Lewis Grassic Gibbon

A Scots Quair


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We have gone back to the original longer paragraphs of 1932, and the map of Kinraddie has been prepared by George Mackie from the one in the first edition.

      If the book is entirely new to you, do not be put off by the glossary at the end. Whether you are Scots or English, American, Australian or Nigerian, speed-reading will sweep you into the action, and if—as Gibbon himself advised in the note prefaced to the American edition of 1933—you start with the Song itself, leaving the Prelude till later, you will soon find yourself effortlessly grasping the main sense of unfamiliar words from the context, and responding with delight to the heroine’s inner voice and the rhythms of the community’s speech. But do not skip the Prelude altogether: as the New York Times reviewer was acute enough to observe on 2 April 1933, it is ‘a very skilfull piece of literary engineering.’

      Some readers have been irritated by what they see as Gibbon’s overuse of ‘and’ and ‘you’. But the repeated ‘ands’ are a necessary feature of the style’s extraordinary fluidity and motion: while ‘you’ is perhaps his most effective device for displaying both his entire fictional world and the mind of his heroine. In the Prelude and Epilude the voice is mainly that of a crony narrator generalised from the community, though it sometimes modulates into another through which the author’s more sensitive perceptions can appear, as in the historical sketch of Kinraddie in the Prelude. The crony narrator, the ‘voice of the folk’ as he has been called, often employs ‘you’. Gibbon’s—and the reader’s—most vivid perceptions are mediated through Chris Guthrie’s consciousness, which exists within frames of third-person past-tense narrative and description. We respond with ease as Gibbon’s style shifts so smoothly between Chris’s mind, these frames, and the crony narrator.

      Thomas Crawford

      NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

       A NOTE

      If the great Dutch language disappeared from literary usage and a Dutchman wrote in German a story of the Lekside peasants, one may hazard he would ask and receive a certain latitude and forbearance in his usage of German. He might import into his pages some score or so untranslatable words and idioms—untranslatable except in their context and setting; he might mould in some fashion his German to the rhythms and cadence of the kindred speech that his peasants speak. Beyond that, in fairness to his hosts, he hardly could go: to seek effect by a spray of apostrophes would be both impertinence and mis-translation.

      The courtesy that the hypothetical Dutchman might receive from German a Scot may invoke from the great English tongue.

      L.G.G.

       Map

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       PRELUDE

       The Unfurrowed Field

      KINRADDIE lands had been won by a Norman childe, Cospatric de Gondeshil, in the days of William the Lyon, when gryphons and such-like beasts still roamed the Scots countryside and folk would waken in their beds to hear the children screaming, with a great wolf-beast, come through the hide window, tearing at their throats. In the Den of Kinraddie one such beast had its lair and by day it lay about the woods and the stench of it was awful to smell all over the countryside, and at gloaming a shepherd would see it, with its great wings half-folded across the great belly of it and its head, like the head of a meikle cock, but with the ears of a lion, poked over a fir tree, watching. And it ate up sheep and men and women and was a fair terror, and the King had his heralds cry a reward to whatever knight would ride and end the mischieving of the beast. So the Norman childe, Cospatric, that was young and landless and fell brave and well-armoured, mounted his horse in Edinburgh Town and came North, out of the foreign south parts, up through the Forest of Fife and into the pastures of Forfar and past Aberlemno’s Meikle Stane that was raised when the Picts beat the Danes; and by it he stopped and looked at the figures, bright then and hardly faded even now, of the horses and the charging and the rout of those coarse foreign folk. And maybe he said a bit prayer by that Stone and then he rode into the Mearns, and the story tells no more of his riding but that at last come he did to Kinraddie, a tormented place, and they told him where the gryphon slept, down there in the Den of Kinraddie.

      But in the