Eric Linklater

Eric Robert Russell Linklater (8 March 1899 – 7 November 1974) was a Welsh-born Scottish writer of novels, writer of poems and short stories, military history, and travel books. For The Wind on the Moon, a children's fantasy novel, he won the 1944 Carnegie Medal from the Library Association for the year's best children's book by a British subject.

Life and writings
Linklater was born in Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, Wales, to the Orcadian master mariner Robert Baikie Linklater (1865–1916) and his wife Mary Elizabeth (c.1867–1957), daughter of James Young, also a master mariner. He was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School and Aberdeen University, where he was President of the Aberdeen University Debater. He spent many years in Orkney, and identified strongly with the islands, where his father was born. His maternal grandfather was a Swedish-born sea captain; thus had Scandinavian origins through both parents. Linklater is a local Orcadian name derived from the Old Norse, and throughout his life, he maintained a sympathetic interest in Scandinavia.

Linklater served in the Black Watch in 1917–18 before receiving a bullet wound, then became a sniper. His experiences of trench warfare are described graphically in his memoir Fanfare for a Tin Hat (1970) and at one remove in his 1938 novel The Impregnable Women, which describes an imaginary war against France.

Whilst an undergraduate at Aberdeen University in 1922, Linklater wrote the first musical comedy for the Aberdeen Student Show, ‘Stella, the Bajanella’, with music by JS Taylor. 24 years later, during Linklater's tenure as Rector of Aberdeen University, his play "To Meet the Macgregors" was performed as the 1946 Student Show.

After abandoning medical studies in Aberdeen, Linklater spent 1925–27 in Bombay, India as an assistant editor of The Times of India and then travelled extensively before returning to Aberdeen as an assistant to the Professor of English and then spending 1928–30 as a Commonwealth fellow at Cornell and Berkeley.

As a writer, Linklater's career took off in 1929. Although his greatest success came in the early years of that career, he was to publish 23 novels, three volumes of stories, two books of verse, ten plays, three works of autobiography, and another 23 books of essays and histories. His third novel, Juan in America, was a hugely popular picaresque, with some of the extravagance of Byron's Don Juan, based on his experiences of the absurd during the Prohibition era, with its resulting gangsterism. It is sprinkled with memorable remarks: "I've been married six months. She looks like a million dollars, but she only knows a hundred and twenty words and she's only got two ideas in her head. The other one's hats." The character returned in Juan in China (1937).

Linklater also wrote three children’s novels, The Wind on the Moon (1944), The Pirates in the Deep Green Sea (1949) and Karina With Love (1958). The first of these is about two sisters, whose adventures include becoming kangaroos and rescuing their father from a Hitlerian tyrant, enlisting the anthropomorphic help of a puma and a falcon. Its combination of storytelling skill and treatment of wider themes such as imprisonment and freedom won it the Carnegie Medal.

Linklater's Orcadian and Scottish sympathies led him to some literary and political involvement in the Scottish Renaissance, culminating in his unsuccessful National Party of Scotland candidacy at the East Fife by-election, 1933. Magnus Merriman (1934) was an acerbic fictionalized description of the debacle. He settled in Orkney with his new wife in 1933.

The author's attitude to war and the moral implications of diplomacy became sharper in Judas (1939), which explores the concepts of loyalty and treachery amidst a strong indictment of the desertion of Czechoslovakia by Britain and France in the name of appeasement. His own military career in World War II began with the Royal Engineers in Orkney, went on to the publicity department of the War Office, and culminated in service in Italy in 1944–45, which led to his novel about an equivocal Italian soldier, Private Angelo (1946), which contrasts nationalism with a sense of national community: "I hope you will not liberate us out of existence," is a remark Angelo makes. As one reference work puts it, Angelo "lacks 'the great and splendid gift' of courage, and consequently makes a poor soldier, although he is especially assiduous in retreating, and ultimately deserts." In 1951 Linklater published a semi-official account of The Campaign in Italy. Linklater moved back to the Scottish mainland in 1947 to Pitcalzean House, near Hill of Fearn in Ross-shire. His abilities and reputation as a novelist waned somewhat, but he turned to historical writing, and with great effect to autobiography. He went to Korea in 1951 as a temporary Lieutenant-Colonel.

Honours
Linklater served as rector of Aberdeen University in 1945–48 and received an honorary degree the following year. He was appointed CBE in 1954, served as deputy lieutenant of Ross and Cromarty county in 1968–73, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1971.

Family
Linklater married Marjorie MacIntyre (1909–1997), an Edinburgh-born, English-educated actress and campaigner for the arts and the environment, on 1 June 1933. She later became active in local politics, and on the Scottish Arts Council in 1957–63. They had four children. Their elder son, Magnus Linklater (born 1942), is a journalist and former editor of The Scotsman and their second, Andro Linklater, was also a writer and journalist. Their elder daughter, Alison (born 1934), is an artist. Their younger daughter, Kristin Linklater, is an actor, voice teacher and author of Freeing the Natural Voice, and their grandson by Kristin, Hamish Linklater, is also an actor. Eric Linklater died in Aberdeen on 7 November 1974 and was buried at Harray on Mainland, Orkney.

Main works
• ;Children's fiction

• The Wind on the Moon (1944) – winner of the Carnegie Medal

• The Pirates in the Deep Green Sea (1949)

• ;Other fiction

• White Maa's Saga (1929)

• Poet's Pub (1929) – adapted as film Poet's Pub (1949)

• Juan in America (1931)

• The Men of Ness (1932)

• The Crusader's Key (1933)

• Magnus Merriman (1934)

• Ripeness is All (1935)

• Juan in China (1937)

• The Sailor's Holiday (1937)

• The Impregnable Women (1938)

• Judas (1939)

• Private Angelo (1946) – war satire ISBN 0-907675-61-1

• Sealskin Trousers and Other Stories (1947)

• A Spell for Old Bones (1949)

• Mr. Byculla (1950)

• Laxdale Hall (1951) – adapted as film Scotch on the Rocks (1953)

• The House of Gair (1953)

• The Faithful Ally (1954)

• The Dark of Summer (1956)

• A Sociable Plover and Other Stories and Conceits (1957)

• ''The Merry Muse (1959)

• Husband of Delilah (1962) – adapted as film Samson and Delilah (1984)

• A Man Over Forty (1963)

• A Terrible Freedom (1966)

• The Goose Girl and Other Stories, selected and edited by Andro Linklater (1991)

• ;Non-fiction

• Ben Jonson and King James: Biography and Portrait (1931)

• Mary, Queen of Scots (1934)

• Robert the Bruce (1934)

• The Lion and the Unicorn: What England Has Meant to Scotland (1935)

• The Man on My Back (1941) – autobiography

• The Northern Garrisons (1941)

• The Defence of Calais (1941)

• The Highland Division (1942)

• The Campaign in Italy (1951)

• Figures in a Landscape (1952)

• A Year of Space (1953), travel

• The Ultimate Viking (1955) – history of Sweyn Asleifsson

• Orkney and Shetland: An Historical, Geographical, Social, and Scenic Survey (1965)

• The Prince in the Heather (1965) – story of Bonnie Prince Charlie's escape

• The Conquest of England (1966)

• The Survival of Scotland: A New History of Scotland from Roman Times to the Present Day  (1968)

• Fanfare for a Tin Hat: A Third Essay in Autobiography (1970)

• The Voyage of the Challenger (1972)

• ;Other

• The Devil's in the News (1929) – drama

• A Dragon Laughed and Other Poems (1930)

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