Ian Murray: Walking between two fires

Here's the latest installment in my series of posts taking an in-depth look at characters from the OUTLANDER books. This time I'm focusing on Ian James FitzGibbons Fraser Murray, aka Wolf's Brother, aka Young Ian ("Ian Óg") Murray. He was born in November 1752. Since Ian has a birthday this month, I thought it would be a good opportunity to take a closer look at this very intriguing character, focusing in particular on how his experience living with the Mohawk has affected him.

* * * SPOILER WARNING!! * * *

If you haven't read all of the OUTLANDER books, you will find spoilers below! Read at your own risk.

IAN MURRAY: WALKING BETWEEN TWO FIRES

From the moment he arrives in North Carolina in DRUMS OF AUTUMN, Young Ian is fascinated by the idea of meeting some actual "Red Indians". He listens eagerly to all of John Quincy Myers' stories, devouring every scrap of information about them.

“Can ye speak Mohawk yourself, Mr. Myers?” Ian’s ears had been flapping all through the explanation. Fascinated by every rock, tree, and bird on our journey, Ian was still more fascinated by any mention of Indians.

(From DRUMS OF AUTUMN by Diana Gabaldon, chapter 14, "Flee From Wrath to Come". Copyright © 1997 by Diana Gabaldon. All rights reserved.)

In the following months, Ian gets to know the local Tuscarora Indians. He learns their language and some of their customs, and goes hunting with them. On re-reading, his intense interest in everything having to do with the Native Americans is clearly foreshadowing, although there's no way any of them could have anticipated how dramatically Ian's life would be changed by his contact with them.

Soon after Ian, Jamie, and Claire arrive in Snaketown to rescue Roger from the Mohawk, everything changes.

[Ian] stepped into the light from the smokehole and I gasped, feeling as though I had been punched in the stomach.

The hair had been plucked from the sides of his skull; what was left stood up in a thick crest from his scalp, a long tail hanging down his back. One ear had been freshly pierced and sported a silver earring.

His face had been tattooed. Double crescent lines of small dark spots, most still scabbed with dried blood, ran across each cheekbone, to meet at the bridge of his nose.

“I--canna stay long, Uncle,” Ian said. He looked pale, under the lines of tattooing, but stood erect. “I said they must let me come to say goodbye.”

Jamie had gone white to the lips. “Jesus, Ian,” he whispered.

“The naming ceremony is tonight,” Ian said, trying not to look at us. “They say that after that I will be Indian, and I must not speak any tongue but the Kahnyen’kehaka; I canna speak again in English, or the Gaelic.” He smiled painfully. “And I ken ye didna have much Mohawk.”

“Ian, ye canna be doing this!”

“I’ve done it, Uncle Jamie,” Ian said softly.

(From DRUMS OF AUTUMN by Diana Gabaldon, chapter 61, "The Office of a Priest". Copyright © 1997 by Diana Gabaldon. All rights reserved.)

Just like that, Ian's life splits cleanly in two. From this moment on, he will always be part Mohawk. He can't go back to the life he was living before.

Consider what Ian has done here. He's agreed to be adopted as one of the Mohawk, in place of the man Roger killed while trying to escape. It's the only way that the Mohawk will let the rest of them go free. Ian deliberately chooses to permanently cut off all ties with his family and his former life, in order to rescue Roger from captivity.

The magnitude of that sacrifice still takes my breath away. Ian is only seventeen years old here, but it's abundantly clear that he's no longer a boy. This decision will irrevocably change his whole life, but Ian doesn't hesitate, nor does he ask Jamie or Claire for advice (let alone permission!) There's only one way out of the situation, and he's the logical person to do it. So he does what must be done, no matter how painful and heartbreaking this parting will be for all of them. (To be fair, there are attractions to living with the Mohawk -- the lovely girl called Works With Her Hands, for one. So he's not entirely unwilling.)

It reminds me very much of Jamie at Wentworth, giving himself willingly to Black Jack Randall -- knowing he's likely to be raped and tortured -- in exchange for Randall's promise to let Claire go free, because it's the only way to save her. The circumstances are different, of course, but the impact of that decision, for Ian, will be just as life-changing as Wentworth was for Jamie.

I'm fascinated by the way Ian's character has changed since he returned from those two years living as a Mohawk in Snaketown. He often finds it difficult to reconcile the two sides of his character, the Scottish Catholic and the Mohawk warrior, and I think the tension between those two sides of himself is really interesting to watch.

Conflict is essential for good storytelling, and as Diana Gabaldon commented on Compuserve in 2008, "a man whose sheer existence embodies conflict is going to be a much more interesting subject (to the novelist, at least) than one who's merely superficially attractive." (She was speaking of Lord John in that instance, but I think we can say the same about Ian after he became a Mohawk.)

With that in mind, consider how utterly appropriate it is that Ian should have found Rollo. Part wolf, part dog, Rollo embodies (in his own way) the sort of dual nature that Ian will carry with him all his adult life, echoing Ian's own inner conflict. Rollo combines the loyalty and protectiveness of a dog with the viciousness and ferocity of a wolf, and he tends to unnerve people who don't know him well.

“Ian,” I said, “that is not a dog. It’s a wolf. It’s a bloody big wolf, and I think you ought to get away from it before it takes a bite out of your arse.”

[....]

“He’s a handsome creature, Ian,” [Jamie] said, scratching the thing familiarly under the chin. The yellow eyes narrowed slightly, either in pleasure at the attention or--more likely, I thought--in anticipation of biting off Jamie’s nose. “Bigger than a wolf, though; it’s broader through the head and chest, and a deal longer in the leg.”

“His mother was an Irish wolfhound. [....] She got out in heat, into the woods, and when she came back in whelp--”

“Oh, aye, I see.” Now Jamie was crooning in Gaelic to the monster while he picked up its huge foot and fondled its hairy toes. The curved black claws were a good two inches long. The thing half closed its eyes, the faint breeze ruffling the thick fur at its neck.

(From DRUMS OF AUTUMN by Diana Gabaldon, chapter 1, "A Hanging in Eden". Copyright © 1997 by Diana Gabaldon. All rights reserved.)

There's no denying that Ian and Rollo share a very strong bond, to put it mildly! The Mohawk saw that at once, giving Ian the name "Wolf's Brother". During those two years in Snaketown, Rollo was the only living reminder of his former life. They've been through so much together, and I was glad to see that Rollo died peacefully in his sleep of old age. Ian really couldn't have asked for a better companion.

In the later books, the conflict between the Mohawk and "white" parts of Ian's character affects nearly everything he does or says, even the way he thinks. Here he is shortly after his return to Fraser's Ridge, trying to adjust to being back with his family again:

“Cheetie,” Ian repeated softly. “It feels ... verra good to speak Scots again, Uncle Jamie.”

Jamie’s hand brushed Ian’s arm lightly.

“I suppose it does, a mhic a pheathar,” he said, just as softly. “Will ye have forgot all your Gaelic, then?”

“’S beag ’tha fhios aig fear a bhaile mar ’tha fear na mara bèo,” Ian replied, without hesitation. It was a well-known saying: “Little does the landsman know how the seaman lives.”

Jamie laughed in gratified surprise, and Ian grinned broadly back. His face was weathered to a deep brown, and the dotted lines of his Mohawk tattoos ran in fierce crescents from nose to cheekbones--but for a moment, I saw his hazel eyes dance with mischief, and saw again the lad we had known.

(From THE FIERY CROSS by Diana Gabaldon, chapter 109, "The Voice of Time". Copyright © 2001 by Diana Gabaldon. All rights reserved.)

But Ian has changed in important ways in those two years. He seems depressed at first, very unlike the lad they once knew. It's not until many months after his return, when he takes Brianna to see the mammoth skeleton, that we learn why. He's devastated at the failure of his marriage to Works With Her Hands, and he feels guilty for his inability to give her live children.

“Was it me?”

“Ian! You mean your fault that the baby died? How could it be?”

“I left,” he said simply, straightening up. “Turned away. Stopped being a Christian, being Scots. They took me to the stream, scrubbed me wi’ sand to take away the white blood. They gave me my name--Okwaho’kenha--and said I was Mohawk. But I wasna, not really.”

He sighed deeply again, and she put a hand on his back, feeling the bumps of his backbone press through the leather of his shirt. He didn’t eat nearly enough, she thought.

“But I wasna what I had been, either,” he went on, sounding almost matter-of-fact. “I tried to be what they wanted, ken? So I left off praying to God or the Virgin Mother, or Saint Bride. I listened to what Emily said, when she’d tell me about her gods, the spirits that dwell in the trees and all. And when I went to the sweat lodge wi’ the men, or sat by the hearth and heard the stories ... they seemed as real to me as Christ and His saints ever had.”

(From A BREATH OF SNOW AND ASHES by Diana Gabaldon, chapter 70, "Emily". Copyright © 2005 by Diana Gabaldon. All rights reserved.)

Is he a Mohawk, or a Scot, or some combination of both? Ian wrestles with that for a long time. He tried so hard to become a Mohawk, to fit in with the others, only to have them send him away. So now he's living on Fraser's Ridge, with his kin, with people who love him, but he doesn't quite fit in with them either. He is "walking between two fires", as the TV series put it in Episode 502.

Even in BEES, seven years after his return from Snaketown, the Mohawk influence is still strong.

I was quite aware--and I thought Rachel and Jenny both knew it even better--that he had by no means stopped being a Mohawk, even though he’d come back to live with us again. He hadn’t stopped looking down at his side for Rollo, either.

(From GO TELL THE BEES THAT I AM GONE by Diana Gabaldon, chapter 59, "Special Requests". Copyright © 2021 by Diana Gabaldon. All rights reserved.)

Claire is right, of course; Ian hasn't stopped being a Mohawk. At the same time, as he told her once, “D’ye think I ever stopped bein’ a Scot?” (MOHB chapter 54, "In Which I Meet a Turnip") That tension between the two sides of his character is always present to some extent, and it takes him a while to figure out how to cope with it.

Ian has always had a strong sense of right and wrong. We first saw this when he was a young teen in VOYAGER, very upset at the thought that he might have committed a mortal sin by killing the intruder in the printshop in Edinburgh. After his return from Snaketown, however, his notion of how to deal with people he views as enemies has been strongly influenced by the Mohawk. He's far more likely even than Jamie to use deadly violence when he or someone he loves is threatened. He reacts with the instincts of a Mohawk warrior, often with sudden, startling violence, shocking everyone in the vicinity.

One memorable example of this sort of behavior occurs in ECHO, when he kills "Mr. X", the would-be blackmailer and "despoiler of the soup":

“Don’t--” I began, turning to Jamie, but never got to finish. I saw the expression change on Jamie’s face, saw him leap toward the man--and whirled just in time to see Ian materialize out of the darkness behind the blackmailer and put a sinewy arm round his throat.

I didn’t see the knife. I didn’t have to; I saw Ian’s face, so intent as almost to be expressionless--and I saw the ex-overseer’s face. His jaw dropped and the whites of his eyes showed, his back arching up in a futile attempt at escape.

Then Ian let go, and Jamie caught the man as he began to fall, his body gone suddenly and horribly limp.

(From AN ECHO IN THE BONE by Diana Gabaldon, chapter 68, "Despoiler". Copyright © 2009 by Diana Gabaldon. All rights reserved.)

It's a shocking act by our standards, especially since the man wasn't physically threatening Jamie's life in any way. As a result of that split-second decision to kill the man, Ian is forced to flee from an angry mob shouting, "Murderer!" He travels with Jamie and Claire to Scotland aboard a British Navy ship, disguised as "a Mohawk who speaks little English." (ECHO chapter 72, "The Feast of All Saints")

One of my favorite Ian moments in ECHO occurs when Jamie, Claire, and Ian return to Lallybroch. Ian is dressed in full Mohawk attire, his hair shaved in the Mohawk fashion. He's a little apprehensive about how his family will react to him (he's been gone for twelve years, after all), but it seems to me that he chose that manner of dress very deliberately. It's his way of saying to his parents, "This is who I am now. I'm not going to change back, so you're going to have to deal with it." It strikes me as a provocative, even defiant, gesture. But he surely didn't expect his mother's reaction!

Jenny stopped dead in the doorway. She blinked, once, and her head tilted slowly back as her eyes traveled up the long, buckskin-covered body, with its roped muscles and small scars, to the crested, feathered head with its tattooed face, so carefully expressionless--save for the eyes, whose hope and fear he could not hide, Mohawk or no.

Jenny’s mouth twitched. Once ... twice ... then her face broke and she began to utter small, hysterical whoops that turned into unmistakable laughter. She gulped, whooped again, and laughed so hard that she staggered backward into the house and had to sit down on the bench in the hall, where she bent double with her arms wrapped round her middle and laughed until the sound gave out and her breath came in faint, wheezing gasps.

“Ian,” she said at last, shaking her head. “Oh, God, Ian. My wee lad. [....] Thank God ye've come in time.”

(From AN ECHO IN THE BONE by Diana Gabaldon, chapter 76, "By the Wind Grieved". Copyright © 2009 by Diana Gabaldon. All rights reserved.)

I was taken aback by her reaction the first time I read this scene, but I've come to appreciate it. Jenny sees past the Mohawk clothing, the tattoos, the hairstyle (as though it's all an elaborate Halloween costume, so outlandish as to seem hilarious) and focuses on the only important thing: Her youngest son has come home at long last, in time to say goodbye to his father, who is dying of consumption.

And then, of course, there's Rachel Hunter. Ian falls in love with her, knowing full well that Quakers abhor violence. He's well aware that he can never be a Quaker, and at first he's afraid that she will reject him because he's such a violent man. He tries, briefly and unsuccessfully, to suppress his Mohawk instincts:

The momentary silence engendered by this was enough for most of the assembled to hear Murray say, with a noticeable effort, “I give you back your life!” He rose off the Indian’s body, swaying and staring as though blind drunk himself, and hurled the knife into the darkness--causing considerable consternation and not a little cursing among those in whose direction he’d hurled it.

In the excitement, most of the crowd likely didn’t hear the Indian’s reply, but Grey and André did. He sat up, very slowly, hands shaking as they pressed a fold of his shirt to the shallow cut across his throat, and said, in an almost conversational tone, “You will regret that, Mohawk.”

(From WRITTEN IN MY OWN HEART'S BLOOD by Diana Gabaldon, chapter 84, "Nightfall". Copyright © 2014 by Diana Gabaldon. All rights reserved.)

And Ian does regret it, almost instantly. He ends up killing the Abenaki warrior moments later, splitting his skull with a tomahawk. After the battle of Monmouth, when Ian tells Rachel about the incident, he fears that she might turn away from him in appalled disgust, but she doesn't.

“I think we can’t wait any longer to be married, Ian,” she said softly. “I will not have thee face such things alone. These are bad times, and we must be together.”

He closed his eyes and all the air went out of him. When he drew breath again, it tasted of peace.

(From WRITTEN IN MY OWN HEART'S BLOOD by Diana Gabaldon, chapter 92, "I Will Not Have Thee Be Alone". Copyright © 2014 by Diana Gabaldon. All rights reserved.)

Rachel loves him deeply enough to accept the Mohawk side of him, even though it troubles and frightens her at times. It's part of who he is. I think he's very lucky to have found her!

As the war progresses, Ian's ability to pass as a Mohawk gives him a distinct advantage, as he's able to move freely into and around British army camps without raising suspicion.

Ian Murray, having carefully dressed his hair with bear grease and a pair of turkey feathers, removed his shirt, leaving this rolled up with his tattered plaid under a log, and told Rollo to guard it, then walked across a small stretch of open ground toward the British camp.

“Hold!”

He turned a face of bored impassivity toward the sentry who had hailed him. The sentry, a boy of fifteen or so, was holding a musket whose barrel shook noticeably. Ian hoped the numpty wouldn’t shoot him by accident.

“Scout,” he said succinctly, and walked past the sentry without a backward glance, though he felt a spider strolling to and fro between his shoulder blades. Scout, he thought, and felt a small bubble of laughter rise up. Well, it was the truth, after all.

(From AN ECHO IN THE BONE by Diana Gabaldon, chapter 61, "No Better Companion Than the Rifle". Copyright © 2009 by Diana Gabaldon. All rights reserved.)

Finally, in BEES, we see Ian adjusting to fatherhood. He's delighted by his baby son, Oggy, no doubt savoring the miracle that he was able to give Rachel a healthy child after so much heartbreak in his first marriage. The baby is eventually given the name Hunter James Ohston’ha Okhkwaho ("Little Wolf") Murray. I thought that was VERY appropriate, reflecting the many different sides of his heritage: Quaker, Highland Scot, and Mohawk.

We also see Ian accepting his older son, Tòtis (aka Swiftest of Lizards), as a part of his family at last. It will be interesting to see how Ian's relationship to both of his sons develops in A BLESSING FOR A WARRIOR GOING OUT (Book 10). It seems to me that Ian's children, too, will "walk between two fires", in a sense. They'll be raised among white people, but I'm confident that Ian will make sure they retain some connection to Mohawk language and customs.

CONCLUSION

My sense is that Ian has finally realized that it's not possible to separate the two sides of his character. He will always be BOTH a Mohawk and a Scot, and he seems much happier, more comfortable in his own skin, once he realizes that he need not choose only one side or the other. He can use aspects of both, whatever seems to fit best in a particular situation. Yes, he will always be "walking between two fires," but he's learned how to do that without getting burned. I'm delighted that he's found some happiness at long last!

I hope you enjoyed this "deep dive" into Ian's character! Many thanks to Diana Gabaldon for creating him, and to John Bell for bringing him to life on TV!

What do you think of Ian's character, in the books or show? Please leave a comment here or on my Outlandish Observations Facebook page.

Here are my previous posts taking an in-depth look at specific characters:
The resilience of Claire Fraser
Jamie Fraser: A fallible man who learns from his mistakes
The evolution of Jamie and Roger's relationship

Hope you enjoy them!