Passion Partners: The Piety of George Mackay Brown and Gerard Manley Hopkins

Passion Partners is based on a postgraduate study on Gerard Manley Hopkins by the Orcadian writer George Mackay Brown at Edinburgh University in the 1960s that has only recently become accessible at the National Library of Scotland after purchase at auction in 2018. "Passion Partners" refers to the medieval liturgical fragment from the primers so popular with the laity: "Grant that I may carry within me the death of Christ, make me a partner in his Passion, let me relive his wounds." And indeed, this book explores the godliness of Mackay Brown and Hopkins as just such "partners" in the Passion of Christ. Catholics they may both be, but they both were keenly aware that it is by their artistic sense that they would be judged as writers in the end. From the "Pied Beauty" of the "Greenfields Kirk" to the "Theological Blades," the illuminated threnody of the Hopkins-Mackay Brown partnership takes us on a journey deep into the Fornaldarsǫgur of the North Atlantic.