By Amy Fahey
But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight – Thursday, April 16 at 8 PM Eastern – to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss President Trump's blasphemous cartoon (and his insults aimed at Leo XIV), the Holy Father's Apostolic Journey in Africa, as well as other issues in the global Church. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel.
Now for today's column...
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:
Quite 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...

A Man in Opposition: Remembering Saint Magnus