The land that held the monastery was quiet and forbidding -- ". . . As our Glendearg did not abound in mortal visitants, superstition had peopled its recesses with beings belonging to another world. The savage and capricious Brown Man of the Moors, a being which seems the genuine descendant of the northern dwarfs, was supposed to be seen there frequently, especially after the autumnal equinox, when the fogs were thick, and objects not easily distinguished. The Scottish fairies, too, a whimsical, irritable, and mischievous tribe, who, though at times capriciously benevolent, were more frequently adverse to mortals, were also supposed to have formed a residence in a particularly wild recess of the glen. . . ."
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5.0 out of 5 stars
"THE DEVIL IS NOT SO BLACK AS HE IS PAINTED.",
By T. Patrick Killough "All about Patrick" (Black Mountain, NC United States) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
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This review is from: The Monastery (Paperback)
In two novels of 1820 THE MONASTERY and its sequel, THE ABBOT, Sir Walter Scott sketches the coming of the Reformation to the Scottish borderland near his home of Abbotsford and the Benedictine monastery at nearby Melrose.In THE MONASTERY most action takes place between 1547 and +/- 1562 either at Melrose Abbey or ten miles up a steep canyon at the fortified tower of Glendearg or at points in between. In Chapter 31, the Catholic Church is portrayed as a mighty whale into which thousands of Reformer fishermen are plunging their harpoons. The leviathan is already spewing blood but is fighting gamely and postponing inevitable death. In the small portion of Scotland called the Halidome of St Mary's, and in its remote vale of Glendearg lives are lived without incessant attention to the struggles of Reformation and Catholicism or of John Knox and the Pope in Rome. Yet those lives are also drawn into the great struggle between whale and tormentors. And lives are also drawn into the endless struggle between Scotland and England, now officially Protestant, in the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I. The champion of dying Catholicism is the ascetic Sub-Prior Eustace of St Mary's Abbey. Suddenly into his hands falls a reformer second only to John Knox as effective among the rude Scots: Henry Warden. Years earlier at a foreign university they were best friends and seekers together of knowledge: William Allan and Henry Wellwood. Now divided, they still love and respect each other and try to ward off evil each from the other. Yet the future Abbot tells his captive, "Wellwood ... we can no longer be friends. Our faith, our hope, our anchor on futurity, is no longer the same" (Ch. 31). -- Central to the Plot: the Avenels Human and Non-Human -- The noble but decaying House of Avenel is represented by the evil border Baron Julian and his orphaned niece Mary, whom he has deprived of her right to the castle which he and thieving bully boys occupy on an impregnable island. Baron Julian Avenel is indeed appalling. Yet as a henchman puts it to a potential recruit, "the devil is not so black as he is painted" (Ch. 24). [NOTE: that statement is true of every Walter Scott villain, including the Catholic Church: each has some spark of good.] Associated as protectress for centuries now with the Avenels is a less than human spirit of wind and water, the White Lady. She has a sense of the future and hints to Mary that she would do well to find and read the vernacular Bible her mother had left behind and to join the Reformation. This Mary does. But in marrying Halbert Glendenning, a young Protestant convert and commoner with whom she was raised, Mary lowers the social status of the Avenels and causes the White Lady to fade away forever. Edward Glendenning, younger brother of Halbert, also loves Mary. But, losing her, he becomes a Benedictine novice. Religion is portrayed as a subject of theological debate between the Sub-Prior and his onetime friend, the Reformer. It is also a matter of ritual and superstition among the lower classes. The Catholic Church is also presented as wealth and land built up over centuries by cathedrals and monasteries. That wealth is now being carved away by Protestant nobles, despite the resistance of Catholic Queen Mary Stuart and a Catholic hierarchy still part of the common law of Scotland. The "frame" of THE MONASTERY is a fictitious Benedictine manuscript collated in the 18th and early 19th Century by two Scottish monks in exile in France and delivered to Sir Walter Scott for editing and publication. Scott reserved to himself, he tells us in the novel's INTRODUCTION, the right not to present simply the Benedictine version of the Reformation. For Sir Walter believed that God meant the Reformation to be and to come to purify and improve Scotland. But much of what Reformation brought, including fanaticism and iconoclasm, was deplorable and much of what it replaced should have been preserved. -OOO-
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