Auld Licht Idyls
Before Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie wrote this quiet masterpiece about the village that made him. Set in the fictional glen of Quharity (drawn from his Kirriemuir childhood), Auld Licht Idyls follows a schoolteacher through brutal winters and small wonders: a starved sparrow against frosted glass, a bantam cock frozen in his water-trough, hens roosting among fishing-rods in the kitchen rafters. These are linked sketches, not a novel, and that's the point. Barrie captures a world where the church casts a long shadow, where customs feel both peculiar and sacred, where the landscape imposes a particular loneliness that also binds the community together. The tone wavers beautifully between wry observation and genuine ache. This is Barrie as literary artist, not yet the sentimental fabulist. He loves these people too much to sentimentalize them. The book feels like looking through a window at snow that fell a hundred years ago: you can't touch it, but you can see every detail.
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“The kail grows brittle from the cold in my dank and cheerless garden. A crust of bread gathers timid pheasants around me. The robins, I see, have made the coalhouse their home. Walter Lunny's dog never barks without rousing my sluggish cat to a joyful response. It is Dutch courage with the birds and beasts of the glen, hard driven for food; but I look attentively for them in these long forenoons, and they have begun to regard me as one of themselves. My breath freezes despite my pipe, as I peer from the door; and with a fortnight-old newspaper I retire to the ingle-nook. The friendliest thing I have seen today is the well-smoked ham suspended from my kitchen rafters. It was a gift from the farm of Tullin, with a load of peats, the day before the snow began to fall. I doubt if I have seen a cart since.””
— J. M. Barrie
