regshoe

At long last, I have acquired a first edition of The Flight of the Heron! This brings my number of physical copies to three. The first two are a 1993 paperback omnibus edition of FotH and its sequels, which is nice enough but it's a bit unwieldy and I don't really want the other two books right there whenever I'm reading FotH, and a 1979 hardback from the original publisher with an impressive list of 'reprinted' years on the copyright page, which is nice enough as a physical book but which has picked up a lot of printing errors over those years of new reprints; that neither of these was really ideal was one of my reasons for wanting to get a first edition. It is in fact a very nice book, a fairly typical-looking early twentieth-century cloth-bound hardback, in decent condition, and well-formatted in details in the way that ebooking has given me a new appreciation for.

Another reason for wanting a first edition was, in fact, ebooking; as you all know there is an ebook on Canadian public domain ebook site Faded Page, but there's none as yet on Project Gutenberg, and for copyright law reasons it's not possible just to transfer the Faded Page ebook across. It seems a bit of a waste of effort to start from scratch making a new ebook for Gutenberg, but—Gutenberg being the biggest and best-known public domain ebook site—I think it might be worth doing. We'll see.

Another reason for wanting a first edition is that it—and, apparently, no subsequent editions—has a really nice map on the endpapers, which

luzula has posted a picture of. This is useful!

The location of Ardroy can, as I've posted about before, be deduced fairly precisely from the text; it corresponds to a real small glen in between Glengarry and Lochiel's lands around Loch Arkaig. The map agrees with this location, though I think it gets the shape of Loch na h-Iolaire wrong. It shows the loch as an oblong angled east-west and about twice as long as it is wide, whereas Broster describes it as 'little more than a mile long, and at its greatest breadth perhaps a quarter of a mile wide'; that it points roughly north-south is suggested by the shape of the real glen, and I think can also be inferred from the text (in chapter 1.2 Ewen and Keith approach the house of Ardroy from the pass in the southeast corner of the real glen by going west, 'in the face of the sunset afterglow', and reach the house by 'skirting the end of the little lake'). Other things we can infer about the loch: it has a 'northern shore', on which Lachlan is standing in the prologue, so is probably blunt rather than pointy at the northern end; the creag ruadh is on the western bank near the middle (in the prologue Ewen and Alison sit '[b]etween the red crag and the spot where he had rated his foster-brother that morning', and Ben Tee is on the far side of the loch). The Allt Buidhe burn is crossed in going from Achnacarry to the house of Ardroy; possibly it's a tributary of the real Abhainn Chia-aig. It might have the same course as the real Allt Coire Odhar Beag, which flows from east to west across the southern end of the glen, or it might flow out of the loch to join Abhainn Chia-aig.

The map also shows a second fictional location, that of Ben Loy/Beinn Laoigh: according to the map it's here, just north of where the River Tarff starts to bend southwest. I think this is consistent with the text: in chapter 3.3 Keith leaves the military road between Inverness and Fort Augustus 'just before the road reared itself from the levels of Whitebridge to climb to its highest elevation', hoping to find a short cut to the Corryarrick; Guthrie's camp is on the military road between Fort Augustus and the Corryarrick, 'some miles from the top of the pass'; on the way there from Beinn Laoigh Keith and Guthrie cross the Tarff, and on the way back the distance is 'not so great as he [Keith] had feared'. Beinn Laoigh is therefore north of the Tarff, west of the Corryarrick, and sufficiently far west that the road—which at this point is heading southeast towards the pass—is not too far away. I might put it slightly further west than the map, but I think the map's location is about as good as we can do. In real life there's a sort of plateau here with several small tarns above where the ground rises steeply from the river; I suppose in the book's geography the slope might be more gentle near the river (it doesn't seem to be very precipitous on Keith and Guthrie's journey) with more of a mountain summit further up.

Finally, a minor mystery! My omnibus copy of the book has a footnote to chapter 5.5 saying that Morar is pronounced 'Móar', which puzzled me slightly because that's definitely not how it's pronounced now. But Christopher Duffy in Fight for a Throne lists the same silent-R pronunciation in an appendix of regional and period pronunciations, and I was willing to accept Broster's and Duffy's combined authority for that being the correct period pronunciation. But in the first edition the footnote says 'Mórar' with the first R still intact—and, looking back through my other copies, it's also that way in the 1979 hardback, while the Faded Page ebook appears not to have the footnote at all. So where does this leave us? Perhaps it's a printing error in the omnibus—but then it's a bit funny that a printing error accidentally recreates what is, according to Duffy, a real historical pronunciation. Perhaps it's a printing error in the first edition which was later corrected—but then why is the original version still there in the 1979 hardback? Part of the mystery is that I'm not at all sure what distinction 'Mórar' as opposed to 'Morar' is supposed to communicate to an English speaker—the only thing I can think of is putting the stress on the first syllable rather than the second, which I think most people would do anyway—and this inclines me to think it's an error. This is odd! If any of you have other editions of the book, what do they have here?