The Farthest Hebrides
RECORDING by Beecham of Mendelssohn’s "Fingal’s Cave," heard from 3YA on Sunday, reminds one of the odd career of the Hebrides island group in the European imagination in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I suppose it began with Macpherson’s "Ossian," the famous forgery which so early foreshadowed everything worst in later Celtic literature. At all events, Wordsworth, Keats, Poe, and doubtless many others restored the Hebrides to their ancient position in Ultima Thule, the island at the edge of the world; they became a symbol of the delightfully remote and mistyFingal’s Cave being an exception in its precision and clarity-about which everyone could write without having to go there. They remain to this day, of course, singularly little known; Hebridean sailors have been seen*in Christchurch, speaking a brand of English which perplexed
the Saxon; but the modern mind is at least less addicted to the love of the foggy and it may be hoped that the revival of Scotland that some people envisage will include these islands which once excited a Europe conscious of its own ignorance.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19450525.2.17.5
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 309, 25 May 1945, Page 8
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182The Farthest Hebrides New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 309, 25 May 1945, Page 8
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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