There’s nothing better than an escapist summer series. I discovered Outlander after my second child was born, when—exhausted by a newborn’s constant needs—the idea of disappearing into 18th-century Scotland was irresistible. Based on Diana Gabaldon’s novels, the show follows Claire Randall (Caitríona Balfe), a plucky nurse who enters an ancient stone circle and travels in time from 1946 to 1743, where she meets the perfect romantic hero: Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan), a Highland lord built like a bronzed god—and with empathy to match.
I wasn’t alone in my Jamie worship. My friend Torri believes Jamie heralded today’s “romantasy” heroes: the likes of Rhysand from Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses and Xaden Riorson from Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing. “He checks all the boxes—provider, masculine, yet sensitive and supportive of his partner’s independence. He was the first of that trend.” Another friend, Val, who fell for the books in 1998, says: “I loved the romance, history, and of course Jamie Fraser. I converted at least four female friends to the series. One threw the second book at me in mock frustration: ‘Where’s the third?’”
We’d meet regularly at Scottish pubs in the East Village to dissect plotlines and speculate about Heughan and Balfe’s real-life chemistry. Val even traveled to Scotland after the show premiered in 2014, surreptitiously photographing kilted bagpipers and visiting Fort William—where Jamie endures a brutal flogging by Captain “Black Jack” Randall and his father dies in shock—in a hunt for her own Highland warrior.
Other fans took guided Outlander-themed tours, as Scotland’s tourism board encouraged them to “give in to your kilty pleasures.” (Ahead of the show’s eighth and final season, expected to air next year, a prequel series, titled Outlander: Blood of My Blood, premieres on Starz on August 8.)
But was there ever a real Jamie Fraser? The short answer is no. In 1988, Gabaldon took notice of the kilted Jamie McCrimmon, played by Frazer Hines, on a rerun of Doctor Who; she then read Eric Linklater’s The Prince in the Heather, about 19 Jacobite officers who sheltered in a farmhouse after the 1746 Battle of Culloden. Eighteen died; only one, a Fraser, survived. And so the legendary Jamie was born.
