5 - The Nativity of Christ

Summary

While Magnus can be read as the ultimate allegory of the Crucifixion in Brown's corpus, Brown's most direct and extensive treatment of the life of Christ centres on His birth. David Jasper and Stephen Prickett note that the birth of Christ has always exerted a powerful influence on the imaginations of artists, as it was the point where ‘myth and history met, and the human and divine became one’. They add that ‘it has always been a peculiarly poetic moment, celebrated by countless poems, paintings and pieces of music’. Brown felt this too, and reflected in his Orcadian column that

Literature has been a good handmaiden to Christmas, from the time of the medieval ballads and carols. No lyric so chaste and perfect as: ‘He came alle so stille / There his moder lay / As dew in Aprille / That falleth on the spray’… (RaD, 198)

Brown's depictions of the nativity are among his most popular works. His annual Christmas stories for the Scotsman were eagerly anticipated by his reading public, and his poetic output on the nativity story spanned almost his entire poetic career. Brown often approached the subject of the nativity directly, but he also used the familiar tropes, motifs and characters of the nativity story in a highly fluid, flexible and allusive way. Indeed, depicting the birth of Christ afforded Brown the opportunity to adopt several literary guises. In his nativity writings, he can be read as priest, bard, antiquary and social commentator. Brown adopts and critiques different religious perspectives on the poetic moment of Christ's birth, and he experiments with form, using parable, homily, short story and dramatic monologue to describe the infant Christ and his holy family.

Despite the popularity of his nativity works, these are the most notable site of divergence in belief between Brown and his Scottish literary critics. Alan Bold acknowledges the difficulty that Brown faced as the creator of modern nativity tales where he contends that ‘the biblical account [of the life of Christ] is almost contemptibly familiar’. And while they offer no comprehensive evaluation of Brown's festive works, the Murrays are rather apologetic about Brown's allusions to Christ in the Gospels, where they say: ‘[t]here may […] be one too many Stations of the Cross poems for some readers’. Elsewhere, familiar critical misreading of paganism appears regularly in appraisals of Brown's nativity writings.