medieval Shetland began to collapse, in the dire economic circumstances of the late sixteenth century, are there detailed written records of what life here might have been like: bitter complaints at the loss of order and well-being. By this point, Shetland was an exceptionally cosmopolitan place, the islands frequented by merchants from around Europe and the North Atlantic, so that Shetlanders often spoke some German and Dutch as well as their own Norn language.
The reason for the dearth of early Shetland stories is the eighteenth-century death of Norn. In literary terms, this loss was total: remarkably, no Norn literature survives except in second-hand fragment. Yet Shetland’s dialect tradition is a worthy successor to the Norn heritage and a key impetus behind the wealth of current literature. This is undoubtedly the richest dialect in Britain and a constant presence in the experience of visitors (few, I imagine, leave Shetland without succumbing to the temptation to call small things ‘peerie’ or to replace ‘th’s with ‘d’s and ‘t’s). It is among Shetland’s greatest assets and the source of much of the archipelago’s distinctiveness.
Once Norn died, dialect flourished. The nineteenth century has an awful reputation where dialect traditions are concerned: the bureaucratisation and centralisation of British life led many autocrats to think like Thomas Hardy’s mayor of Casterbridge, who labelled dialect words ‘terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel’. Yet Shetland bucked the trend, forging – as always – a path all its own. By 1818, the crofters visited by Samuel Hibbert used words and grammatical constructions substantially the same as those employed by Shetlanders today (although, as the Shetland archivist Brian Smith puts it, ‘naturally, the vocabulary is different, since we live in a society where dozens of words for small-boat equipment or seaweed, are unnecessary’). But the 1880s and 90s, during which Shetland crofters and fishers were freed by national legislation from the worst exploitation of landlords, marked a particular moment of growth. The first Shetland newspapers were founded in 1872 and 1885, and both specialised in dialect prose. They ran long serials such as ‘Fireside Cracks’ (Shetland Times, 1897–1904) and ‘Mansie’s Rüd’ (Shetland News, 1897–1914) which used island language to offer subtle observations of island life. ‘My inteention’, says the narrator of ‘Mansie’s Rüd’, ‘is no sae muckle ta wraet o’ my warfare i’ dis weary world, as to gie some sma’ account o’ da deleeberat observations o’ an auld man, on men an’ things in a kind o’ general wye.’ As this suggests, these columns were not inward-looking things, but helped form distinctive island perspectives on the world at large. In this newly prolific era, Shetlanders such as Laurence Williamson began collating and categorising dialect words and phrases, while others, such as the Faroese linguist Jakob Jakobsen, began to attempt to recover the old Norn language.
In this atmosphere of renewed self-confidence, some Shetlanders, such as the dialect poet William Porteous, began to use English to evangelise the islands to those mainlanders who, if they thought of Shetland at all, pictured a dreary scene. Poetry ‘advertising’ Shetland to the urban south embraced a flamboyant romantic aesthetic that wouldn’t have been possible a century earlier. This marks, perhaps, the beginning of the idea that Shetland is the northernmost and fiercest expression of a frayed Atlantic edge worth celebrating. Ferocious storms, wind-whipped seas and bleak, unpeopled headlands could be romanticised, rather than being dismissed as incompatible with progress or politeness. In Porteous’s descriptions of the ‘strange exultant joy’ to be found in confronting ocean weather, many touchstones of later evocations of the North Atlantic sublime can be found.
Two days after completing my descent of Shetland I found Porteous’s verse in the local archives and was struck by his heroic efforts to make storms not just poetic, but an actual tourist draw. I felt that, having kayaked this far in improbably blissful calm, I still lacked a crucial aspect of the Shetland experience. But there was no need to have worried: five days after I rounded Sumburgh Head a brief but grisly weather front was forecast. I’d already decided, thanks to Sally Huband’s influence, that my last Shetland venture had to be to Foula. Given the risk of rough weather I chose not to paddle the crossing but booked my kayak onto the twice-a-week passenger ferry. At thirty feet long this is essentially just a diesel sixareen with a lid. It was perhaps surprising that only the youngest of the eight passengers was sick as, rocking and rolling, we meandered a slow course across the sea’s contours. Minutes after disembarking in Foula’s tiny harbour I launched the kayak and was paddling up the island’s east coast. By the time I reached the north-east corner, I was in a sea terrorised by breakers three times my height, from which I could look east to the whole Atlantic coast I’d paddled down. That night I wandered through the Foula coastline’s meadows of ground-nesting seabirds, taking great care to find myself a spot to sleep away from any chicks (figure 2.7).
It was on the second of my three days on the island that I finally met the force that Porteous had pronounced Shetland’s true ruler: the ‘Storm King’. That morning I’d climbed the island’s tallest cliffs and lounged, lodged among puffins, with my feet dangling 1,200 feet over the sea (figure 2.8). I sat gazing north while clouds gathered in the west and large, cold drops of water began to fall. Hundreds of screeching kittiwakes took to the air, disturbed by eddies in the wind, while spindrift skimmed the sea in all directions. The real arrival of the storm was preceded by minutes of strange, thick warmth. Then lightning flashed across the ocean, lending the swell fleeting new patterns of light and shadow, before rich, deep thunder reverberated through the rock. Puffins and fulmars joined the kittiwakes in panicked flight, and the booming cliffs themselves seemed to have come to life. The whole spectacle was as sublime and life-affirming as Porteous had, a century before, promised his urbane readers it would be:
And when the Storm King wakes from his sleep in the long, long winter night,
And, robed in his garment of silver spray, strides southward into the light –
At the sound of his voice ye shall see the waves race in for the land amain,
Then, broken and beaten on cliff and beach, fall back to the sea again.
Ye shall see the tide-race rise and rave, and rear on his thwarted path,
Till stack and skerry are ringed with the foam of the hungry ocean’s wrath.
Ye shall watch with a strange, exultant joy, the winds and waters strive,
And your hearts shall sing with the rising gale, for the joy that you are alive.18
Thermometer and barometer measure our seasons capriciously; the Orkney year should be seen rather as a stark drama of light and darkness.
George Mackay Brown
LATE SUMMER BRINGS uncertainty. It was mid-August by the time I resumed my journey and, in contrast to the long calm days on Shetland, the Orcadian sea changed hour by hour. Sun, squall, sea mist, rain and rainbow passed across the coastlines fast enough to make each morning feel like a time-lapsed month. When winds shifted, water responded: weather was conducted through the shell of the boat and into me, dictating the experience of each new stretch of coast. Not just perception but emotion drifted with the moods of sky and sea. This ranged from the giddy joy of lurching along, propelled by a following swell, or the anxious focus when gusts brought side-on breakers, to serenity on flat seas that seemed perfectly safe and infinitely spacious.
Phases of transition from calm to chaos were often the most sublime, binding beauty and fear together. Not for nothing are the islands of Orkney said to evoke sleeping whales: they are peaceful mounds with awful potentials. As the month progressed I saw, felt, and, for the first time, photographed, parts of waves that seemed more the habitat of surfers than paddlers. These were not the long strafing breakers that come with heavy swell (I still had some leeway before the truly wild weather of autumn); they were the standing waves that twist and coil