Greenmantle

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In Manx legend, Saint Brigid came to the Isle of Man to receive the veil from Saint Maughold. Her feast day is known as Laa’l Breeshey in the Manx language, (which is similar to Irish and Scots Gaelic.) The lady of the house placed rushes by the hearth for a bed for the saint, then called out, ‘Brede, Brede, tar gys my thie tar dyn thie ayms noght Foshil jee yn dorrys da Brede, as ihig da Brede e heet staigh’ Translation: ‘Brigid, Brigid, come to my house, come to my house tonight. Open the door for Brigid and let Brigid come in.’ Cornwall She is the guardian of every newborn child, their cradles often protected with a woven Brigit’s Cross. Upon the safe birth of the child, it was ‘sained’ by the midwife, with three drops of water on the child’s forehead, dedicating the child in the name of the Trinity. A candle was also carried around the bed sun-wise three times. All these are elements from the Goddess Brighid, who was a solar deity also associated with healing wells. Could saining be from an older tradition of putting the newborn child under Brighid’s protection? Brigit of the Hearth Buchan was able to write Greenmantle with some authority because he was himself both a soldier and a spymaster. By the end of the War he was head of the War Propaganda Bureau. He was also a director of his own publishing company, Nelsons, and as an editor he originated the idea of the weekly part-work (again paid for by the government) on the First World War.

The King of Leinster granted Brigit land for a monastery in Kildare (Cill-Dara: Church of the Oak), around 470 AD. Brigit was the Abbess of the first convent in Ireland, and after her death, a perpetual flame was kept in her honour. It was a centre of learning and art, including metal work and goldsmithing; its most famous illuminated manuscript being the Book of Kildare (which no longer survives). Only women were permitted to enter the hedge enclosure with the Eternal Flame, which was fanned by a bellows. There were originally nineteen nuns who kept vigil at the fire, one each night. On the nineteenth night, the nun would say, ‘Brigid guard your fire, this is your night’.These Nuns may have been a continuation of a sect of Druids, the ‘Sisters of the Galliceniae’, who performed sacred female rites. According to Cogitosus, who wrote in 650 AD, Kildare was a ‘double community’ of monks and nuns, presided over by an abbess. Brigit’s relics were kept in the abbey until the Viking raids in the Ninth Century. King Henry VIII of England, during the Reformation, dissolved the assets of the Catholic Church in Ireland and destroyed the abbey in the Sixteenth Century. All that remains of the Medieval building are a high cross and a round tower. The remains of what might be the original communal hearth from the time of Brigit were discovered in 1996. About a mile away from the remains of the abbey, the original stone well still exists, with a cloutie tree (a Larch) nearby. The Larch’s branches are still hung to this day with strips of cloth, bandages, ribbons, etc. in prayer to Saint Brigit for healing.In 1993, Sister Mary Minehan, a Brigidine Nun, relit St. Brigid’s flame in Kildare. They have set up a Solas Bhride, a Christian Community Center, ‘for Celtic Spirituality in the spirit of Brigid of Kildare’. They hold a festival, Feile Bhride, at Imbolc in Kildare each year. They are raising funds to establish a permanent building to house the perpetual flame. Membership in Cairde Bhride (Friends of Brigid) can be obtained by writing Sister Mary Minehan at Solas Bhride, 14 Dara Park, Kildare, Ireland, telephone 045-522-890. Brigit of the Mantle Indeed, one of the weirder scenes has Hannay, ah, meeting the Kaiser. Wilhelm appears as a sympathetic man, not the callous and not-too-bright warlord of usual British discussion. As we contemplate the death of print, it strikes me that little exchanges like these are going the way of the dinosaur, and the loss isn't necessarily a great step forward for civilization.Dedications to Bride are common throughout Great Britain and Ireland. From these traditional observations, it will be seen that Bride and her services are near to the hearts and lives of the people. In some phases of her character, she is much more to them than Mary is. Symbols The Serpent

That's an enormous act of sympathy for Hannay, since he just came from the western front and clearly hates the Germans. And what an imaginative, compassionate portrait from Buchan, also a soldier *at that moment*. John Buchan's four tales featuring hero Richard Hannay fall squarely in the ripping yarn tradition, and they're particularly remarkable as examples of early spy novels. Here are the badder than bad villains and resourceful, patriotic, man's man of a hero that we encounter later in the novels of Ian Fleming, for example. Then there's the perennial theme that pits one worldview against another, with the fate of civilization hanging in the balance. The exotic settings (in Germany, Hungary, and Turkey) add another layer of intrigue. The plot is too convoluted -- and, to be honest, a little too hocus-pocus -- to recap, but it doesn't really matter. Once the reader has gotten by some of the initial artifice of the premise, it's a sleigh ride. Buchan was educated at Glasgow and Oxford Universities. After a brief career in law he went to South Africa in 1902 where he contributed to the reconstruction of the country following the Boer War. His love for South Africa is a recurring theme in his fiction. Peter Hopkirk's nonfiction work Like Hidden Fire, published in 1997, follows actual German plots to destabilise the region during World War I. While Hopkirk draws various connections between Buchan's work and the historical events, there is no indication that Buchan had knowledge of the actual events or used them as the basis for his story. However, Lewis Einstein's book Inside Constantinople: A Diplomatist's Diary During the Dardanelles Expedition, April to September, 1915 refers to a German woman agitating the Muslim population in Constantinople, in the mode of Hilda von Einem, so this element of the story may have some factual basis. Cairns, John C (September 2004). "Ironside, (William) Edmund, first Baron Ironside (1880–1959)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (onlineed.). Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/34113 . Retrieved 14 January 2008. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)I kindle this candle in the name of Brighid, Goddess of Smiths. I sain this house in the name of Brighid, Goddess of Healers. I smoor this candle in the name of Brighid, Goddess of Poets. Brigit and Animals It wasn’t only Ian Fleming who borrowed from Buchan. The 1985 Hollywood action-adventure “The Jewel of the Nile” also lifted the central premise of a Muslim holy man – The Jewel – being used as the pawn in a jihadist plot. I first read this book when I was 10 or 11. It was a library copy, borrowed from the Kodaikanal Club in Kodaikanal, a hill station in south India. It used to be the local English club and the contents of the library still include a large number of old hardbound editions of authors who were popular in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Early on in this novel, Hannay remarks on the ability of the English for 'getting inside the skin' of distant races. He goes on to say: 'Perhaps the Scots are better than the English, but we're all a thousand per cent better than anybody else.' Someone had underlined this sentiment and jotted down in the margin: 'Oh, really?'. The rejoinder, in a different hand, was: 'Yes, really, my dear anonymous!' This was followed by a phrase, apparently in Dutch, that I cannot recall.

Hence, we provide our clients with proprietary research services including presentations, active participation at meetings and conferences, as well as access to Greenmantle’s team of regional experts. Greenmantle is the second of five novels by John Buchan featuring the character Richard Hannay. It was first published in 1916 by Hodder & Stoughton, London. It is one of two Hannay novels set during the First World War, the other being Mr Standfast (1919); Hannay's first and best-known adventure, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), is set in the period immediately preceding the war.Hannay is called in to investigate rumours of an uprising in the Muslim world, and undertakes a perilous journey through enemy territory to meet his friend Sandy in Constantinople. Once there, he and his friends must thwart the Germans' plans to use religion to help them win the war, climaxing at the battle of Erzurum. We also get an all too rare glimpse of the eastern front, as Russia invades Anatolia. The novel's finale takes place in the battle of Erzurum (1916), and I can't think of a fictional representation of this struggle. Russians appear as serious, even noble, a far cry from the usual British perception of a clumsy, collapsing army being ground to death by Prussians. Let no man or woman call its events improbable. The war has driven that word from our vocabulary, and melodrama has become the prosiest realism. Things unimagined before happen daily to our friends by sea and land. His furious mother had her vengeance on the couple. She mounted the forces of winter against them, borrowing days from the harsh mid-winter, causing devastation to the newly emerged flowers and young animals. But her power was waning and the love between Angus and his Bride were too strong for her. The Cailleach withdrew from the landscape, and turned to into a large grey stone, biding her time until the other side of the year when the Queen of Winter would reign again.