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Home / Publications / Books / Scotnotes Study Guides / Scotnote 19

Scotnote 19

Naomi Mitchison’s
EARLY IN ORCADIA,
THE BIG HOUSE & TRAVEL LIGHT

Moira Burgess

Published in: Paperback.
By: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2004
Price: £5.95
ISBN 978-0-948877-61-2

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Naomi Mitchison was one of the most prolific, skilled and original writers of the twentieth century, whose novels range in setting from prehistory to outer space. Her work displays a breadth of knowledge and a sympathetic understanding for humanity: whatever out time, or our culture, or our beliefs, we are all still very much the same under the skin.

Moira Burgess’s Scotnote covers three of Mitchison’s historical novels: Early in Orcadia, a sequence of stories set in prehistoric Orkney; The Big House, a children’s fantasy of time-travel back to the early nineteenth century; and Travel Light, following a young Viking girl on a magical quest. Each novel is examined, and the plots, and the author’s beliefs and influences, are discussed and explained for senior school pupils and students at all levels.

CONTENTS

  • Naomi Mitchison: life and work
  • Early in Orcadia
    • The story/stories of the novel
    • Theme and structure of the novel
    • Setting in geography and prehistory
    • Characters
    • Language
    • Myth and religion
  • The Big House
    • The story of the novel
    • Theme and structure of the novel
    • Characters
    • Setting and language
    • Historical periods
    • Celtic myth and folklore
  • Travel Light
    • The story of the novel
    • The structure of the novel
    • Characters
    • Setting in time and place
    • Themes
    • Norse myth and legend
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography

Primary Sidebar

Retrieving and Renewing: a poem for ASL

   Forget your literature? – forget your soul.
   If you want to see your country hale and whole
   Turn back the pages of fourteen hundred years.
   Surely not? Oh yes, did you expect woad and spears?
   In Altus Prosator the bristly blustery land
   Bursts in buzz and fouth within a grand
   Music of metrical thought. Breathes there the man
   With soul so dead—? Probably! But a scan
   Would show his fault was ignorance:
   Don’t follow him. Cosmic circumstance
   Hides in nearest, most ordinary things.
   Find Scotland – find inalienable springs.
  Edwin Morgan, 2004

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