His work is craggy, granitic, primitive, as stark as the wind-seared rock of his native Orkney. Rarely leaving the "oystergrey" islands north of northmost Scotland, George Mackay Brown found there a world of local vastness, where he word-carved novels, stories and poems about prows and rudders, "sea sounds" and stars, wars and murders, and island chieftains for whom "Roots / cried, stars sang, / gulls wrote a name in the air and in water."

Though Brown thought himself a mere craftsman, his death this year in Kirkwall, Orkney's capital, brought tributes proper to an artist. In London, The Tablet called him "a giant of literature and much loved"; The Guardian found him "a major influence" and a leader of "the Scottish literary renaissance"; The Times named his last novel "a magisterial summing-up of the purpose and meaning of man's life."

"By drawing his boundaries tightly around himself," continued The Times, "Brown freed his imagination to sweep through time and space." Perhaps The Economist best caught his quirky localism; "He found all he wanted in Orkney, especially in its timeless traditions of farming and fishing, its handed-down stories and the long history of its inhabitants, whose physicallegacies stretch back 6,000 years and are never far from sight in the islands."

I first read George Mackay Brown ("Mackay" rhymes with "sky") in 1990, when a Jesuit friend, a Scot, urged the novel Magnus on me. It proved a feast: the 12th century reimagined; wildlands made vivid; places and persons starkly named (Birsay, Egilsay, Skail, Stedquoy; Mord Clack, Hold Ragnarson, Jorkel Hayforks); the peace-seeking earl Magnus Erlendson darkly murdered (to become St. Magnus Martyr); and—a final pleasure—Brown's craggy, lyrical prose: "I will speak first of the coat that is beautiful and comely, yet subject to the mildew and moth fall of time."

I also admired the novel's highly physical yet deeply religious sense of sacrifice, both primitive and Christian. In ancient Orkney, Brown wrote, "the animals honoured the god … with their broken flesh and spilled blood … I speak of priests, a solemn sacred ritual, lustrations, sacrifice. The kneeling beast, the cloven skull, the scarlet axe, the torrent of blood gurgling into the earth at the time of the new sun, the hushed circle of elders." And "when the hands of the priest and the elders dabble in the blood, the whole tribe is washed clean of its blemishes." Centuries and civilizations later, a newer and ultimately similar sacrifice graced a 12th-century kirk:

The old priest peered closely into the parchment that he held in front of him, and he read the Latin [of the Gospel] in a faded voice. Candle-light splashed the worn parchment…. [Then began] a slow cold formal dance with occasional Latin words—an exchange of gifts between God and man, a mutual courtesy of bread and wine. Man offers … the first fruits of his labour to the creator of everything in the universe, stars and cornstalks and grains of dust…. The bread will be broken, and suffused with divine essences, and the mouths that taste it shall shine for a moment with the knowledge of God. For the generations, and even the hills and seas, come and go, and only the Word stands, which was there … before the fires of creation, and will still be there inviolate among the ashes of the world's end.

Bardic and mystical, Brown found Orkney a "microcosm of all the world." Born in 1921 in the town of Stromness, he developed tuberculosis at the age of 20. Only a decade later could he resume his formal education, studying under the Orkney poet Edwin Muir at Newbattle Abbey near Edinburgh. Despite recurring illness, he did an English degree at Edinburgh University (1956–60) and graduate work on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1962–64). In 1961, rejecting what he called a "life-denying" Scots Calvinism, he became a Roman Catholic—a rarity in Presbyterian Orkney—and deepened his sense of sacramentality and of liturgical festival.

Returning to his native Stromness in 1964, he wrote with quiet discipline. Six days a week, he sat at his kitchen table from 9 A.M. to 1 P.M., ball-point pen in hand, bond paper before him, his back to the window to avoid distractions. To fend off visitors, he posted a note on his front door, "Working all day. GMB." Brown never married and rarely left Stromness. Though granted a Travel Award in 1968, he got no farther than Ireland, where he stayed with his friend and admirer, the poet Seamus Heaney. He visited England just once, in 1989.

Writing came easily to him. "He was amazed," said a friend, "at the effortlessness of his writing, incredulous that anything so easily accomplished could have any value." Slipping smoothly between past and present, he linked ancient sagas and modern events. Yet though he wrote of Nazi Germany and Eastern desert kings, he was at his best when telling about Orkney's people—a "mingled weave" of Norsemen, Picts, Icelanders and Scots with "stories in the air." He devoted two books to his islands—An Orkney Tapestry (1969) and Portrait of Orkney (1981)—but all his novels, poems, stories, plays and children's books reveled in Orcadiana. Over 20 of his works were set to music by the Orkney composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies—most notably the opera "The Martyrdom of St. Magnus" (1977)—and together Brown and Davies founded the annual St. Magnus Festival in Kirkwall.

Never a self-promoter, Brown still won quiet fame through his poetry, his novels Greenvoe (1972) and Magnus (1973), his consequent O.B.E. award (1973) and Bill Forsyth's television film of his story "Andrina." (The filming of Greenvoe will soon begin.) Brown received honorary doctorates from the universities of Dundee and Glasgow, and his work has been translated into such languages as Polish, Hebrew and Japanese. He published 34 books, and his last novel, Beside the Ocean of Time (1994), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Britain's major literary award, and won the Saltire Award for the best Scottish book of 1994.

This theme of time—"the ocean of time"—in a way defines him. "Haunted by time," Brown delved into Orkney's various pasts, while distrusting the modern technologies of North Sea oil drilling and uranium mining. Rigs and mines marred Orkney's sea and land, he felt, just as television corrupted storytelling, telephones distracted thought, and modern conveniences masked the rhythms of nature and life and language.

His poems keep these primal rhythms alive. Island women "have the silence of stones under / sun and rain." A local chief "died one shearing time, / webs of winter on him." After school, a boy "leaves / the sea smells, creel / and limpet and cod" to meet a girl with "cornlight / in the eyes, smelling / of peat and cows / and the rich midden." August is the "month of the sickled corn," and December brings "flute song, / star in the solstice tree." At Epiphany-time, "The three kings / met under a dry star. / There, at midnight, / the star began its singing." In spring, the crucified Christ was reduced to "flake of feather and slivers of bone," and "suffered himself to become, on a hill, / starker than seed or star." Such phrases as the above catch Brown's style: economy of words, sharp stresses, vivid images, Anglo-Saxon alliteration ("starker than seed or star"), Hopkinsian word-surprise ("pilgrim" as a verb) and old words and localisms ("skirls," "cuithe," "querns," "cruisie," "nousts"). His poems are minimalist—pared to verbal bone and forged image—and are often modernist as, while careful of form, he heaps up vivid fragments. He can make even a poet's fallow day poem-worthy: At day's end the poet's "seaward window smouldered, black and red. / Would a poem come with the first star? / Lamplight fell on two white pages."

On April 13, 1996, George Mackay Brown died in a Kirkwall hospital at the age of 74. The man who, according to Seamus Heaney, could "transform everything by passing it through the eye of the needle of Orkney," was himself transformed by death. After a funeral Mass at St. Magnus's Cathedral, Kirkwall, he was buried near Stromness on April 16, the feast of St. Magnus. But his work remains, for richness and delight. New work is also promised. His last poetry collection, Following a Lark, was published in May; and he left a trove of unpublished manuscripts: more poems and stories, one may hope, of ancient ships and heroes, of primal feasts and ceremonies, and of things—to use his words—as "ordinary as pebbles, shells, seapinks, stars."