Shetlandic

“ And, even in cases where the words did not follow the phonetic rules of Shetland Norn, but were Lowland Scottish in form, doubt might exist, as Norn has been exposed, during so many centuries, to a strong influence from Lowland Scottish, on account of which approximations to the latter speech have occurred, both in the meanings and in the forms of the words.
Several Shetlandic words, although they are English (L.Sc.) in form, must be regarded as of Norse origin on account of their diffusion in Northern languages, especially in Norwegian, Færoese and Icelandic ”

“ The old form *ol has been dropped, as the name for the fish, *ol has been superseded by Eng. “eel”, and the other *ol has then been changed similarly to “eel”. This change must have taken place at a time when the older (Norn) form *ol, as a name for the fish, and the more recent (Eng.) form “eel”, were used simultaneously in Shetlandic.
Many Norn words in Shetland have been fully or partly translated into English (L. Scottish) , but with the special Northern (Norn) meanings preserved.
bank, sb., ledge, as e.g. peat-bank, and banks, pl., steep coast, show anglicising of O.N. “bakki”. ”

“ Both these versions were noted down in Fetlar. It seems as if “karəl mi mŏg” is another and more corrupt Shetlandic form of “kallar á mik” — kallar by metathesis of ll and r becoming [karəl] . mog is a Shetl.-Norn form of “mik”, me, which is found again in the Hildina ballad (“moch”) and in the rhyme of “The Crow and the Crab” (“mog”) . “mi mog”, doubtless with added English “me” as mog was no longer understood.
Himpi or Humpi, the introductory word, with which the troll-mother calls to her child, is probably the child’s name, and may be the Norwegian word “hympe”, n., clumsy figure ”

“ Shetlandic Norn words or meanings found only in Fær.:
blogaben, sb. = Fær. bløkubein, n.
brill, sb., a buoy, cf. Fær. prilla, a leather-sack.
flingaso (*flignaso) = Fær. flidnasoð, water in which limpets have been scalded, from fliða, f., limpet. No. flida, f., flake, splinter. Cf. Shetl. fladrek, flodrek, limpet, which is the same word as No. fladra, f., a small splinter. flither (flidder) , in N.Eng. dial. (Yorksh.) and in the Isle of Man, is used of limpets. ”

“ 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 Shetlands, for their part, are grander, wilder, rougher, poorer, colder, wetter, less “improved,” in general, more Norse and primitive. Their industry is rather at sea than on land. Mr. Tudor quotes an apt saying as to the difference between the people: [205] “The Shetlander is a fisherman who has a farm; the Orcadian a farmer who has a boat.” Through the fisheries the Shetlanders were long in closer touch with Holland and Scandinavia than with Scotland, which for centuries has been spreading her tentacles over the adjacent Orkneys. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now the people of the Shetland Islands are very quiet, orderly and industrious. They live by many means. Some of them have shops in the towns, where they sell groceries, and dress-goods and cured meats. Others live by catching fish to send south. Some let themselves down by ropes over the edge of a great high cliff, and gather the eggs of birds. Then [90] the women knit shawls and hoods and veils and socks, and so gain a few pennies to buy food with. ”

“ ARLY in the present century many superstitious beliefs and observances were common in Shetland which are now altogether forgotten, or only to be found lingering in some outlying districts. The old world ways of the Shetlanders have given place to a new order of things. Our domestic, social, and industrial life is conducted on different lines. Hence it is evident that even the remembrance of the times of our forefathers will pass away for ever with the present generation. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The bones of the Celtic shorthorn and of turbary sheep, the presence of hammer-stones, pieces of pottery and scrapers, of limpet and other shells, together with the bones and implements collected during the excavations by the late Mr John Bruce of Sumburgh, support Mr Douglas’s view that horses reached Shetland some centuries before the turbulent Norse jarls, harassed by Harold Fairhair, began to settle in the Northern and Western Islands of Scotland. ”

“ But more frequently these guileless maidens and their happy lovers tripped with lightsome lilt the old Shetland reels, such as “Nippin' Grund,” “Da Brunt Scones o' Voe,” “Da Scalloway Lasses,” “Shak'-'im-troose,” “Kale an' Knocked Corn,” etc.
There is a desire in the human mind to pry into the future, and even at the present day, in this land of Kirks and Bibles, you may see jolly lads in H.M. uniform and braw young lasses patronising the professional cup and card reader. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Shetland is a very different country than many see. There are no green fields and trees, and the children living there hardly believe it when you tell them that in England or Scotland there are green lanes, and that birds build nests among green leaves. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. Lerwick (q. v.) is the capital. ”

“ If the present originally Norwegian population in the Orkneys and Shetland Islands possessed, on the whole, any strongly-marked Scandinavian characteristics, they would naturally occur most in the islands farthest towards the north. But the oppressions and political changes that have occurred there have done their work so thoroughly, that even the Shetlanders no longer bear in their character and natural disposition any strongly-marked feature of their Norwegian origin. The only ones remaining are, perhaps, their love of the sea, and their skill in contending with its dangers. ”

“ On my first visit to Shetland I spent some time on the mainland, chiefly on geological errands bent, but not without a glance at the scenic and antiquarian interests of the islands. One of my excursions took me to Papa Stour—a small island lying to280 the west, and exposed to the full fury of the Atlantic storms, which have tunnelled its cliffs with caverns and gullies. ”

“ Thus, for instance, a fiord is generally called “firth” (fjorðr) ; a creek “wick” (Dan., Vig) ; a holm, or small island, “holm;” a promontory, or naze, “ness;” a valley, “daill,” or “dale.” But it is peculiar to these districts, that the forms of names of places which occur most frequently in the old Danish part of the north of England, namely, those ending in by, thwaite, and thorpe, are extremely rare in Shetland, and in the rest of the old Norwegian possessions in Scotland. ”

“ By the separation from Denmark and Norway, the small Shetland population had become intellectually and linguistically isolated, a circumstance that was bound to weaken very much their power of resistance to the persistent Scottish influence. Bit by bit, the peasantry began to think it genteel to adopt Scottish words and modes of expression, and to feel ashamed of the old homely words, which they gradually came to look upon as lacking authority and justification. ”

“ SHETLAND WOMEN. NOT far outside the town of Lerwick, on the Shetland Islands there is a great, black, muddy tract of land called a peat-bog. All about is utter desolation. There are no huts even to be seen. ”

“ No point in Shetland is more than three miles from the sea. Detached rocks and stacks, some high above the water and others below the surface, present a forbidding aspect to the spectator, and increase the dangers of navigation round the coast. ”

“ Not to know how to knit in Shetland is like not knowing how to read at home. A little girl is taught the art before she can read; and, as a result, at every cottage will be found the spinning-wheel and the needles, while the feminine hands are never idle. It is one great means of support; and on Regent Street in London will be seen windows full of soft, white goods marked “Shetland Hosiery.” ”

“ But those female Finns, whom the amorous Shetlanders captured before they could regain their skin-canoes are described as "engaged in dressing their flowing locks" at the eventful moment: a most natural proceeding on the part of any woman who has just landed from a sea-voyage (whether these particular women had come all the way from Bergen, or which is likely—from some outlying island of the Northern groups) . The reality of those merwomen of Shetland is manifest throughout the tales relating to them. They bear children to their Shetland lovers ”

“ It is, at all events, remarkable, that the traditions of the country should ascribe to the Picts, the early inhabitants of Shetland, the same dwarfish stature, and that the numerous remains of their habitations which still exist, should seem to confirm the tradition. The race which at present possesses the Shetlands is, however, of what the French call "an advantageous stature," and well limbed. If it be the want of a proper and genial warmth, which prevents the due growth of the domestic animals, it is a want to which the Zetlanders are not subject. ”

“ But I have been told today that the Shetland people are a very intelligent class, and they would surely have intelligence enough to discover that they were getting a lower price than they might get for their produce?-Some of them are intelligent, and no doubt they would discover that. ”

“ As Shetland, for several reasons, must be assumed to have been colonized considerably earlier than the Færoe Islands and Iceland, and prior to the appearance of the i-mutation in Norse, and as such an insular dialect must in one respect and another end by going its own way, one can very easily suppose that, in spite of Shetland’s close connection with Norway, and the steadily maintained linguistic influence from that country, the i-mutation was never completely carried out in Shetland Norn. ”

“ It may then have been that their intercourse with the people of the west, including the mainland as well as the isles, may have induced the Vikings to make a change in their funeral customs. As the burial rites of a people are the customs to which they usually most persistently cling, perhaps some other suggestion is needed to account for such a change.
In Shetland the barrows are found upon the hillside and by the seashore, and even beside the refuse heaps of the early inhabitants. ”