Cornerstone No. 190, page 18
67: Eric Linklater
Yet another thoroughly Scottish Great Scot born ‘over-
seas’ (this prolific writer was born in Penarth, Wales on
March 8th, 1899) who achieved celebrity status via the
creation of novels, short stories, children’s fantasies,
travel books and military histories. Eric Linklater was
born to ‘Norse’ parents – his father an Orcadian and his
mother of Swedish descent – and identified, all his days, with the Orkneys. The
good people of these islands, like those in Shetland, are not Gaels, rather
Scandinavian; indeed, Linklater is an Orcadian name derived from Old Norse (a
rough translation gives us ‘at the stone of the heather’).
Our subject however, was educated on the Scottish
mainland at Aberdeen Grammar School followed by
Aberdeen University. Another facet of his education, a
somewhat more violent one, came from his activities in
military service. Linklater was a member of the Black
Watch in WW I and was wounded at The Somme in
1918. In WW II he served with the Orkney section of the
Royal Engineers, worked in the publicity department of
the War Office and saw service in Italy 1944/45. In 1951
he served as a temporary Lieutenant-Colonel in Korea.
These experiences were to have an influence on E.L.’s
writing – and perhaps, due to his writing, on many more of us; however, GS 67
did not set out to be a writer for he began his studies in medicine before
realising that he was travelling up the wrong academic path.
He discontinued medicine and started to read English literature obtaining an MA
in 1925. He travelled a great deal becoming assistant editor of the
in Bombay (1925–1927) and returned to Scotland by a somewhat
circuitous route that entailed crossing Persia and the Caspian Sea to the
Caucasus before regaining his beloved islands. Following work at the University
of Aberdeen, Linklater spent two years oscillating between the USA and China
on a Commonwealth Fellowship. It was during this period that he became
determined to be a novelist but he still had itchy feet, the wanderlust taking him
to India again, in 1935, to China, to Japan then crossing the Pacific to the USA
before returning to Scotland. So, where is this taking us?
All writers of distinction base their scripts on personal experiences (perhaps
with the exceptions of the Brontë Sisters and that of Karl May) then give back
to their readers stories and accounts which are elaborations and embellish-
ments of those experiences. Such accounts can thus allude to real occurrences
– often political – and lead the reader to concur with popular opinion or reject
Great Scot!