The Folklore of Orkney & Shetland

By Ernest Walker Marwick

This comprehensive volume of folkloric traditions in Scotland’s Northern Isles is a treasure trove of stories, history, and cultural legacy.

The two island groups of Orkney and Shetland have much in common. In each the grey stone houses and treeless landscapes are scoured in winter by stinging gales, and in summer lie under the endless days of the ‘simmer din’.

Originally Norwegian, they have been part of Scotland for centuries, but their many and varied legends, folk tales and customs are still saturated with Norse influences. While this book tells tales and discusses beliefs that are known throughout the northern isles, it also outlines those elements which are unique to each island group.

Ernest Marwick not only recounts countless tales which have been transmitted aurally and by writing, but also places these tales within geographical and historical contexts, thus enabling a deeper appreciation of this wonderful material. A bibliography is also included, together with an index of tale types and motifs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781788852722

Book preview

Illustration

The Folklore of the British Isles

General Editor: Venetia J.Newall

The Folklore of Orkney and Shetland

Illustration

The Folklore of Orkney and Shetland

Ernest W. Marwick

Drawings by Gay John Galsworthy

Illustration

This edition published in 2011 by

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

First published by Birlinn Limited in 2000

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © The Estate of Ernest W. Marwick 1975

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 1 78027 008 1

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed and bound in the UK by

CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Foreword

One of the huts at Skara Brae village in Orkney, built some 3,500 years ago, has two old women buried beneath its wall – possibly an early example of a widespread foundation rite. According to legend, this is approximately when Kekrops, mythical first king of Athens, invented matrimony, laying the foundations of the European social system. With genuine insight, Thucydides remarked about a thousand years later that ‘the Greeks lived once as the barbarians live now’.

This comment, which anticipated 19th-century anthropological schemata, for instance L. H. Morgan’s progression from savagery through barbarism to civilisation, echoes the Arcadia versus culture controversy which periodically troubles scholarship. This is currently so, with Engels’ The Origin of the Family, itself deriving from Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877), unwittingly providing a theoretical background for many fashionable mores.

A current intellectual vogue exhorts us, in pseudo-Marxian phraseology, to recognise again the lost golden age, when the noble savage was not a romantic daydream, but the norm. The bland, Merrie England attitude of outdated folklore studies is now paralleled by a defensiveness, especially among amateur dabblers in social anthropology, invariably determined to seek out lessons apposite to modern life. This does no service to anthropology, a discipline complementary to our own, whose admittedly divergent approach suggests that folklore’s too complacent historical orientation needs reassessment.

Thoms chose the expression folklore advisedly. A different ideological slant might have given us ‘folk life’, in fact a much later term. As the word suggests, folklore often owes as much to philosophy as to science, and the form of 19th-century folkloric debate underlines this point. That is our strength; it is the rationale of folklore’s conceptual autonomy. The diachronic approach, essential to an understanding of philosophy, must often serve the folklorist. The question ‘what?’ can be faced without such a reference, but, using the term strictly, never ‘why?’.

Theories of an elysian pre-history, as it happens, receive local support in archaeological evidence from the north. Sites of the Skara Brae period, especially in Shetland, yield few traces of weaponry, pointing to a largely self-sufficient pastoral and fishing economy. Besides, Orkney evidently possessed reindeer and elk, large meat-providing animals. Remoteness, allied to a warmer climate than now and better agricultural conditions, lends support to the impression of a comparatively idyllic period.

And yet humanity does not react exclusively to its economic environment. Folk belief and folk practice are certainly at root utilitarian, but nature affects man through his intellectual consciousness as well as through his physical needs. The environment impinges as both a practical and a spiritual challenge. In Professor Gordon Childe’s view the two old women, who may well have died naturally, were probably interred at Skara Brae so ‘that their ghosts should help to sustain the wall’. But there are several other possibilities. They might have been sacrificial victims, or perhaps they were so placed to remain under the surveillance of the living. Even today this accounts for house-side burials in parts of the anglophone Caribbean, this in an economically well-endowed area where life should be easy and pleasant, and yet the dead, however amiable their lives, are viewed with perpetual dread.

The relative calm of the islands’ pre-history was evidently interrupted in the first century A.D. Broch architecture most plausibly suggests a protective purpose, against slavers from the south. Historical records begin during the Norse Earlship, established before 900. This lasted until 1231, and was superseded by various Scoto-Scandinavian rulers under Norwegian, then Danish, sovereignty. At the same time Hanseatic and later Dutch economic links were formed, persisting in varying extent through the 19th century. The islands were pledged to Scotland in 1468-9, and in the 1560s the harsh Stewart dictatorship began. Although this was later mitigated, the Norse era was remembered as the local golden age, and this is reflected strongly in the islands’ traditions. The richness of folklore lies in its combination of practical philosophy with rudimentary scientific endeavour, often accompanied by a commentary on the social reality of a given period.

Ernest Marwick’s volume makes the most of this splendid material, and his thorough and painstaking approach is matched by attractive presentation. Born and bred in an Orkney farming family, he began writing in his teens. His first book was An Anthology of Orkney Verse (1949), and in 1961 he edited Orkney Folklore and Traditions (by Walter Dennison). Apart from a number of pamphlets and hundreds of articles, from 1960-71 he worked regularly on a local BBC programme, dealing specifically with Orkney, Shetland and Caithness, and often made national and Scottish broadcasts on similar topics. He is a well-known weekly columnist and feature-writer on The Orcadian, and was on the editorial staff of The Orkney Herald. As well as writing, his main interest is the collection and preservation of northern folklore and, living in Kirkwall, he is much concerned with conservation work.

London University

March 1975

Venetia Newall

Contents

Foreword

Maps of Orkney and Shetland

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Kingdoms of the Sea

2 Folk of Hill and Mound

3 The World of Witches

4 A Heritage of Stone

5 Mysteries of Daily Work

6 The Wheel of Life

7 Island Calendar

8 World of the Children

9 The Dark-Green Bottle

10 Orkney Folk Tales

11 Shetland Folk Tales

Notes

Bibliography

Index of Tale Types

Motif Index

General Index

IllustrationIllustration

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due and are gratefully offered, to the many people whose contributions are recorded in the Notes; also to Mrs Kathleen Harcus, Miss Embla Mooney, Mr Tom Anderson, Mr Erling J. F. Clausen, Mr R. P. Fereday, Mr John J. Graham, Mr Tom Henderson, Mr Peter K. I. Leith, Mr Evan Mac-Gillivray, Dr T. M. Y. Manson, Mr Peter Moar, Mr George M. Nelson, Mr John D. M. Robertson and Mr William A. Sutherland for special help and encouragement. For permission to quote from books and other copyright material, I am indebted to Mr Alexander Annal (‘The Fine Field of Lint’); the Rev. J. J. Davidson (‘The Ghosts from the Sea’); Mr Bruce Henderson (‘The Bewitched Sixareen’); Mr Tom Henderson (‘Luckie Minnie and the Little Boy’ and the story of the witch Tulta); Mr Arthur Irvine (‘Johnny Raggie Comes ta Grace’); Mr L. G. Johnson (quotations from Laurence Williamson of Mid Yell); Mrs Charlotte Nicolson (quotations from the works of John Nicolson); Mr George P. S. Peterson (‘Minna Baaba and the Spanish Ship’ and ‘The Blind Eye of Gibbie Laa’); Major H. N. Robertson (‘The Giant, the Princesses and Peerie-fool’, by Duncan J. Robertson); Mr T. A. Robertson (‘Da Giant an da Trows’ and ‘Essy Pattle and da Blue Yowe’, recorded by Mrs C. Laurenson); Mr Stephen T. Saxby (quotations from Shetland Traditional Lore and other works by Jessie M. E. Saxby). The editors and publishers of the following journals kindly gave me the freedom of their columns: The New Shetlander, The Orcadian, The Orkney Herald, The Shetland News and The Shetland Times; and the County Librarians of Orkney and Zetland gave me the benefit of their wide knowledge of sources, and ready access to little-known pamphlets and manuscripts. I owe a special debt to the Viking Society for Northern Research and to the Shetland Folk Society for permission to use any material I needed from any of their publications; and to Mr Ronald Marwick who obligingly brought to my notice unpublished writings of George Marwick of Yesnaby. I have enlisted Miss Jacqueline Simpson’s scholarly aid for a scrutiny of Old Norse words and references; she has also compiled the Index of Tale Types and the Motif Index. The help so liberally given over many years by the late T. A. Robertson (the Shetland poet Vagaland) is acknowledged with particular gratitude, as is the stimulating advice and expert assistance of Mrs Venetia Newall.

Ernest W. Marwick

Introduction

ORKNEY AND SHETLAND are, even today, two of the least known archipelagos in the United Kingdom. Orkney is separated from John o’ Groats, on the northern margin of the Scottish mainland, by seven miles of stormy firth. As the crow flies, 170 miles further on, is Muckle Flugga, the most northerly islet in Shetland. The tides of the Atlantic and North Sea run like rivers through both groups of islands; and in the 50-mile gap between them these oceans meet, with only Fair Isle to break the lonely expanse of water. Lerwick, Shetland’s capital, is in the same latitude as Bergen in Norway, and somewhat north of Cape Farewell in Greenland.

There is much that Orkney and Shetland have in common: each has one large island, known as the Mainland, and a great variety of smaller islands; in each the grey-stone houses and almost treeless landscape are scourged in winter by stinging gales; they share the long days and tranced twilights of the northern summer; their people are home-loving, but necessity has carried many of them, especially the superb seamen of Shetland, around the world and back again; they have a common history distinct from that of Scotland, but politically they have been part of Scotland for 500 years.

Certain things, however, make these island groups different from one another. Orkney, with gentle slopes and fertile fields, is a land of farmers, on whom tradition has less influence than it has on the men and women who wrest a living from the hills and moors of Shetland and from its neighbouring seas. The Shetland tongue, as a vehicle of story and lore, has greater range and vitality than the Orkney dialect as now spoken. In general, the temperament of the Shetlander is less sceptical than that of the Orcadian and more easily impressed with the numinous in nature and the part played by the supernatural in everyday life. While this book tells tales and discusses beliefs that are known all over the northern isles, a sustained effort has been made to distinguish, wherever necessary, between the lore and culture of Orkney and Shetland. A story, custom or belief which seems to belong more exclusively to one group than the other, or which has survived longer in that group, is indicated by (O), Orkney, or (S), Shetland, unless its provenance is made clear by the context. The same method is used to distinguish the place names of each county.

It might be said that these northern isles came gradually into history out of a haze of romantic tradition. They lay in dragongreen and serpent-haunted seas; indeed the oldest stories say they were the teeth that fell from the greatest of all serpents, the Stoor Worm, in his death agony. Early Irish writers called the Orkney Islands Insi Orc, islands of the Boar. The Mainland of Orkney was Inistura in Hebridean myth. To the Romans the Orkneys were the Orcades (a term still used by writers of purple prose); and Shetland was, it seems, the Thule that Agricola’s men saw in the far distance when his ships ventured to the north of Scotland around AD 83.

Even then, the henges of massive stones, the green tumuli and the passage graves must have been objects of mystery; as the magnificent broch towers, built around the beginning of the Christian era, were to become. All these monuments became indiscriminately associated in the popular mind with various ancient races, including Picts and Finns (S), and with subterrestrial creatures which may, or may not, have retained some features of dimly remembered aborigines.

If by the eighth century the vigour of the island populations had become exhausted and their numbers diminished (conditions we may postulate but cannot prove), men of abundant vitality and fiery courage were waiting in Norway to descend on their unprotected shores. These were the true Vikings: men who cultivated with equal zest the arts of war and peace; men who thought it good to die with a cynical jest on the lips; men who loved and understood the sea so well that however thick the mist, and whatever way the wind blew, they could always find their way home by an underswell that ran towards the land, just as their spiritual descendants the Shetland fishermen (who called this undersea movement the moder-dye) could do until comparatively recent times. The Vikings subjugated the isles, no doubt possessing the women and enslaving the men. They were followed by more peaceful settlers, folk who were content to farm and fish when their masters gave them leave, and who brought to Orkney and Shetland the language, customs, tales, and even games, of their Norwegian homeland.

Until the second half of the fifteenth century (when they were mortgaged to Scotland) Orkney and Shetland were a Norwegian province. They had Norse laws, and the Norse respect for all law that was rooted in the people’s will. In their folklore certain basic freedoms, and certain ways of looking at life, are taken for granted. A Shetland scholar, Laurence Williamson, said very aptly, ‘The Norse have a steady sense of the right, but not of its variety.’ Their matter-of-fact temperament has been inherited by their descendants in the northern isles, particularly by the Orcadians. There are tales of the mysterious, but few with mystical undertones; they are characterised rather by a stark recognition of the realities of life and a genius for saying only what is essential. This trait is exemplified in the sagas, not least in the islands’ own Orkneyinga Saga. Despite the fact that it only became generally known in translation towards the end of last century, the Orkneyinga Saga has had considerable influence, turning men’s thoughts towards their origins, teaching them to recognise Norse traditions which had been overlaid, and, in recent times, inspiring historians and poets.

Although the older language of the islands, the Norn, died out in Orkney during the seventeenth century, and somewhat later in Shetland, many of its speech forms and a surprising number of its words are in everyday use. The state of the Shetland dialect is so healthy that a Shetlandic grammar was produced a few years ago, and prose and verse in the dialect appear frequently. There are Norn dictionaries, published in the early part of this century. The Shetland one contains some 10,000 words, and its Orkney equivalent rather more than 3,000. The number of Norn words remembered in each county indicates the comparative richness of its speech. Norse place names are preponderant. To have attempted to convey island lore exclusively in its dialect form would have been to make this book incomprehensible to most readers; what is more, the very real differences between Orkney and Shetland speech would have been difficult to preserve. The plan adopted, therefore, has been to write in a straightforward English capable of conveying the facts – if not always the flavour – of the beliefs and traditions which have been selected, and to retain, with explanations, all essential words and phrases from the dialect originals. Good examples of the stories once told in the island tongue will be found in the collections of folk tales which form the book’s concluding chapters.

At this stage it should be said that, while the folklore of the northern islands is extremely varied and continuously interesting, it contains few of the elements which make the ancient legends of, for example, Ireland so attractive in form and rich in content. There is no cycle of hero tales, and only one attenuated story of the Norse gods. Folk poetry hardly exists. In part, the reasons why the islands’ traditions are more domestic than heroic can be found in their history.

From the point of view of the folklorist, the most important effect of the pledging of Orkney (1468) and Shetland (1469) to Scotland, and their arbitrary annexation to the Crown of Scotland in 1471, was the relatively rapid supersession of the Norn language by a dialect of Lowland Scots. Even though – as has been indicated – this dialect was richly permeated by Norn words, the disintegrating effect on the oral lore of the islands caused by the change of language was very considerable, especially in Orkney where Scottification began earlier than in Shetland. The few fragments of Norse ballads and tales which remain are indicative of a folk literature which did not survive the transition. In the Faroe Islands, some 200 miles north-west of Shetland, where the spoken language was retained, scores of lengthy tales have been collected, as well as heroic ballads, one of them with more than 600 stanzas.

No thorough study has been made of the Scottish contribution to the folklore of the islands. At best it was quantitative rather than qualitative, and is most clearly reflected, perhaps, in agricultural and domestic customs, and in scores of astute and leery sayings. If Orcadians and Shetlanders had been brought into an intimate relationship with Celtic Scotland there might have been mutual enrichment, but they have had few contacts in modern times with the poetical and imaginative Gael. The shrewd Scottish administrators, clergymen and professional men, and the sturdy Lowland farmers who found their way north and were assimilated into the island communities were neither fertile in fancy nor lyrical in expression. Furthermore, Scottish rule was for centuries so tyrannical that life was reduced to subsistence level and the opportunity, even the aptitude, for the cultivation of such arts as the making of poetry and music, and the invention of stories, disappeared. The collector of ballads and folk songs who hopefully visits Orkney and Shetland is likely to be disappointed. Not until the past generation or two have the arts been seriously cultivated.

Island memory has, nevertheless, been exceedingly tenacious of customs associated with daily life and work, and of superstitious belief in strange creatures thought to inhabit hills, mounds and the surrounding sea. The sea has always fascinated the northern mind, and must come frequently into any book of Orkney and Shetland lore. As a physical presence, with its storms and calms, whirlpools and tideways, skerries and caves, it has a dramatic quality which the landscape lacks; the known creatures which dwell in it – fishes, seals, porpoises, sharks, whales – have endless variety and some can be fearsome. Even more fearsome are the unknown creatures with which imagination has peopled it. The sea was both a source of food (to be gained by secret skills and scrupulous attention to immemorial usage) and a dangerous highway. Over it at almost every period came stony-hearted raiders: Danish pirates, wild ‘Lewismen’, eighteenth-century buccaneers, the press-gang. All of them contributed something to the lore of the islands.

Among the legendary creatures who were supposed to prefer the land, the trows (Norwegian trolls) were ubiquitous. Even today, practically every district in Shetland can provide its trow story. It is true that several other mythical creatures – whom the Norse inhabitants of the islands would have distinguished without difficulty – have lost their identity in the trow, and that ever since the coming of printed fairy stories for children the trow has acquired characteristics which do not properly belong to such a primitive being. In many stories, however, the troll of Norwegian tradition can still be seen.

The Devil, although not unknown in the North, was regarded more as a theological hypothesis than as a personage who might come to transact his business in a visible, much less a theatrical, manner. When he spoke, which was seldom, it was in a distinctly Scottish voice. Ghosts have been surprisingly few. The same cannot be said of witches, who require a section to themselves, and whose deeds, if set out in detail, would fill a book.

A good deal of information relating to work customs and the rites connected with birth, marriage and death can still be obtained from old people. Examples of most types of traditional lore, apart from previously unrecorded folk tales and ballads, which are extremely rare, may also be found after diligent search. But the folklorist of today is a picker-up of fragments; he must rely greatly on collections of old lore made during the nineteenth century and the early part of the present century. Some of the pioneer descriptions of Orkney and Shetland contain interesting material – to be used with the utmost caution – but systematic collection was done by a very few enthusiasts, including Walter Traill Dennison and Duncan J. Robertson in Orkney and Jessie M. E. Saxby, John Spence and John Nicolson in Shetland. The works of these writers, who did so much to preserve the tales and traditions of their islands, are listed in the Bibliography at the end of the book, as are additional sources of information. Specific references to many other authorities who have contributed to the knowledge of northern folklore either by their writings or by verbal communications will be found in the Notes, and – when the writer of this book has benefited personally from their generous help – in the Acknowledgments.

In the past three decades, excellent work has been done by the Shetland Folk Society, both in renewing interest in the lore of the islands and in placing some of it on permanent record. The five Shetland Folk Books so far published contain unusually representative and well-edited collections.

Illustration

1 Kingdoms of the Sea

THE SEA IS TO DWELLERS IN ISLANDS what mountain or forest is to inlanders: a place of mystery peopled by creatures that are frequently hostile, but sometimes benevolent. The oldest and vaguest of these creatures are pure personifications of nature, never completely visualised and known only by their attributes. Such, in the myths of the northern isles, are the Mither o’ the Sea and Teran. In Shetland, the Mither o’ the Sea came to be regarded as a sea deity who could be invoked by fishermen for protection against the Devil; in Orkney she was looked on as the benign spirit of the summer, who stilled the storms, brought warmth to the ocean, and filled the waters with teeming life. Teran, the winter spirit, was her implacable enemy. Each spring, around the vernal equinox, they fought for mastery of the sea in a terrible struggle known as the vore tullye (spring struggle). People heard Teran’s voice in the roaring of the March gales, and saw his anger in the savage onset of the waves. When the storms subsided they knew that Teran had been overcome, and that he lay bound and helpless at the bottom of the ocean. There, with now and then a convulsive struggle, he remained all summer, while the Sea Mither continued her beneficent and procreant reign.

As the autumn came on Teran’s struggles grew fiercer, until at last he escaped from his fetters and renewed his battle with the Sea Mither. That fight, accompanied by shrieking winds and tattered skies, was known as the gore vellye (autumn tumult). Teran was victorious, and the Sea Mither was banished. For a while every living creature had to submit to Teran’s monstrous rule; but in the dreadful days of winter the Sea Mither often heard the fisherman’s agonised cry; and he knew that in the spring, refreshed and invincible, she would triumph over her enemy.

A primordial monster of Scandinavian mythology was ‘Miðgarðsormr’, the World Serpent, whose coils encircled the earth. He was hidden in the ocean, which, men imagined, lay like a gigantic moat around the vast circumference of the world. This creature is probably to be glimpsed in an old Shetland belief concerning the cause of the tides that, ‘away, far out to sea, near the edge of the world, lived a monstrous sea-serpent that took about six hours to draw in his breath, and six hours to let it out’.

In Orkney the World Serpent became the Stoor Worm, a veritable symbol of evil