72 pages • 2-hour read
Drums of Autumn
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of rape and pregnancy termination.
The Mountains
Scottish characters like Jamie and Jocasta feel a strong connection to the mountains in the colonies. For these characters, the mountains symbolize home and the life they had in Scotland. When Jamie treks out into the mountains as he leaves River Run, he feels a sense of peace he hasn’t felt since he reached the colonies. He tells Claire, “How shall I tell ye what it is, to feel the need of a place? […] The breath of the mountains, breathing their own breath in my nostrils […] If I am to live as a man, I must have a mountain” (393).
Jamie’s words show just how important the mountains were to his life in the Highlands, and how much they are intrinsically a part of him. When he and Bree go out hunting, Jamie notices how her body becomes accustomed to climbing as if she, too, has her Highlander genes ready to help her. The mountains serve as a symbol of the wildness and freedom of the so-called “new world,” however, they also serve as a powerful reminder of home to the Highlanders, who feel welcome among the mountains.
Claire’s Wedding Ring
Claire has two wedding rings from her two marriages: An engraved gold one from Frank and a silver one from Jamie, both of which she wears all the time. When Bonnet and his pirates board their boat, Claire swallows one ring to keep him from stealing it, not knowing which it is, but Bonnet gets away with Claire’s gold ring from Frank.
Claire’s gold wedding ring has different symbolic meanings for different characters. When she first married Jamie, she refused to stop wearing the ring as a reminder of her love for Frank, and continued to wear it when she returned to the future as a reminder of her obligation to her first husband. When Brianna sees Bonnet with the ring, she recognizes it as Claire’s immediately. To her, it represents her parents’ marriage as she initially saw it, before she learned that it was a marriage in name only. Bree puts herself in great danger to get the ring—Bonnet rapes her during her mission to reclaim it. This attempt to get the ring back shows how much she is willing to do for her family, particularly her mother.
When Claire brings out the ring during Bree and Jamie’s fight, Jamie is angry, as he still views her marriage to Frank as a personal failure. He takes the ring before Claire can, jealous because he fears that Claire still loves Frank and, like Brianna, views him as Bree’s true father. At the end of the novel, Jamie gives the ring back to Claire as he accepts that he cannot change her past, representing his letting go of his anger and jealousy toward Frank and his total acceptance of Claire. As a whole, the complex relationships between the various characters and this ring symbolize the complexities of family and relationships and The Nature of Love and Obligation.
Dreams
Dreams are a key motif in the novel, often representing cryptic messages about the future. The Tuscarora hold dreams in high regard, believing them to be important indicators about what is to come. Nayawenne dreams about Claire just before her son finds her and Jamie. When she goes to a place she dreamed of, she finds a sapphire amulet and learns things about Claire and their shared future. Nayawenne’s dream foreshadows her own death, as well as Claire’s distant involvement in it, yet the dream also shows Claire’s abilities as a healer and leads both women to trust one another.
Brianna has dreams about Jamie, including one where she visits the cave he nearly died in, which she could not have known about from Claire or his history. Similarly, Jamie dreams of Bree and sees on her a birthmark that Claire never mentioned to him. These dreams symbolize The Power of Family Bonds, despite the fact that they have never met.
Claire also has a significant vision of a man in Chapter 23, which she initially believes to be a dream. This vision leads her to his skull and the opal amulet. Claire has various other cryptic dreams regarding birth and death while she is close to this man’s skull, some of which she has a hard time separating from reality. She dreams of giving birth, but she cannot tell if it is her or Bree doing so, and she sees herself holding a bloody knife, foreshadowing the conflict she will feel about possibly terminating Bree’s pregnancy. Claire’s dreams in this chapter foreshadow her future in the novel, while also revealing the truth of the mysterious man’s past, as she will later learn.
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