Here is the simple tale of a simple man to whom simple circumstances - and his neighbours - proclaimed that he required a wife to look after his children, his cows and his goat.
Since most of the women on his native island were near relatives to himself, it seemed that he would have to go to look for her on the Scottish mainland, resort of women innumerable.
A simple quest indeed. What Ewan McEwan, of the Inner Hebridean Isle of Eorsa, made of it in the end was far from simple.