Book Description

The Merry Men" is a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson first published in 1882 in Cornhill Magazine 45-6 (June-July 1882). The story was later published in Stevenson's collection The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887). It is set on the fictional island Eilean Aros, based on the Isle of Erraid. The title derives from the local name given to a group of waves in the story, not from the Merry Men of Robin Hood tales. Eilean (Scottish Gaelic for island) Aros, the fictional island setting of the story, is based on the Isle of Erraid in the Inner Hebrides. Stevenson wrote of his time there in his collection of essays Memories and Portraits, where he says "there is another isle in my collection, the memory of which besieges me. I put a whole family there, in one of my tales; and later on, threw upon its shores, and condemned to several days of rain and shellfish on its tumbled boulders, the hero of another." It is possible that the stranger from the Sea may be the Devil. There was a long tradition in Scotland that the Devil appeared as a black man (Stevenson mentions this in a footnote to "Thrawn Janet", another story in the same collection.) Also, Gordon earlier claimed that the Sea was the work of the Devil. A parallel can be drawn between this story and the later Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, another story of an isolated man driven mad by Nature. Interestingly, Gordon's rant about the Devil living in the Sea ends with him moaning, "The horror! The horror of the sea!" ...which is echoed in Conrad in Kurtz's last message: "The horror! The horror! Exterminate all the brutes!"