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Travel Light, with The Varangs' Saga
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Naomi Mitchison. With an introduction by Isobel Murray |
ISBN 9781904999973 |
Paperback 180 pages |
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Published 1 June 2009
UK Price £12.95
In her novels, Naomi Mitchison frequently tackled serious issues, war and peace, conflicts of loyalties, freedom and slavery, and of course feminism.
But a very few times she allowed her work to be primarily a question of fun, or play.
In Travel Light (1952) she wrote a charming fairy tale in which a king's daughter was saved from death as a baby, then successively lived with bears and dragons.
It is set in a Never Land which is nonetheless gently Norse, where Odin, the All-Father, 'made men in order to amuse himself'.
In the course of her journey, Halla becomes perhaps the most individual Valkyrie in literature.
This edition also contains The Varangs' Saga, a previously unpublished holiday entertainment from 1926, where most of the fun comes from describing young British couples with children on a group holiday in France, but describing them in the manner of an Old Norse saga.
Mitchison wrote: 'Play is absolutely necessary to everyone: we are the kind of animal that plays.'
NOT AVAILABLE IN THE USA OR CANADA.
Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen.
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© Kennedy & Boyd, an imprint of Zeticula Ltd., Unit 13, 196 Rose Street, Edinburgh, EH2 4AT, Scotland
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