In A Calendar of Love and Other Stories, George Mackay Brown's first collection, Brown writes of Orkney as ‘a small green world in itself’. Orkney is depicted in these stories as a world and a community that is united by both location and shared religious practice. In ‘Witch’, Brown presents a vision of the ideal community: in a community ‘under God … society appears as an organism, a harmony, with each man performing his pre-ordained task to the glory of God and the health of the whole community’. In these early stories, Brown adheres closely to the model of community suggested by D. H. Lawrence, where: ‘Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away…. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose.’ Community for both Brown and Lawrence is a space where individual freedom is made possible by belonging to, and working in, a unified geographical and religious framework. To understand the individual, one must first understand the community in which he dwells, and to understand that community, one must understand its religious and social foundations. While all of Brown's fiction addresses this fundamental idea, in his first novel, Greenvoe, Brown most clearly delineates the structure of community as such. Here he presents community as immediate and immanent: communal life is the basis of individual identity.