The Outlandish Companion

by Diana Gabaldon

  Page 105: “MacTavish”

  This was a bit of clumsy editing (on my part). I had originally had Jamie going under the alias “Jamie MacTavish” when he meets Claire—the Scots not knowing who she was, but strongly suspecting she was a spy of some kind, and unwilling to reveal Jamie’s identity. However, the bit in which he was so introduced was cut out when I did the final trimming and splicing of the manuscript—and neither I, the editor, nor the copy editor noticed this reference, which was left hanging in the breeze.

  Page 160: “cherries and apricots”

  I am reliably informed by horticulturists of my acquaintance that neither cherries nor apricots would have been fruiting at this time of year. Am I a botanist? No.

  Page 184: “Je suis prest.”

  This is one of those things that isn’t an error, but people often think is. Yes, I know (as several dozen people have informed me) that the correct French spelling is “Je suis prêt.” However, the fact remains that the bloody Fraser motto is “Je suis prest.” The “prest” is an obsolete French spelling; the “s” was replaced by the diacritical “ê” sometime in the nineteenth or twentieth century—but “prest” it was, and “prest” it is.

  Page 196: “… his heart’s blood staining the same leaves, dyed by the blood of the beast that killed him.” Should read “… his heart’s blood staining the same leaves dyed by the blood of the beast that killed him.”

  Page 197: “nasturtium syrup”

  My botanical expert informs me that the plant Americans normally refer to as “nasturtium” was not found in Scotland in the eighteenth century, being New World in origin. However, another plant (whose name I forget), also known commonly as “nasturtium” in the Old World was found in Scotland. However, it’s the first kind—Nasturtium spp.—from which one makes a remedy for indigestion; I don’t think the Old World plant has any medical usages.

  Page 218: “cherry tree”

  Okay, this is what comes of writing scenes out of order and gluing them together. You get people punching flowering cherry trees, when other people were picking cherries off them a month earlier (even if they shouldn’t have been). Damn all cherries, is what I say.

  Page 276: “My father was a Fraser, of course; a younger half-brother to the present Master of Lovat.”

  This should clearly have been “older half-brother,” since Brian Fraser was considerably older than Simon, Master of Lovat (who is depicted—fairly accurately—as being near Jamie’s own age, in Dragonfly in Amber).

  Page 277: “… running side by side from the seacoast.”

  This one isn’t precisely an error, it just sounds wrong. It should have read something like, “running side by side from Inverness.” While Inverness is on the Firth of Forth (which in turn is an inlet of the sea), no one would really describe it as “on the seacoast.”

  Page 286: “balcony” should be “gallery.”

  Page 312: “Brian Dhu” should probably be “Brian Dubh.” There is no such thing as “correct” spelling in Gaelic (since it was largely unwritten for a good long time, there was no major attempt to standardize its orthography until the present day), but some forms are more widely seen and accepted than others.

  Gaelic spelling is not all that consistent, especially if you look at older documents (well, neither is English spelling, in all fairness), and I have seen “Dhu” used as a nickname, with that spelling. However, my Gaelic expert says it should be “Dubh,” and he knows lots better than I do.

  Page 313: “mo duinne” should be “mo nighean donn.”

  This was an attempt on my part to render “my brown one,” using a Gaelic dictionary. My Gaelic expert, Iain Taylor (who graciously volunteered for the job after reading the first two books), informs me that the correct form should really be “mo nighean donn” (my brown-haired girl), and so I used that form in the later books.

  Page 316: “Lag Cruime”

  I don’t know that this is exactly an error, but it isn’t Gaelic, either. I made it up.

  Page 337: “Grants, I supposed. Or Campbells.”

  “Campbells” should be “Chisholms.”

  Page 366: typo; “chivying” should be “chivvying.”

  Page 384: typo; “very” should be “every.” (”I’m tired of having to watch ye every minute.”)

  Page 445: “grey” should be changed to “green.”

  Page 582: “Fergus nic Leodhas” should be changed to “Fergus mac Leodhas”; “nic” is “daughter of,” while “mac” is “son of.”

  Page 584: Young Jamie’s date of birth. Jenny tells her brother that her son turned two years old “last August.” This being at the end of October 1743, Jamie Murray would have been born in August 1741. However, Jenny also says her son was “conceived six months past the time I last saw… Randall.” If she last saw Randall in October 1739, when he took Jamie Fraser to Ft. William, then Jamie Murray would have been conceived in April 1740, and born in January 1741, not August. Oooookay. Change “August” to “January,” then.

  Page 586: “mi dhu” should be changed to “mo nighean dubh,” in accordance with correct Gaelic usage. It means “my black-haired one (girl).”

  Page 621: missing open quotes—“He looked so funny.…”

  Page 632: “… sat still by the fire hearth.” Remove the word fire.

  Page 637: Change “ruadh”to “ruaidh.”

  Page 644: first “himself” should be “Himself.”

  Page 691: “The numbers were one, nine, six, and seven.” This refers to the year 1967 (see page 692), and should be changed to “… one, nine, six, and eight” (1968). See “1945” p. 519; also “Where Titles Come From.”

  Page 692: change “Nineteen sixty-seven” to “Nineteen sixty-eight.”

  Page 768: insert comma, “ripping through a soldier’s upper arm, leaving a tuft of shredded fabric flapping”

  Page 778: “the black robes of a Franciscan” Well, here again, it might be an error, and it might not. One researcher with a specialty in church history assured me, after reading Outlander, that Franciscans wore brown robes. Upon looking into the matter more thoroughly, though, I discovered that there were assorted suborders of Franciscans, who seem to have been wearing robes in all sorts of colors, from brown and black to gray (the last being called “The Dusty Friars,” in consequence). So, the probability may be that Father Anselm should have been wearing the brown robes of a Franciscan, but then again, maybe he wasn’t.

  Page 803: “myrrh leaves”; delete “leaves.” The part of the Commiphora myrrha plant used as an aromatic essence “myrrh”) is the crystallized sap, not the leaves.

  Page 818: typo; change “solid foot” to “solid food.”

  Page 833: “1745” should be changed to “1746.”

  Page 834: “The chart—that cursed chart!—had given the date of his marriage, sometime in 1744. And the birth of his son, Frank’s five-times-great-grandfather, soon after.” In fact, Jack Randall married early in 1746—but surely by this time we all appreciate just how inaccurate historical documents can be?

  Page 834: “1744” should be changed to “1745.”

  Miscellany

  I have had some readers inform me that there could not be wolves in Scotland at the time described, or that it is impossible for a woman to kill a full-grown wolf with her bare hands. Well, maybe so—and maybe no.

  Wolves have been extinct in Scotland since the mid-eighteenth century; the last (fairly reliable) recorded sighting that I was able to find was in 1749, and sightings were infrequent for some years before that. However, this does mean that wolves could still have been extant in 1743, when Claire encounters a small pack outside Wentworth.

  Now, the behavior described for these wolves is not that characteristic of a truly wild pack, but it is consistent with that of animals driven out of their usual habitat and forced to rely on scraps and carrion, rather than on free hunting. One would expect adverse effects not only on the behavior of such animals, but on nutrition and general heal
th.

  Therefore, while it is unlikely—though not impossible—that a woman could overpower and kill a full-grown wolf under normal circumstances, it’s rather more likely that a desperate woman could overpower a mangy, underfed animal, which might well be suffering from parasitic disease or nutritional deficiencies.

  NB: Recent efforts by the Scottish Wildlife Council to reintroduce wolves in Scotland have been fairly successful. On one trip to Scotland in the early 1990s, I saw several posters, all bearing the full-face likeness of a big, yellow-eyed wolf, teeth showing just ever-so-slightly. “Don’t tell him he’s extinct!” read the legend underneath.

  DRAGONFLY IN AMBER

  Page 23: “The Flying Scotsman could have him in Edinburgh in three hours.” More like four or five.

  Page 30: Brianna’s age

  All right. I freely admit that I lose track of dates easily, since I usually stick in something approximate while writing, and then try to tidy it up later. However, I think Brianna was born in November 1948. If she was, she would have been nineteen in May of 1968, when introduced to Roger Wakefield. And if that’s so, then Claire ought to have said “Bree has another year and a half to go” rather than “Bree has another eight months to go” before being legally allowed to drink alcohol.

  Page 168: change “Oh no you don’t,” to

  “Oh, no, you don’t!”

  Page 172: “size-nine shoes”

  Now, when I wrote this, it didn’t occur to me—never having bought shoes in England—that U.K. sizes would be different than those in the U.S. I therefore envisioned a size-nine foot as being fairly large, but not pontoonlike (I wear a U.S. size six, myself, but my elder daughter, who is 5’8”, wears size nine).

  In fact, only one person has written to note that the sizes—in 1946—would not have been similar, and that an English size nine ladies’ shoe would have been truly enormous. The situation is complicated by more recent historical developments, in which the U.K. has entered into commercial arrangements with the European community, and there has—evidently—been a shift in sizing. After considerable conversation with on-line acquaintances in the U.K., Israel, Germany, and assorted other places, it appears that now, a size-nine shoe sold in England might be only a bit larger than the equivalent size sold in the United States—but according to the testimony of people alive during Claire’s World War II era, the sizing then was different. Ergo, I ought to have given her a size six or the like, in the interests of historical accuracy—but if I had done so, I would have given modern-day readers an inaccurate impression of exactly how big her feet are.

  The bottom line is that I have no idea whether this ought to be considered an error or not—but Claire’s feet measure roughly ten inches, heel to toe. The reader may choose an appropriate shoe size to reflect this, depending on the reader’s country of origin, age, and general interest in the matter.

  Page 184: insert comma; “You know it’s not Frank,”

  Page 196: “producing a sound wedged somewhere in the crack between E-flat and D-sharp.”

  This is one of those nonerrors that people feel obliged to call to my attention, pointing out that E-flat and D-sharp are the same note. I am aware of this, having a minor degree in music, and so is Claire; she’s exaggerating the discordance of Jamie’s voice, in implying that he can hit a note that’s so wrong it doesn’t even exist. So much for hyperbole!

  Page 201: a scene slightly out of place. This scene is ostensibly the first time we’ve met Annalise de Marillac, but in fact we have already encountered her a few pages earlier. This is what comes of writing in pieces and gluing them together.

  Page 205: size-nine shoes again.

  Page 283: “middle of one of Madame Elise’s salon”—remove the second “of”; should be “middle of one Madame Elise’s salon.”

  Page 349: “Do no harm.”

  It is a popular misconception that the Hippocratic Oath begins with the phrase “Do no harm.” In fact, it doesn’t, but the notion that a physician should refrain from making things worse is definitely embodied in the oath (the complete text of the oath itself is given in Voyager, page 716) so this appeared to be a reasonable bit of poetic license, and was certainly much more graceful when incorporated into the existing dialogue.

  Page 411: “in to” should be “into”; “popped the sausage whole into his mouth.”

  Page 465: insert hyphen between “coelis” and “et”; “in-coelis-et-in-terra.”

  Page 479: delete sentence “She accepted Claire’s proffered note to Jamie.” I have no idea where this sentence came from. I have no memory of writing it, and it makes no sense in the context of the story. I’m used to the spontaneous generation of typographical errors, but this is the first time I’ve seen a whole erroneous sentence create itself.

  Page 489: insert “in”; wisps drifting in the languid air.”

  Page 570: change “mi dhu” to “mo nighean dubh.”

  Page 586: change “Mo cridh”to “Mo chridhe”

  Page 643: insert comma; “grinned up at his commander,…”

  Page 770: change “mearchin’” to “meachin’.” A dialect form of “meaching,” this meaning is “obsequious, servile, skulking.”

  Page 778: “But my hands grew damp at the thought, and I wiped them unobtrusively on my robe.” Actually, at this point Claire is still wearing her muddy, salt-stained dress; she doesn’t change into Father Fogden’s spare robe until page 779. So change “robe” to “skirt,” if you will, please.

  Page 913: “1968.”

  This is not an error, if the dates in Outlander are adjusted from 1945 to 1946, and 1967 to 1968 (see discussion of chronology in “Where Titles Comes From”). On the other hand, if they aren’t, it is.

  VOYAGER

  Page 120: change “chess” to “dice.”

  Page 145: a charaid(h)?

  Page 223: punctuation error. Change “married couldn’t do enough” to “married. Couldn’t do enough.”

  Page 244: change 1945 to 1946.

  Page 258: typo. Change “intstead” to “instead.”

  Pages 373–374: we have a prostitute named Mollie on one page, and Millie on the next. Take your choice, but it ought to be the same name on both pages.

  Page 409: change “I drifted down the street” to “As I drifted down the street.”

  Page 538: “lang-nebbit” shouldn’t be italicized; it’s Scots, not Gaidhlig.

  Page 636: typo. “stop at Lewes” should be “stop at Lewis.”

  Page 681: “His eyes were on Fergus, who was teasing Marsali with an albatross’s feather, holding her by one arm and tickling her beneath the chin as she struggled ineffectually to get away.”

  Well, this is another of the maybe so/maybe no errors. As a few astute readers have pointed out, Fergus has only one hand, and presumably would find it difficult to hold an albatross’s feather with his hook. This is perfectly true; on the other hand, I’m not so sure that he isn’t holding Marsali’s arm with his hook, and using his hand to wield the feather. Naturally, he couldn’t be restraining her very effectively in this fashion—but then, he obviously isn’t, or she wouldn’t be struggling “ineffectually,” would she?

  Page 699: change “out the realm of Kraken” to “out of the realm of Kraken.”

  Page 709: “Gideon and his daughter.”

  Okay, it’s a fair cop. Claire’s not a Bible scholar, and neither am I. It wasn’t Gideon, it was Jephthath (Judges 12).

  Page 737: punctuation error. Change “thought he’d killed, lank brown hair” to “thought he’d killed. Lank brown hair.”

  Page 761: insert comma. Change “kirtling it up above my knees and took” to “kirtling it up above my knees, and took.”

  Page 822: MacKimmie/Joyce

  Okay. I admit it, I temporarily lost track of Laoghaire’s husbands. She had two before marrying Jamie—Hugh MacKenzie, one of Colum’s tacksmen, and then Simon MacKimmie, who fathered Marsali and Joan and died in prison. Only I hadn’t taken proper n
ote of Simon, and so had him in one spot as Simon MacKimmie and in another as Simon Joyce, and when I wrote this particular passage, I hadn’t yet made up my mind which was right, so included both names, intending to strike out the extraneous one later. Only I didn’t.

  Page 848: “How much blood did ye tell me a person has in his body?” he asked. “About eight quarts,” I said, bewildered. “Why?”

  At this point in the story, Claire is under a fair amount of stress, having been attacked by a pirate and seriously wounded. It’s therefore understandable that she should have suffered a slight lapse of attention, since she plainly would know that the human body contains an average of eight pints of blood, rather than eight quarts.

  Page 894: insert period. “Yes, that was his name. Why?”

  Page 897: change “MacIvers” to “MacIver.”

  Page 1024: the Gaidhlig phrase beginning “A Mhìcheal” should be italicized.

  DRUMS OF AUTUMN

  Page 83: At the calling of the clans, I am reliably informed, customary usage dictates that the representative of the MacDonalds should call, “Clan Donald is here,” rather than “MacDonald is here.” This is reasonable usage, given that “MacDonald” really means “son(s) of Donald;” on the other hand, MacLeod, McKuen, MacLaren, and (to the best of my knowledge) all other “Mac” clans don’t do this, but call according to the “Mac” form of the name. On the third hand, nobody says custom has to be consistent, and if Clan Donald wants to call itself that, it’s certainly fine by me.

  Page 94: The same vigilant horticulturists

  who objected to the cherry season in Scotland are still on the job regarding the proper season for peaches in the Carolinas. Hmm. Possibly it does not occur to these helpful souls that the weather patterns might have been slightly different in the 1700s than they are now? (Maybe they weren’t, too, but I take my defenses where I can find them.)