implications of Brown’s nativity poetry.

Magnus

This chapter considers the ways in which Brown adapts, develops, and treats the cult of St Magnus in literary terms. It examines Brown’s creative use of history, hagiography, and the cult of St Magnus as first seen in the Icelandic Sagas. It discusses Brown’s complex fusion of hagiographic, apocryphal, biblical and saga writings in his novel Magnus (1973) and in other devotional poetry. The chapter contends that Brown resituates a largely forgotten Norse saint within a Scottish and Scandinavian hagiographical context, while simultaneously reintroducing St Magnus into twentieth century Scottish literature.

A Biography of Faith

This chapter concentrates on three major biographical strands in order to obtain a clear idea of Brown’s literary Catholicism. It explores the trajectory of Brown’s religious life through his unpublished early manuscripts, autobiographical fiction, and letters to various correspondents. It examines his autobiography, For the Islands I Sing, in relation to the traditions of spiritual self-writing by other literary converts. The chapter also investigates the intertextual connections between George Mackay Brown’s work and the autobiographical writing of John Henry Newman, Edwin Muir, and Muriel Spark, among others.

Mary

This chapter investigates Brown’s engagement with Mariology in three ways. First, the chapter discusses Brown’s creative use of the Virgin Mary’s various iconographical depictions and cults, in order to restore her image to Orkney’s landscape. The chapter examines Brown’s ‘apocryphal’ texts, which reveal that he was more politically-engaged than is often thought. Last, this chapter provides a new reading of enculturation in Time in a Red Coat (1984), the novel that represents the high point of Brown’s Marian corpus.

The Scottish Catholic Literary Imagination

This chapter recovers the submerged literary Catholicism of a Calvinist country. It presents a broad overview of Scottish Catholic writing from the medieval period to the late twentieth century, and discusses the over-determined ways in which religion and religious identity have been shaped by Scotland’s literary critics, poets and writers. The chapter examines the debate over the defining features of Catholic fiction and presents its own definition in relation to the work of George Mackay Brown.