![]() ![]() More seriously, he closely examines the effects of the 18th-century union with England and the cost and benefits to both countries, and the apparent inability of Scots throughout history to unite without betraying one another. Along the way he considers such oddities as whether the tartan is a comparatively modern invention and whether Macbeth and Thorfinn the Mighty, the Norse earl of Orkney, might not have been one and the same. Magnusson begins by promising to undo a few “cherished conceptions” about Scottish history, while advancing a few of his own. ![]() ![]() He is thus admirably suited to the difficult task of condensing Scotland's history-made dauntingly complicated by family rivalries, contending clans, and ceaseless tensions with sometime-conqueror, England-into a coherent narrative. ![]() The Icelandic transplant, an archaeologist and prolific author ( The Vikings, 2001, etc.) and translator ( The Fish Can Sing, 2001, etc.), has a greater sense of Scottish history than do most natives. Almost as weighty as the Stone of Destiny, this vast, superb history relates Scotland's past over a dozen millennia.ĭevotees of BBC America and the History Channel may know Magnusson, familiar on UK airwaves as a historian of the British Isles. ![]()
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