There have been several adaptations, including a 1971 television series by BBC Scotland, a 2015 film version, and some stage versions. Kinraddie, the book’s fictional setting, also represents a world in transition.The rural practices and way of life that the story’s characters have always known are increasingly challenged by advancing technology and the impact of war. A central theme of the book is the passing of the ‘old Scotland’, a theme powerfully articulated towards the end as the minister unveils a memorial to the parish’s war dead: One of the comments above suggests the important point that what Gibbon was seeing is an east of Scotland more than a west of Scotland feature. While that would be hard to establish objectively, I think the east-west divide has roots deep in the nature of the land. The fact that the east is mostly fertile agricultural soil long made it a magnet for consolidated feudal power, based on coercion and the normalisaiton of violence. That’s not to say that there wasn’t also violence on the west coast. There was plenty, and brutally so like the Eigg massacre. But this was more within an indigenous framework where matters were easier to process locally through time – a case more of lateral violence (equitably, from the side) than vertical violence (from top down, and hard to engage with, thereby the pressure spilling out laterally). In the west, indigenous communities could be more themselves for longer because, until the Cheviot came in and the clearances began, the land was not worth grabbing and settling in for anything much other than subsistence. I suspect that in the west with Iona etc., Christian influence was also stronger, and the bardic tradition that it built on carried a kind of immunity in conflict that gave the culuture richer roots through which reconciliations might be effected. Sunset Song is profound. It is heartbreaking but ultimately uplifting and life affirming. It tells a story of a Scotland that, in some senses, is no more, yet, in others, still lives in the hearts of each and every one of us. It’s also now a politically dangerous concept. Part of the danger is that we interpret ‘other’ cultures from the point of view of the culture we regard as ‘normal’. Thus, we identify Gaelic or English as the common languages that reinforce ‘the Scots psyche’, even though many Scots nowadays have neither Gaelic nor English as their first language. Likewise, we identify the historical heritage that reinforces ‘the Scots psyche’ with that of Wallace, Knox, and Burns, even though many Scots nowadays don’t have any of that as their cultural inheritance. The danger is that Scots who don’t conform to the ‘normal’ psychological profile or archetype are excluded as ‘Scots’.

Difícil tarea, pero 'Canción del ocaso', auténtica joya de la literatura escocesa publicada en 1932, bien merece una entrada. Una de esas entradas que se escriben desde el corazón y profundamente emocionada. The thing to understand is that It was less wage slavery than a way of life. Despite the itinerant nature of this way of life, social relationships were maintained through the farm households and bothies, the weekly markets, and the quarterly fairs. Countries were much smaller: for example, I once worked out that my grandmother had lived her entire life within a sixteen-mile radius of where she was born. My grandfather was only ever displaced from his native country in Stirlingshire by the First World War and its aftermath, which disrupted rural populations in Scotland in ways that Robert Colquhoun eulogises in Sunset Song. Strong and abiding relationships were maintained in the smaller worlds of the farming communities of the time, as evidenced by Robert McLellan’s Linmill Stories. Though it will scandalise much of the neighbourhood, Chris is going to marry this minister, Robert Colquhoun, who evokes a rich past (for all its hardships and cruelties) and fears for the future. “So, lest we shame them, let us believe that the new oppressions and foolish greeds are no more than mists that pass. They died for a world that is past, these men, but they did not die for this that we seem to inherit.”

Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

As you enjoy it, I invite you to marvel at this. It is said that Lewis Grassic Gibbon (just thirty-three years of age when he died, even younger than that other Scottish genius Robert Burns at the time of his death) wrote this masterpiece in six weeks. In doing so, he gifted us one of the finest literary accomplishments Scotland has ever known.

The last sentence with its references to cultural fear and (self) loathing may explain that persistent Scots psychological cringe. The book is essentially a lament for the passing of a way of life. Gibbon shows how the war hurried the process along, but he also indicates how change was happening anyway, with increasing mechanisation of farms, the landowners gradually driving the tenant farmers off as they found more profitable uses for the land, the English-ing of education leading to the loss of the old language and with it, old traditions. Although the cruelties and hardships of the old ways are shown to the full, he also portrays the sense of community, of neighbour supporting neighbour when the need arises. And he gives a great feeling of the relative isolation of these communities, far distant from the seat of power and with little interest in anything beyond their own lives. But here too he suggests things are changing, with some of the characters flirting with the new socialist politics of the fledgling Labour Party. In the second chapter, the twins are still babies. Learning she is pregnant again, Jean falls into despair. Unable to get help from her society, she goes insane, killing the twins and then herself. After the tragedy, Guthrie drops out of school, going to work on her family’s homestead. Her eldest brother, Will, absconds with a girl from Kinraddie, marries her, and moves permanently to Argentina. John is enraged by what he perceives as his son’s betrayal of their family, which causes him to suffer a stroke. For the rest of his life, he is paralyzed. While bedridden, he makes sexual advances to Guthrie, who refuses. La historia de Chris Guthrie y Kinraddie, esa pequeña comunidad de campesinos en Escocia, que deben enfrentarse día tras día a la dura vida del campo pero al mismo tiempo aman y veneran esa tierra, es de esas que se quedan contigo. It is said that Grassic Gibbon (just 33 years of age when he died, even younger than that other Scottish genius Robert Burns at the time of his death) wrote this masterpiece in six weeks. In doing so, he gifted us one of the finest literary accomplishments Scotland has ever known.The digital copies are taken from the first editions and are full text so now you can read these works as they were first presented to the public. In a flash it had come on him, he had wakened up, he was daft and a fool to be there; and, like somebody minding things done in a coarse wild dream there had flashed on him memory of Chris at Blawearie and his last days there, mad and mad he had been ... Another part of the danger lies in our reluctance to ‘give up’ our normal. Then we get into fights about ‘our’ national identity and its perceived dilution by ‘foreign incomers’, and ‘national movements’ of people sharing ‘national’ beliefs and aspirations. Above all, it was the conflict that brews in Chris, between tradition and modernity, learning and the land, moving away or staying put, that resonated with me.

In Chapter 3, John died and Chris inherited all of his money and property. Rather than sell it, she decided to continue to run Blawearie on her own. Chris started a relationship with a local laborer called Ewan Tavendale. They got married and Chris later discovered that she was pregnant. This first volume of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's trilogy, A Scots Quair, focuses on the life of Chris Guthrie, daughter of a tenant farmer in the fictional estate of Kinraddie in the north-east of Scotland, before and during the First World War. Sunset Song, written in 1932, is generally considered the strongest book in the trilogy and one of the greatest Scottish novels of the twentieth century. Although it's written in a form of the dialect of the area, it's been pretty heavily anglicised so that it keeps the rhythms without being too hard for non-Scots (or modern Scots) to understand. There's a heavy sprinkling of old Scots words, but also a glossary of them should the meaning not be obvious from the context. At the same time, it is important to remember that you are writing your argument out in English. Assuming any Scot wanted to affirm or deny your argument requires literacy in English.’ But suddenly, at the point where Chris finds herself alone and independent, the book turns into something quite wonderful. The story of Chris and Ewan falling in love and marrying is full of emotional truth. This isn't a great romance – this is two young people setting out to make a life for themselves and their inevitable children, farming the land in continuity with the generations before them and assuming they will hand it on in turn to the next, and making the adjustments that any couple must when the realities of living with another person don't quite match up to the dream. That’s a terribly anglocentric thing to say. By virtue of the same argument, anyone who wanted to affirm or deny something written by a Scot who doesn’t write in English, but who writes in Gaelic or Urdu (say), would require literacy in Gaelic or Urdu. Why should English be privileged over any of contemporary Scotland’s other languages?Su sueño de convertirse en maestra debe postergarse cuando la tragedia golpea directamente a su familia. Dos opciones se abren entonces ante ella: ¿empezar de nuevo lejos de su hogar o aferrarse a él y compartir su destino? But, for all that, it was Chris Guthrie that gave the novel the place in my heart that it still occupies today. I am genuinely not sure if it is true or a stretch to say, as many do, that the Chris of Sunset Song – and the two subsequent novels that make up the Scots Quair trilogy – personifies Scotland. Islamic state and Taliban were not the first to realise that profound change comes only by killing the roots, the image, the word, the idea of the fully creative human. The results are well recorded. Las descripciones de la naturaleza, del paso de las estaciones en este rincón de Escocia, perdido entre el Mar del norte y un mar de colinas y brezales, son tan hermosas que cortan la respiración. Es la belleza de una Escocia salvaje que va transformándose al mismo tiempo que el nuevo siglo... I am listening to the audiobook narrated by Eileen McCallum. You have to pay attention. Understanding the Scottish dialect is difficult, but worth it. I don't understand all the words. Most you understand from the context. The dialect captures the colloquial speech of the area. The dialect is said to be artificial, but I didn’t realize this. McCallum's intonation reflects the humor, sadness and anger found in the lines. She sings the Scottish tunes. Five stars for the excellent narration. In my view the narration enhances one's appreciation of the text.

And do we really need to be so terrified of talking about Scots from the past who have made a contribution, in case this makes someone feel ‘excluded’. The author himself had a personal philosophy that mixed a sort of primitive Christianity with Marxist economics. He believed that organised religion had corrupted the original message of Christianity. His worldview comes through in the novel, where two of the most favourably drawn characters, Chae Strachan and Rob Duncan, are both men with leftist opinions, whilst the local Minister, Rev. Gibbon, is a hypocrite of the first magnitude. If the book has a weakness, it lies in the author making this message a little too obvious. It’s a minor complaint though in what is otherwise a first-class novel. The last section of the main text, just prior to the epilogue, is superbly delivered. In the Epilude, a new Reverend at the church in Kinraddie commissioned a monument to commemorate the men of Kinraddie who were killed in the war. The Reverend began a romantic relationship with Chris and Chris attended the unveiling of the monument with her son. It was the old Scotland that perished then, and we may believe that never again will the old speech and the old songs, the old curses and the old benedictions, rise but with alien effort to our lips. Mitchel was a socialist, a communist even. The garden city movement has complex origins but a good part of them are in the idealism of the cooperative and Arts and Crafts movements and the developing traditions of the trade Union movement. Welwyn Garden City had an active communist party branch and a relatively skilled and well organised work force drawn from working class communities right across the UK as well as strong non conformist and artistic communities.And so she marries young Ewan Tavendale and together they are content to farm their land, Chris' happiness enhanced when she bears her first son. But the world is changing and over in Europe war clouds are gathering. And during the four years of fighting, life for Chris and for this entire community will be changed forever. But, for all that, it was Chris Guthrie that gave Sunset Song the place in my heart that it still occupies today. I am genuinely not sure if it is true or a stretch to say, as many do, that the Chris of Sunset Song – and the two subsequent novels that make up the Scots Quair trilogy – personifies Scotland. Conocemos a Chris cuando apenas es una niña que corre por las colinas de Kinraddie, la cabeza perdida entre lecturas y ensoñaciones. Chris ama profundamente la tierra que la ha visto nacer, pero al mismo tiempo es consciente del duro destino que le espera cuando deba hacerse cargo de su propia granja y de su propia familia. Lo ha visto en los ojos de su madre; en esa mujer cansada, melancólica y rota que recuerda con nostalgia los tiempos felices de su infancia...