ABSTRACT
Orkney, an archipelago-size cluster of islands, lies off the northeast coast of Scotland. Blue slate, elsewhere a rich man's roofing but in Orkney more common than shingling, gives houses in the islands their air of the abstract. George Mackay Brown's poetry is like this, not abstract meaning tenuous but pared down almost to outline. Where the Orkney sun strikes against the roofs in Stromness, the slate shows as hard-edged planes that leave half their surface in shadow. In Brown's memory of Orkney, the starkest fact is the death of St. Magnus, murdered on Easter Monday in 1117. Earl Hakon murdered St. Magnus, and incredibly—except that history has many examples like it—he ranks among the greatest of the Orkney earls. During the Second World War, Italian prisoners, captured in the African desert, built a chapel on Orkney, and all who visit it must marvel at the craft that made something from nothing.
