Shetland Islands

“ At ten o'clock, we were passing through a channel between the islands leading to Lerwick, the capital of Shetland, on the principal island bearing the name of Mainland. Fields, yellow with flowers, among which stood here and there a cottage, sloped softly down to the water, and beyond them rose the bare declivities and summits of the hills, dark with heath, with here and there still darker spots, of an almost inky hue, where peat had been cut for fuel. Not a tree, not a shrub was to be seen, and the greater part of the soil appeared never to have been reduced to cultivation. ”

“ It is possible that the Shetland Islands were the “ultima Thule” spoken of by Roman authors in the first centuries after Christ; but it is certain that the Romans at that time knew the Orkneys by the name of “Orcades:” whence it appears that the primitive root Ork, in the later Norwegian name of the islands, is very ancient, and probably of Celtic origin. Before the arrival of the Norwegians, both the Orkneys and the Shetland Islands seem to have been inhabited by the same Pictish or Celtic race that was settled in the rest of Scotland. ”

“ Shetland, lying more remote from the rest of Britain, has preserved, even more than Orkney, traces of the Scandinavian occupation. One comes now and then upon an old Norse word in the language of the people, and so foreign are the topographical names that, in hearing them pronounced, one might imagine oneself to be among the fjords of Norway. To this day we may hear a Shetlander, who is about to sail for the south, say that he is going to Scotland, as if he regarded his own islands as part of another kingdom. ”

“ The New Shetland Islands, situated between 61° and 63° of Southern latitude, were originally discovered by Dirck Gheritz, a Dutch navigator, who, in attempting to round Cape Horn, was carried by tempestuous weather within sight of their mountainous coasts. Long forgotten, they were re-discovered in 1819 by Mr. Smith, a master in the royal navy—whom a storm had likewise carried thither—and in the following year more accurately examined by Edward Bransfield, whose name survives in the strait which separates them from D’Urville’s Louis Philippe Land. ”

“ ON CERTAIN BELIEFS AND PHRASES OF SHETLAND FISHERMEN. By ARTHUR LAURENSON, Esq., Lerwick.
The native population of the Shetland Islands is Norse in blood and origin. There is not, nor has there been, any appreciable Celtic element in it. To this day the Norse physiognomy of the people is distinctly marked; nowhere do you find the Celtic type. The language, now rapidly merging into English, has for the last three hundred years been departing from the old Norse which was once the tongue of the islands ”

“ In the larger islands the land is generally lower on the east side than on the west; and in many cases the hills are steeper on the west than on the east. Most of the smaller islands are low-lying and grassy, forming excellent pasture ground for sheep.
There are many fresh-water lochs in the islands, the largest being Girlsta Loch in Tingwall, Loch of Cliff in Unst, and Spiggie in Dunrossness. They are nearly all well stocked with trout, which makes Shetland attractive to anglers. Shetland has no streams large enough to be called rivers ”

“ That is what they will do, these romantic islanders, for the « 193 » rugged old mother that bore them. [8] "Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!" is their cry. Down with the raven, the eagle, the peregrine, gull, skua, cormorant, and let the soul of the gamekeeper live for ever in the wild Shetland Islands!
[8] Not all, of course. To Mr. Lawrence Edmondston, of Unst, and to Mr. Hoseason, of Yell, all lovers of birds and wild nature are greatly indebted.
There is something, I verily believe, in a gun and cartridges, that dries up all poetry in a man's heart. ”

“ Immediately south of Cape Horn, at a distance of only 500 miles, are the South Shetland Islands and Graham's Land, whence the Antarctic continent or a group of large islands probably extends across or around the south polar area to Victoria Land and thence to Adélie Land. The outlying Young Island, 12,000 feet high, is about 750 miles south of the Macquarie Islands, which may be considered a southern outlier of the New Zealand group; and the Macquarie Islands are about the same distance from the 1,000-fathom line at a point marking the probable southern extension of Tasmania. ”

“ Orcadian, latinized Celtic adopted by the Northmen, O.N. Orkneyjar; and, in the second place, Pictland was the natural name for Scotland before the Scots became masters of the country; and, later, for those parts of Scotland, where the bulk of the Pictish inhabitants had taken up their abode, particularly the north-east. In the third place, a name ending in “-land” appears less appropriate to the Orkney Isles, whose chief island, Mainland, is not so large and prominent in relation to the other islands as the Shetland Mainland in relation to the other Shetland Islands. ”

“ Andrews he was told that the King of Scots ruled over one hundred and sixty-one islands, that the people of the Shetland Islands lived for the most part on fish prepared by freezing or sun-drying or fire, and had no other wealth than the skins of beasts. ”

“ On the island of “Kalhân” in the same sea the inhabitants have the form of men but animal heads; another island was called the Isle of the Two Heathen Brothers, who practised piracy and were changed into two rocks. He also names the Island of Sheep and “Râka,” which is the Island of Birds (cf. pp. 51, 55) .
“To the islands in this sea belongs also the island of ‘Shâsland’ [presumably Shetland, perhaps confused with Iceland] , the length of which is fifteen days’ journey, and the breadth ten. It had three towns, large and populous; ships put in and stayed there to buy ambra (amber ?) ”

“ The Norsemen did not come to the Shetland Islands until late in the eighth century and they found many of these brochs already in existence. The most perfect of them all is the one on the island of Mousa. It measures fifty-three feet in diameter at the base and thirty-eight feet at the top. It is forty-two feet high. The interior of what appears, externally, to be a rather large building, is less than twenty feet in diameter owing to the peculiar construction of the walls, which are really double. They are seventeen feet wide at the base. ”

“ But in point of fact the map as we have it answers to the narrative singularly well. Any blurs or lacunae which needed restoration must have occurred in very fortunate places. Iceland, Shetland,142 Greenland, Scotland, Estotiland, and Drogio are all not very far from where they should be. The Orkneys and Fair Island, if too far west in fact, are only far enough to suit the tale, for when Antonio sails eastward he comes to them and knows he has passed east of Iceland, a reflection more likely to occur if the interval were rather small than if it were very great. ”

“ If the people seek their living on the sea by fishing, it is usually in boats belonging to the proprietor of the estate, who consequently receives a large share of their profits. The condition of the common people in the Orkneys, and in the Shetland Isles, is certainly not at all enviable, even in comparison with that of their Scandinavian kinsmen on the poor and more remote Faroe Islands and Iceland; although commerce is still limited and oppressed there by a monopoly which was soon abolished in the Orkneys and Shetland Isles after their separation from the united Norwegian-Danish kingdoms. ”

“ Again, when Earl Zichmni and Antonio Zeno with their little flotilla, fired by the fisherman’s American experiences, strike westward from Frisland for Estotiland they, indeed, do not reach that goal but do attain by accident the mysterious Icaria and find themselves where Greenland can be and is reached without much difficulty. Now, on the map (Fig. 19) , Icaria, about the size of Shetland, is the most westerly of all the islands not distinctly American. ”

“ Many little out-of-the-way townships in insular Scotland contain scholars who would find themselves quite at home among a set of college dons. In the course of my travels in Shetland I came to the tiny village of Scalloway, and while standing on the pier gazing alternately at the confusion of sea and island, and at the grim old ruined castle where Earl Patrick, the wicked viceroy, once resided, I heard a conversation on geology being carried on between a tall and brawny shopman and some sailors. ”

“ The northernmost group of the British islands, the Shetland, are composed of a great variety of rocks, including granite, gneiss, mica-slate, serpentine, greenstone, and many others, with some secondary rocks, chiefly sandstone and conglomerate. These islands are exposed continually to the uncontrolled violence of the Atlantic, for no land intervenes between their western shores and America. The prevalence, therefore, of strong westerly gales, causes the waves to be sometimes driven with irresistible force upon the coast, while there is also a current setting from the north. ”

“ It is reasonable to suppose that the earlier migrations of the human race have been from east to west—hence we may infer that the people called Picts were Finnish adventurers from the Scandinavian peninsula, who migrated or were driven westward about the beginning of or shortly before the Christian era. And as Shetland is the nearest land to Norway, they probably colonised these islands first, and in time proceeded westward by way of the Orkneys to the mainland of Scotland. ”

“ The Shetland Isles became a province of Norway in King Harald Fairhair’s time, and belonged to that country till 1469, when King Christian I of Denmark and Norway (which countries had shortly before been united) pledged the Isles, together with the Orkney Islands, to Scotland as security for the dowry he had undertaken to provide on the occasion of the marriage of his daughter Margaret to King James III of Scotland. ”

“ Did not the minister once rebuke them for their spells and mystic whims by aptly applying to them the words of St. Paul to the Galatians: 'Oh, foolish Fladibisterians, who hath bewitched you?' There is an atmosphere of tranquillity and Arcadian peace swimming over Fladibister such as is nowhere else to be found in Shetland. The young men of the place roam far over the sea, as mariners and fishers; but like the exiled Jacobite{239}—
'Who sighed at Arno for his lovelier Tees,'
they never feel happy till they are back home here under the roofs of thatch. ”

“ Hitherto the industry of the Orcadians has been chiefly directed to farming pursuits; while the Shetlanders have been almost exclusively occupied in the cod, ling, and tusk fishing. It is doubtful, indeed, if, up to this period, there be a single boat belonging to the Shetland Isles which is completely equipped for the herring fishery. But on reaching Shetland another fleet of Dutch doggers was seen collecting in numbers off these islands—a coast which is considered a rich harvest in Holland. ”

“ The old Norse speech of Shetland shows in its vocabulary a close connection with the mother-tongue, Norwegian, a closer connection than that shown by Icelandic and partly by Færoese with the same language, the common mother-tongue of them all. This circumstance has a natural explanation in the fact that Shetland was situated so much nearer to Norway. Certainly the political connection between the Islands and Norway was severed by the mortgaging of the Islands to Scotland in the 15th century ”

“ Of the Norn words that are not in general use throughout Shetland, some belong to certain larger portions of the Islands, as, for example, North Shetland, more strictly, the North Isles; the Westside; South Shetland; but many are limited to a single district or to a single island.
Of the great mass of words that have become antiquated, some cannot be said to have perished, as they are still used by old people, though often only in certain islands, districts or neighbourhoods; they are not to be heard in the speech of younger people. ”

“ Some ancient people, presumably the Picts, have occupied the pastures and outruns of Shetland in a manner never subsequently attempted. All the hills and outruns of the islands are ramified by a network of the remains of old stone dykes. Those vestiges (which seldom have any name) are very ancient, probably coeval with the brochs. There is a place in Unst, near the broch of Underhool, where what appears to be the outer dyke of an old town can be traced ”

“ Shetland or Zetland (29) , a group of over 100 islands, islets, and skerries, of which 29 are inhabited, forming the northernmost county of Scotland, lying out in the Atlantic, NNE. of the Orkneys; Mainland (378 sq. m.) , Fell, and Unst are the largest; the coast-line is boldly precipitous and indented, while the scenery all over the island is very grand; the soil is peaty, ill adapted to cultivation, but there is considerable rearing of stock, and the little shaggy pony is well known; fishing is the chief industry, herring, cod, ling, &c. ”

“ Being far removed from the centres of commerce, and having few natural resources in themselves, the islands are almost entirely lacking in manufactures. Fishing and farming are the chief industrial pursuits, while the rearing of native sheep, ponies and cattle form a considerable part of the rural economy. Along with every croft or holding goes the right of common pasturage in the hills and moors, called “scattald.” Crofts would be of little value without this common grazing, which is a remnant of the old Norse odal system of land tenure, and is peculiar to the islands of Shetland and Orkney. ”