Books
Interested in the heritage of the area, Nicholas joined the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society in 1927. Intrigued by the possible connection between Buttermere and the Norse landowner Bueth, mentioned in official documents relating to Cumberland at the time of the Norman conquest in the early 12th century, he produced a booklet, "The Epic of Buttermere" portraying the secluded valley as a stronghold of resistance to the invaders, and site of a supposed "Battle of Rannerdale Knotts". This was so successful that in 1929 he wrote an expanded and illustrated novella version, "The Secret Valley". This too was a great success, and in 1930 Frederick Warne, publisher of the Beatrix Potter books produced a new edition.
Encouraged by Sir Hugh Walpole, whose own Lakeland historical novels were very popular at the time, in 1932 Size tackled another local Norse story, the supposed origin of the elegant cross at Gosforth. This had first appeared in the novella "The Story of Shelagh, Olaf Cuaran's Daughter", by local historian C.A. Parker, but Size's book "Shelagh of Eskdale" expanded on what Parker had written, to produce a short novel uniform with the second edition of "Secret Valley," again published by Warne. Finally, about a year later, Warne published "Ola the Russian", a longer novel in which the setting was broadened to include the whole Norse world, fictionalising the life of Olaf Trygvesson.
Size did write one other book, "The Haunted Moor," which recounted the legendary stories of the various strange features on Ilkley Moor near Bradford. This was only available in the local area (but it did contain an advertisement for the Victoria Hotel).
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Famous quotes containing the word books:
“The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one’s mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.”
—Victor Null, South African educator, psychologist. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, introduction, Yale University Press (1988)
“All books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hour, and the books of all time.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)