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    History, Homages and the Highlands: An Outlander Guide
    History, Homages and the Highlands: An Outlander Guide
    History, Homages and the Highlands: An Outlander Guide
    Ebook341 pages4 hours

    History, Homages and the Highlands: An Outlander Guide

    By Valerie Estelle Frankel

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    With oodles of steamy romance, paranormal time travel, adventure, and much more, Outlander is sweeping the nation. From over a dozen volumes to its newest incarnation as a breathtaking Starz show, it continues to delight, even with subtle, clever changes. But what was life really like then – from kilts and bagpipes to selkies and the fair folk? Who was Bonnie Prince Charlie and why was his campaign so disastrous for the Highlanders? Discover the story’s roots, from Doctor Who to Brigadoon to Game of Thrones. Learn to speak Scottish, uncover the difference between Beltane and Samhain, explore customs of Highland weddings, tour Versailles and Edinburgh, and dive into the rich era of history that pervades this incredible epic.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherValerie Estelle Frankel
    Release dateNov 6, 2014
    ISBN9781310322983
    History, Homages and the Highlands: An Outlander Guide
    Author

    Valerie Estelle Frankel

    Valerie Estelle Frankel is the author of more than fifty books. She has taught children of all ages and is a former San Jose State University professor. She enjoys dancing, acting and creating costumes. She lives in California.

    Read more from Valerie Estelle Frankel

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      Book preview

      History, Homages and the Highlands - Valerie Estelle Frankel

      History, Homages

      and the Highlands

      An Outlander Guide

      Valerie Estelle Frankel

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      Joss Whedon's Names: The Deeper Meanings behind Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Cabin in the Woods, The Avengers, Doctor Horrible, In Your Eyes, Comics and More LitCrit Press.May 2014.

      Pop Culture in the Whedonverse

      History, Homages and the Highlands: An Outlander Guide is an unauthorized guide and commentary on Outlander (book and show) and its related universe. None of the individuals or companies associated with the books or television series or any merchandise based on this series have in any way sponsored, approved, endorsed, or authorized this book.

      Print ISBN-13: 978-0692328071 (LitCrit Press) 

      Copyright © 2014 Valerie Estelle Frankel

      Smashwords Edition

      LitCrit Press

      Contents

      Introduction

      Salutes, Homages, and Influences

      Doctor Who

      Game of Thrones

      Other Cable Shows

      Brigadoon

      The Wizard of Oz

      Alice in Wonderland

      Anachronisms

      Cameos

      Adapting the Books

      The Actors

      The Credits

      First Person

      The 1940s

      The Episodes

      Genre

      Historical Fiction

      Fantasy

      Science Fiction

      Romance

      Characters

      Claire

      Jaime

      Frank

      Black Jack

      Other Characters

      Eighteenth Century Scottish Culture

      Bagpipes

      Beggars

      Black Watch

      Cattle Raiding

      Charms

      Circle Dancers

      Clans

      Drinks

      The Fair Folk

      Food

      Freemasons

      Gaelic Language

      A Gentleman’s Education

      Kelpies and the Loch Ness Monster

      Kilts

      Medicine

      Money

      Music

      Peat

      Redcoats

      Rent Collecting

      Silkies

      Tartan

      Tea Leaves and Palmistry

      Thistles

      Tourism

      Waulking Wool

      Weddings

      Witchcraft

      Women’s Clothes

      Sun Feasts, Fire Feasts, and Holidays

      Time Travel and Magic Guide

      History

      History of the Stuart Kings

      Historical Figures

      Place Guide

      Scotland

      England

      France

      Other Places

      About Gabaldon

      Similar Books

      Scottishisms

      Reading Order

      Cast

      Works Cited

      Introduction

      Outlander offers a dazzling world of mingled magic and history as Claire Beauchamp Randall plunges into the standing stones and finds herself on the edge of the Jacobite Rebellion. But who was Bonnie Prince Charlie historically? What was life really like among the bagpipes, kilts, cattle raids, and Gaelic of the Highlands? And what of the books – what are their sources? This book explores Scottish life of the 1740s and 1940s, together with the people and places Claire encounters on her adventures.

      Learn the difference between Scottish and English pounds, customs of Highland weddings and funerals, and all the delightful expressions of the Scottish dialect. From Louis XV to George VI, it’s a tour through European history before Claire travels on to meet the Founding Fathers of America.

      There’s also magic and mystery: standing stones, selkies, the fair folk, witchcraft, and always the mystery of Loch Ness. The Sun Feasts and Fire Feasts of Imbolc, Beltane, and Samhain are still celebrated today as people bind on protective charms and pray to Jesus and Mary along with the older Celtic gods of Lugh and Bride.

      With over 20 million copies sold and now a Starz cable show, the series is a historical, romantic, fantastical adventure not to be missed!

      Salutes, Homages, and Influences

      Doctor Who

      While first inspired, Gabaldon was watching a Doctor Who rereun, specifically War Games with Patrick Troughton and his companion, Jamie MacCrimmon. The latter, a kilted Highlander recruited from just after the Battle of Culloden, was one of the most popular characters on the fifty-year show. She notes that she found his gallantry endearing and his kilt rather fetching, so she began the book in his era. As Gabaldon goes into more detail about the Doctor Who scene:

      In this particular scene, Jamie McCrimmon and Lady Jennifer, a WWI ambulance driver (hence demonstrably no one’s delicate blossom) are somewhere with the TARDIS, but without the Doctor, who was presumably in considerable danger elsewhere/when. Jamie declares that he must go rescue the Doctor, tells Lady Jennifer to wait there, and heads for the TARDIS - followed closely by Lady Jennifer. When he perceives that she plans to come, too, he insists that she must stay behind, ostensibly because someone needs to tell their other companions what’s going on. Lady Jennifer greets this piece of feeble persuasion with the scorn it deserves, demanding, You just want me to stay behind because I’m a woman, isn’t that right? To which our courageous young Scotsman (who is considerably shorter than Lady Jennifer) replies, Well, no, I - that is... you... I... well... yes! Now, I found this demonstration of pig-headed male gallantry riveting.

      …

      Jamie McCrimmon, from the eighteenth century and a culture in which women were respected, but not considered men’s physical equals (for the excellent reason that they aren’t), appears for the most part to accept the notion that the women with whom he has to do on his travels through time are in fact his equals and treats them that way – until now. When push comes to shove, and it’s a matter of a woman taking on physical risk... he can’t help it; he has to try to protect her, even though he accepts her as his intellectual and social equal. (The Doctor’s Balls Kindle Locations 334-349).

      Jamie was named in compliment to the Doctor Who character. He too struggles with modern women, particularly his World War II nurse Claire, with her own standards of what she can manage. Continuing her story, Gabaldon adds:

      So Jamie he was, but with a blank for a last name. Knowing nothing about Scotland when I began, I was reluctant to give him a last name until I knew more about the history of the Highlands and its clans. He remained Jamie [] for several months, in fact – until I happened in the course of my research to read The Prince in the Heather, by Eric Linklater. This book told the story of what happened to the Bonnie Prince and his followers after the disaster at Culloden. Included in the description of those harrowing days was the poignant quote which I later used in Dragonfly in Amber: After the final battle at Culloden, eighteen Jacobite officers, all wounded, took refuge in the old house and for two days, their wounds untended, lay in pain; then they were taken out to be shot. One of them, a Fraser of the Master of Lovat’s regiment escaped the slaughter; the others were buried at the edge of the domestic park. Now, by this point I had seen enough of the story to think that it should end at Culloden – but I had the feeling that there was more to the story than that. So, on the off chance that there might one day be a sequel to this book (cough), I thought it might be advisable for Jamie [] to survive that battle – and if that were the case … well, plainly his last name should then be Fraser. (Outlandish Companion, 135-136)

      Coincidentally, Jaime McCrimmon is played by Frazer Hines. Also coincidentally, as Gabaldon put it, I came across the legend of the Dun-bonnet – the survivor of Culloden who returned to his estate, and lived seven years in hiding in a cave, protected by his loyal tenants. This struck me as a most romantic and suitable story, so – in the larcenous fashion of novelists – I snatched it and adapted it to my own purposes Months later, she discovered the man’s name was James Fraser (Outlandish Companion 136).

      Frazer Hines has been cast in the role of a prison warden for a 2015 episode, as a fun salute to his original contribution. In another nod, in the eighth book, Brianna jokes with family friend Joe Abernathy about how much she wishes she had a TARDIS instead of the standing stones (Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, ch. 97).

      Game of Thrones

      Ron Moore comments, "Oh, sure. Game of Thrones proved that you can do this – that you can take a big literary franchise and convert it into a big television hit. And be faithful to the source material and do it right and do it big, and then an audience will come [for] big serialized ongoing mythology. Absolutely, they opened the door for us (Prudom, Ron Moore")

      Starz’s CEO Chris Albrecht recognizes that many want to classify Outlander as Starz’s version of Game of Thrones, noting, We should just hope for the kind of success that show has had in popular culture. Nonetheless, he considers the separation between books and show to be a flaw in Game of Thrones: "There are a lot of people that watch Game of Thrones that never read the books and maybe have still never read the books. What you’d love to see in something like this is for each franchise, the books and the television show, to feed the other (Prudom, Strong Female). Moore says he’s not particularly worried about attracting new viewers. I think if people try it, they’ll get hooked and just keep coming back (Prudom, Strong Female").

      Of course, there are many superficial similarities: Both are historical-fantasy dramas with lots of sex and violence, filmed in beautiful exotic British locations. Both are adventures on the edge of a cataclysmic war, with stunning period costumes. There are repeat names (Jaime, Ned, Jenny, John, River Run, Brienne/Brianna) and tropes: family loyalty, fate, forbidden love, duty. Both series follow the books closely, with author cameos and involvement. George R.R. Martin and Gabaldon are friends in fact, with her work appearing in several of his anthologies. She notes, "When I told George Martin, who I know quite well, that I had 16 episodes, he said, ‘What? Game of Thrones only gets 10 a season,’ but George’s books are not as long and complicated as mine" (Bethune).

      Nonetheless, there are fundamental differences: the books A Song of Ice and Fire are epic fantasy sagas that emphasize male point of view characters (those who are not male like Brianna and Arya often have masculine behavior patterns). By contrast, Outlander begins with Claire’s point of view almost exclusively for the first two books. As she time travels and explores a culture and lover so different from anything she’s known, she guides readers to see the world through her inherently feminine worldview. Game of Thrones with naked women standing about in rooms and long speeches by Littlefinger and Tyrion (contrasted with mystery women like Melisandre) has a noted emphasis on the masculine. Mary McNamara in HBO, You’re Busted, notes that on Game of Thrones, The upper frontals got so gratuitous – two women teaching themselves the tricks of prostitution while a male character, fully clothed, muses about his personal history and definition of power – that fans took to Twitter to complain.

      Albrecht acknowledges an attempt to capitalize on the lack of female-skewing programs in the premium space, and to attract women with Outlander, adding, When women become attached to something like this, it’s pretty hard to pry them away from it. I think they are a much more loyal, less fickle audience than lots of other demographic segments (Prudom, Strong Female).

      Other Cable Shows

      The Outlander books date to 1991, but it seems likely that TV executives looked at them and thought, oh, Game of Thrones meets Downton Abbey. The series … has some of ye-olde-time grimy violence and sex of Games and a little of the plummy accents and cozy Anglophilia of Downton. (Hale)

      Many cable shows, including The White Queen, Camelot, The Tudors, and certainly Game of Thrones see medieval sex scenes with anachronistic cleanliness and waxing. Indeed, The New York Times describes Jaime as the kindest, buffest and cleanest of the group (Hale). In most of these, women learn to seduce men, and men, to be the sexual conquerors. On The Tudors, King Henry sleeps with every woman he desires, as does the new pope in The Borgias. As McNamara notes, these shows are terribly slanted:

      Although there is male nudity – men occasionally, though not always, appear shirtless and/or bottomless when they are having sex with women – there are no male brothels, no scenes of clothed women, or men for that matter, sitting around chatting in a room filled with naked men…For all their many functions, women’s bodies are not props and prostitution is not something that should be regularly relegated to atmosphere.

      A few shows seem to take a women’s point of view for a far different story. In the first episode, Claire takes what she wants – including in her marriage. Moore explains that he wanted to show her as empowered sexually as a person and having her own appetites and desires (qtd. in Maerz). In the ruins of Castle Leoch, Claire doesn’t undress for the audience, and as Frank kneels before her, she pulls his head down. At a preview screening in New York, Mike Hale writes, the women in the audience loudly expressed their approval. She’s the one who makes the first move, telling Frank what she wants (even removing her own underwear ahead of time!) so she’s also the one we get to see enjoying it, critic Melissa Maerz notes in her article Let’s Talk about that ‘Outlander’ Sex Scene. As she adds:

      Obviously, sex scenes that focus on women getting off are still generally seen as taboo. In the documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated, Kimberly Pierce, who directed Boys Don’t Cry, reveals that the MPAA pressured her to cut a similar sex act from her film to prevent it from earning an NC-17 rating, even though the brutal murder at the film’s end was acceptable under an R rating. Pierce believes the MPAA was particularly uncomfortable with a shot that featured no nudity at all – it was a close-up that lingered on Brandon Teena’s ecstatic expression – because it was such a clear departure from more traditional sex scenes, which have a clear endpoint as their goal, and tend to finish whenever the guys involved do. Maybe that’s why it feels somewhat radical that the camera pans upward during the Outlander sex scene so that we can see Claire’s face.

      The Starz show The White Queen and HBO shows Sex and the City and True Blood are all adapted from women’s books. Thus all focus on the female protagonists and their emotions and relationships. Sex and the City features dating gossip, and the women objectify men far more than the reverse, as they discuss pros and cons in each. In The White Queen, the heroine forces the king to submit to her will and marry her rather than conquering and discarding her. True Blood takes this further, objectifying a fully nude Eric Northman, a handsome vampire happy to walk around in the buff. Sookie’s brother is naked as often as Sookie, and he prances around for the camera as well.

      This staring at men emphasizes the women as the source of power in the scene and the camera angle through which the viewers experience life. This is the opposite of most shows. As E. Ann Kaplan sums it up: Within the film text itself, men gaze at women, who become objects of the gaze; the spectator, in turn, is made to identify with this male gaze, and to objectify the women on the screen; and the camera’s original ‘gaze’ comes into play in the very act of filming (qtd. in Clover 235). However, Claire makes the sexual decisions, eyes Jaime’s entire body in a slow walk-around on their wedding night, tells Frank what she wants, and provides the series voiceover. She’s directing the action in a way very unusual for women onscreen.

      So far I had been assaulted, threatened, kidnapped, and nearly raped, and somehow, I knew that my journey had only just begun. Claire’s words in the first episode emphasize the trauma she’s undergone and all she will soon endure, as many women did in this time period. In episode eight, both Claire’s consensual encounter with Jaime and her two near-rapes are shown mostly clothed, with a swirling camera to focus on her long-lasting trauma. Like the scene with Jenny’s nudity, the emphasis here is on the characters’ pain and shock, not the salaciousness.

      The Times notes, "In keeping with the Starz ethos, though, [Outlander is] a lighter show all around – less heavy and also less substantial" (Hale). The gradual speed certainly parallels Downton Abbey at times, likely inspiring the comparison. But the genius of both shows is an emphasis on more than battles and beheadings but on daily life in the period dramas, the day-to-day interactions that are more the province of women than men.

      Brigadoon

      Jaime and Claire note that in Scottish legends, people always travel 200 years. Probably the most famous tale of this sort is Brigadoon. Two Americans hunting in Scotland wander into a village, only to discover it’s been magically unstuck in time and is in fact filled with people from two hundred years in the past. As Tommy falls in love with a village inhabitant, Fiona, he realizes his bustling city and corporate life lack the romance and charm of the old world. He knows he cannot return to Fiona, as their world only touches his own once per century, but he tries to go back and see her nonetheless, only to find her – true love has made their timelines intersect once more.

      This fifties musical with a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe, was quite popular, followed by a Gene Kelly movie adaptation. Nonetheless, Brigadoon cannot be traced to a particular folktale or novel, except perhaps Germelshausen, an 1860 story by Friedrich Gerstäcker that is actually set in Germany. Its cursed village appears for only one day every century. The protagonist, Arnold, comes from the outside and falls for the villager Gertrud, but ends being parted from her forever, with a plot that appears in many German tales by Mueller, Heine, Uhland and others. As such, Brigadoon seems an influence on the series, but it would be an exaggeration to say that in the fairy abduction tales it’s "always two hundred years, when this modern story, based on another modern tale from Germany, is the only example.

      The Wizard of Oz

      Claire tells Jaime – with ribbons woven in his hair – that he resembles the Cowardly Lion (Voyager, ch. 38), while Brianna compares a time traveler’s bewilderment to Dorothy’s (An Echo in the Bone, ch. 85). There’s also Claire’s spell in episode four of the show. The chapter title, Son of a Witch, is a book title from the Wicked series. Meanwhile, a World War Two pilot compares himself to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, adding to himself maybe it was the resemblance of the Northumbrians to scarecrows and lions (All Hallows 449). All of these emphasize the connection between series, as the hero finds himself in a far-off land.

      Alice in Wonderland

      As Claire enters a magic portal and pops into a foreign world of strange rules, this English lady thinks of Alice in Wonderland several times. Part one of Dragonfly in Amber is titled ‘Through a Looking Glass, Darkly," blending Carroll’s second book Through the Looking Glass with 1 Corinthians 13:12. A chapter title for Written in My Own Heart’s Blood is Of Cabbages and Kings. Claire reminds herself to Begin at the Beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop while writing a letter (An Echo in the Bone ch. 74).

      Upon discovering Lord John is unexpectedly in Philadelphia, Claire goes to see him feeling a little like Alice down the rabbit hole (An Echo in the Bone, ch. 85). Likewise, Laoghaire’s brother resembles the white rabbit in Brianna’s eyes (The Drums of Autumn, ch. 33). The prologue of Voyager evokes the book as well, as Claire says, "Looking down into reflection, I

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