Today marks the death, over nine centuries ago, of St. Magnus, a jarl or earl of Orkney, those windswept isles off the coast of mainland Scotland. His holy life is recounted in the Orkneyinga Saga, which captures, in spare and forceful language, his Christian witness in an era when violence and ambition regularly upended the lives of ordinary crofters and fisherfolk.
The imaginative energies of Orcadian writer and convert George Mackay Brown were fired by the story of St. Magnus, resulting in numerous poems, a drama, an opera (with composer Peter Maxwell Davies), and shorter narratives. The Magnus muse is nowhere more evident than in Mackay Brown’s 1973 novel, Magnus.
It’s a strange work, at once innovative and imitative, proceeding through a succession of interwoven voices and symbols: the rise and fall of oars, scythes, weapons, the chanting of psalms, the web of light and harp and loom. I’m not sure it can even be called a novel. It’s more of a dramatic meditation, a stylized, lyrical evocation of meaning – closer to poetry. Perhaps unhelpfully, Brown himself says in his memoir, “Realism is the enemy of the creative imagination.”
He presents the martyrdom of St. Magnus, betrayed by his cousin and rival earl, Hakon, as an example of a larger pattern: “At certain times and in certain circumstances men still crave spectacular sacrifice,” says Mackay Brown. “They root about everywhere for a victim and a scapegoat to stand between the tribe and the anger of inexorable Fate.”
In his memoir, For the Islands I Sing, Mackay Brown reveals his motives for a strange transposition that occurs when the novel comes to the martyrdom:
[Q]uite suddenly one morning, as I was thinking of ways to tell the story of the actual martyrdom in Egilsay in 1117, it occurred to me that the whole story would strike a modern reader as remote and unconnected with our situation in the twentieth century. The truth must be that such incidents are not isolated casual happenings in time, but are repetitions of some archetypal pattern; an image or event stamped on the spirit of man at the very beginning of man’s time on earth, that will go on repeating itself over and over in every life without exception until history at last yields a meaning. I did not have far to go to find a parallel: a concentration camp in central Europe in the spring of 1944.
With this shift to Nazi Germany, Mackay Brown highlights the terrifying ordinariness of evil, the presupposition that violence and brutality are a default setting for humanity, and defy resistance.
Thus, the killing of Magnus is presented in the novel as something administrative, procedural. Lifolf the cook, who has been conscripted by Earl Hakon to carry out the actual murder, repeatedly declares, “Of course it had nothing to do with me. . . . One does not dispute with one’s superiors inside the barbed wires.”
Shakespeare offers striking parallels in the “functionaries” of King Lear. The captain, who surrenders his humanity by delivering Edmund’s order for the execution of Cordelia, ironically claims he cannot “draw a cart or eat dried oats” like a brute workhorse, but if “it be man’s work, I’ll do it.”
Standing in defiant opposition to the contagious violence of Lear is the gesture of the unnamed servants who minister to Gloucester immediately after the gouging out of his eyes. One perishes trying to stop the brutality; the other two minister to the blinded Earl by fetching “flax and whites of egg / To apply to his bleeding face.” At the risk of displeasure or death, they affirm their humanity.
In the Orkneyinga Saga, Magnus makes a final offer, telling Hakon and his men that he is more concerned with their souls than with his own life: “have me mutilated in any way you choose, rather than take my life, or else blind me and lock me in a dungeon.” But they crave a final solution, one which will ensure that no further violence will ensue.
In this original version, Lifolf isn’t banal about the evil he is asked to commit. Hakon first asks his standard bearer, Ofeig, to do the killing “but he refused angrily.” When he asks his cook, “Lifolf started to weep out loud.” Magnus consoles him: “Don’t be afraid, you’re doing this against your will and the man who gives you the order is a greater sinner than you are.” He then commits his soul to God and “offers himself as a sacrifice.”
Sigrid Undset found the parallels between Magnus’ day and her own obvious, requiring no imaginative leap or historical rupture. She writes:
We who live in a more highly organized civilization (as long as it lasts) often try stealthily to evade the stern claims of God so as to obtain for ourselves a little more than our neighbours of the material benefits of this world, or we strive for “recognition” from man, and endeavor, as far as we can, to avoid the “contempt of the Cross.” It is probably that in our hearts we are no less occupied with ourselves than were the violent friends of St. Magnus – more cautiously and in a great deal more civilized form we commit the same sins as those which our forefathers perpetrated brutally and in the full light of day.
“The reason why his personality stands out so sharply,” continues Undset, “is because he appears in such strong contrast to the world in which he lived. He was a man in opposition. . . . All around him had one essential aim – to rule and to be their own masters. St. Magnus was the only man of his time who always thought – just the opposite.”
St. Magnus’ life and death remind us that, in the midst of conflict and moral confusion, we need a voice, however still and small, urging the path of peace and self-sacrifice. Such a voice is always going to run afoul of those who crave an illusory and dangerous “final solution” or who indulge in reckless rhetoric.
The “banality in the face of evil” needn’t be the default setting: in opposition to those who have cauterized their moral sense, there need to be those who yet “see feelingly,” whose reaction to suffering and violence is not to turn away and say, “it was none of my business,” but to run for the flax and egg whites, and be willing to embrace the “contempt of the Cross.”
