Sawney Beane: The Abduction of Elspeth Cumming by Frieda Gates
My rating: 3/5 cats
sawney beane: scotland’s favorite cannibal-patriarch. the man who brought a lady into a cave and emerged twenty-five years later with eight sons, six daughters, eighteen grandsons, and fourteen granddaughters, having robbed, killed, and digested hundreds of people during his incest and bloodbath extravaganza. bring your own dropcloths!!
the legend inspired many artists, from painters and sculptors:
to musicians:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNne2Q…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSNwHw…
to filmmakers:
GRIECO!!!
so why not literature? how can you take this story and end up with something dull?? ta-daaaa! for the most part, this is indeed pretty dull. i gave it three stars cats because i never hated reading it, but if you are familiar with the story, you don’t need to read this. it’s basically what you know with some sort of subplot thrown in that is mostly just expository “slice of life in scotland’s sixteenth century.” ms. gates is not a historian, but this book somehow reads like the work of a historian trying their hand at fiction:
Living in a cave was not unusual. Prehistoric man and many primitive tribes were known to be troglodytes. But in sixteenth century Scotland, all most people knew about caves was based on local folklore; and because these tales involved frightening superstitions, it was not common for people to want to live in them, or even enter them.
and:
A settlement in Scotland was called a farm town, or if it contained a parish church or gristmill, it was a kirk town or mill town, respectively. The size of these settlements, which centered on a grouping of individually-owned fields, was determined by the total area of land that one or sometimes two or three plough teams of horses or oxen could keep under cultivation. Homes, which were mainly small huts, all focused on a central street or green where the market was set up once a week. This gave the residents, as well as nearby farmsteaders and peasants from nearby estates, an opportunity to buy and sell their produce and crafts. Sawney’s father sold his excess produce in such a town.
zzzzzzzz—you are boring the cannibals, ms. gates.
less textbook and more
, please.
before reading this, i always thought that sawney beane was a for-true story like the donner party. but it turns out, while some places claim that the story has in fact been authenticated, others pooh-pooh him as the stuff of legends. too bad, because i really love the idea of him, and i like to think he was a real man, waylaying travelers and lining his walls with their cloaks and eating them off of their very own dishes.
sawney beane gets 5 stars cats, this book gets a low 3—we have rounded those scores into a medium-three because we are not very good at math.
do you know what happened to the sawney bean clan, once they were captured?? you can find out from wikipedia, so i don’t think this counts as a spoiler, but they were all rounded up and the men had their genitals removed and tossed into a bonfire, and then they were dismembered for as long as they were alive and tossed piece by piece into the same bonfire while the womenfolk were forced to watch. the women were just burned alive without ceremony. this includes all the babies and young’uns who were born into the clan and had no idea that what they were doing was taboo.
scotland!!!
i would like to read a better novel about this. come to think of it, i was underwhelmed with the novel i read about the donner party, too. i need better cannibal fiction in general, please.
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