NAPOMO: Scotland, Alastair Reid

Scotland

It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet,
when larks rose on long thin strings of singing
and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels.
Greenness entered the body. The grasses
shivered with presences, and sunlight
stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.
Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat,
the woman from the fish-shop. ‘What a day it is!’
cried I, like a sunstruck madman.
And what did she have to say for it?
Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves
as she spoke with their ancient misery:
‘We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it.’

I'm spamming, but this is actually quite cool

... at least if you are interested in John Buchan (and if you aren't, I am pretty certain that he is more interesting than you realise)

I'm reading a book about traditions relating to Elijah and Enoch in the middle ages* (among other things, there is a tradition of E & E as two witnesses who will come back before the end of the world and by martyred by the forces of Anti-Christ. Bizarrely, this persists into the wild shores of pre-millenial dispensational eschatology, so "Left Behind" have the 'two prophets', though I cannot, off hand, remember if they are explicitly identified with E & E; I rather think not).

However, that wasn't what I wanted to observe, rather that there is a page on Muslim traditions, on which I have just made the following note:

31 Muslim trad. of Ghiser/ Khidr/ Khizrillias – ‘holiness’; can be Jesus, Mohammed or all prophets; or the companions of Elijah; or Elijah himself (cf Turkish name Khizrillias); always connection with prophecy; the word is related to the Arabic form of the name Elijah, Khidr. In one Turkish tradition (eg in 16th C poet Lamil) the Ghiser are green-clad guardians of the water of life.
32 And a few lines later Ghiser is Elijah himself.

GREENMANTLE! GREENMANTLE! JOHN BUCHAN IS MORE AWESOME THAN YOU!

* Witte, Maria Magdalena. 1987. Elias und Henoch als Exempel, typologische Figuren und apokalytische Zeugen: zu Verbindungen von Literatur u Theologie im Mittelalter. Frankfurt am Main/ Bern/ New York: Peter Lang.