Muir grew up in an environment that, he says in
An Autobiography (1954), was essentially no different from the way it had been hundreds of years before, with scarcely any visible traces of the modern world. The isolation, the windswept and barren landscape, and the surrounding sea combined to work on the boy's imagination and to make his childhood a mythlike experience. He says in
An Autobiography that "the Orkney I was born into was a place where there was no great distinction between the ordinary and the fabulous; the lives of living men turned into legend." The family's beliefs were strongly tinged with Calvinism, and the Muirs participated in the waves of religious revival that swept the islands during the first ten years or so of Edwin's life; but for the young Muir the landscape, the open sky, and the farm animals--some gentle and some, such as the horses, frightening but beautiful and mysterious--seemed to offer a more benign view of God's creation than the one that was presented at the revival meetings.
Throughout his life Muir would return frequently to the Orkneys, both in person and in his novels and poetry.
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