Sunset Song- Standing Stones Flashcards
What do the standing stones represent?
A defining moment in culture when man asserted his presence and territory. From then on man was able to mark his ownership of the land. With ownership comes increased focus on land, machinery and eventually territorial war.
This is highlighted when the Guthrie’s are traveling to Blawearie for the first time
What does Chris see in her vision? And when does this happen?
“For out of the night ahead of them came running a man… he wrung his hands, he was mad and singing, a foreign creature, black- bearded, half naked he was; and he cried in the Greek the ship of Pytheas! The ship of Pytheas!”
This is in ploughing.
Gibbons presents here a vision of primitive man, a symbol of the way that simple folk have from the beginning of history been harassed by alien bringers of civilisation
Why are the stones special to Chris?
She discovers a place where she can take refuge from her fears for the future and from family conflicts
What do the local legends say about the standing stones?
They are Druid Stones and that “the Druids had been coarse devils of men in the times long syne, they’d climb up there and sing their foul heathen songs around the stones”
How does John Guthrie feel about the standing stones?
John Guthrie dislikes the stones. When he finds Chris reading he grabs her book and as he does so he glances at the stones and “kind of shivered, as though he were feared, him that was feared at nothing dead or alive” he tells Chris that they were “coarse, foul things, the folk that raised them were burning in hell”
The stones are also symbols of change and continuity, elaborate on this
Chris is intrigued by the age of the stones and reflects on how people saw them in the past just as she was seeing them now.
In this way the stones remind her of change and mortality, as the people who erected them are long gone. They are monuments to civilisation having been put there by the earliest settlers of Scotland, thus beginning the process of change
What does imagery also relate the stones to?
Directly to time passing, “as the gnomons of a giant dial the shadows of the standing stones crept into the east” but by their enduring presence they also represent continuity and stability
To Chris they are a constant in her life, a source of security in a world constantly changing
Where is Chris at the beginning and end of each chapter?
Chris is depicted up at the stones, reflecting on the period of her life that has just passed. The stones are sometimes personified to seem like old friends
