On 20 October 1994, George Mackay Brown wrote to Sr Margaret Tournour:

This was not, by Brown's late standards, a measured response. Indeed, Brown's article of reply to Erik O. Paulsen's ‘Well, is St Magnus really a saint?’ is a strongly worded piece, which condemns Paulsen's work as ‘at best a grey and uninteresting’ comment. Brown writes that Paulsen has presented ‘the prose rather than the poetry’ in his examination of the life of St Magnus, and he chastises the Orcadian's readers, noting, ‘I was sorry to see, on the week after Mr Paulsen's article, that not one Orcadian had spoken up on behalf of their saint.’ This prickly response seems at first to be incongruous with Brown's public persona at this late stage in his life. He was usually careful to avoid any sort of theological debate, writing to Sr Margaret in 1992: ‘if in any company a religious argument however friendly develops, I either shut up or go away: my mind doesn't work logically, only imaginatively. Slowly one comes to learn one's limitations.’ However, despite his deep need for privacy, Brown could not sit idly by while the sainthood of St Magnus was called into question. Brown's article of reply, ‘The Magnus Miracles were Manifold’, expresses his passionate, lifelong commitment to an Orcadian saint who was central to his faith and creative career.

In fact, Brown had been aware since his youth that St Magnus (born c. 1075) was viewed as rather an odd historical figure by many of his fellow islanders. He writes in his autobiography that Orcadians ‘considered [St Magnus] to be a queer fish, one of those medieval figures, clustered about with mortifications and miracles that have no real place in our enlightened progressive society’ (FI, 52).