Literature of Shetland
Encyclopedia
Shetland literature reflects the history of Shetland: five hundred years of Norse rule, followed by five hundred years of Scottish and British - this, in very simple terms, is the political reality of the last millennium. Before the Norse, millennia of mysterious peoples and an immediately precedent Christian Celtic period; prior to and into the British age, three hundred years of Hanseatic
Hanseatic
Hanseatic may refer to:* The Hanseatic League, a trading alliance in northern Europe in existence between the 13th and 17th centuries.* The Hanseatic , the synonym for the members of the upper class of the free imperial cities Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck since the middle of the 17th century after...

 trade with "Dutchies" (usually Dutch, sometimes, Germans). All of these aspects of history have inspired and influenced Shetland's writers - just as the unchanging landscape of the 'Auld Rock', its weather, seasons, its flora and fauna, have provided a touchstone in the midst of sometimes tumultuous change; as the land itself is refuge from that other great favourite subject - the sea.

Norse literature

The earlier Norse language faded slowly, taking at least as long as three hundred years to die out in certain isolated parts of the archipelago such as Foula
Foula
Foula in the Shetland Islands of Scotland is one of Great Britain’s most remote permanently inhabited islands. Owned since the turn of the 20th century by the Holbourn family, the island was the location for the film The Edge of the World...

 and Unst
Unst
Unst is one of the North Isles of the Shetland Islands, Scotland. It is the northernmost of the inhabited British Isles and is the third largest island in Shetland after the Mainland and Yell. It has an area of .Unst is largely grassland, with coastal cliffs...

, as first Lowland Scots
Scots language
Scots is the Germanic language variety spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster . It is sometimes called Lowland Scots to distinguish it from Scottish Gaelic, the Celtic language variety spoken in most of the western Highlands and in the Hebrides.Since there are no universally accepted...

 and then English became the language of power. Yet the Norn even influences the kind of Lowland Scots spoken here today, in lexicon and grammar, and perhaps there is still a touch of Dutch
Dutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...

 to the sound of it. This unique mix has come to be termed Shetlandic
Shetlandic
Shetlandic, usually referred to as Shetland by native speakers, is spoken in the Shetland Islands north of mainland Scotland and is, like Orcadian, a dialect of Insular Scots...

.

Little remains of the old Norse tongue, Norn
Norn language
Norn is an extinct North Germanic language that was spoken in Shetland and Orkney, off the north coast of mainland Scotland, and in Caithness. After the islands were pledged to Scotland by Norway in the 15th century, it was gradually replaced by Scots and on the mainland by Scottish...

, in script form, and what is extant seems often corrupted, though the fragments are fascinating. Those have been studied in depth, and scholars have notionally fixed the old Shetlandic Norn as kin to Faeroese and Vestnorsk. The oral tradition for which Shetland was famed in the Norse era, when it was known as a land of bards, died with the language - though it may well be that some of the old folktales and ballads were translated into the oral tradition we now know in Shetlandic, and that the continuing proliferation of writers in Shetland is an ongoing form of that tradition of 'bards' - even across the difficult cultural shift from Scandinavia to Britain.

Shetland is mentioned, however, in sources from the surrounding countries. For example, the Orkneyinga saga
Orkneyinga saga
The Orkneyinga saga is a historical narrative of the history of the Orkney Islands, from their capture by the Norwegian king in the ninth century onwards until about 1200...

, mainly about Orkney talks about the archipelago on a number of occasions.

British Period

In the British era, which properly began for Shetland with the Napoleonic Wars
Napoleonic Wars
The Napoleonic Wars were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to...

, Shetlanders have developed a literature in variant written forms of the spoken Shetlandic tongue, as well as in English - the first widely published writers were two daughters of the Lerwick
Lerwick
Lerwick is the capital and main port of the Shetland Islands, Scotland, located more than 100 miles off the north coast of mainland Scotland on the east coast of the Shetland Mainland...

 gentry, Dorothea Primrose Campbell
Dorothea Primrose Campbell
Dorothea Primrose Campbell was a poet and novelist, born in Lerwick Shetland. Her father Duncan was a surgeon who had married one of the Scotts of Scottshall in Scalloway, Elizabeth, the eldest of a large family....

 and Margaret Chalmers
Margaret Chalmers
Margaret Chalmers, poet, self-styled "first British Thulian quill", was born on the 12th of December 1758 in Lerwick. Her father William is said to have been the son of a Lord Provost of Aberdeen, factor to Earl of Morton and tacksman of various local estates. Her mother Catherine Irvine was born...

 writing for the most part in a rather formal English. Subsequent Shetlandic writers such as James Stout Angus
James Stout Angus
-Life:He was born at Catfirth Haa in the parish of Nesting. His grandfather William Angus is recorded first at Burraness in Delting, but the lands of Catfirth were leased in 1782 to the Angus family who retained them until 1890. His son Hercules married Janet Stout of Scatsta. He was a merchant at...

, George Stewart
George Stewart
George Stewart may refer to:*George E. Stewart, Philippine-American War Medal of Honor recipient*George F. Stewart , American food scientist*George Francis Stewart , Irish land agent...

 and Basil R Anderson helped forge the written form of the native tongue.

There are now a number of titles that might properly be termed ‘Shetlandic' or 'Shetland' classics, in the sense that they found a ready market among Shetlanders when first published and became, in time, somehow definitive of some part of the islands' culture. These works are not always the works of natives - 'incomers' and 'blow-bys' have made considerable contributions, as in the cases of Jakob Jakobsen
Jakob Jakobsen
Dr. phil. Jakob Jakobsen, , was a Faroese linguist as well as a scholar of literature. He was the first Faroese person to earn a doctoral degree...

 and Hugh MacDiarmid
Hugh MacDiarmid
Hugh MacDiarmid is the pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve , a significant Scottish poet of the 20th century. He was instrumental in creating a Scottish version of modernism and was a leading light in the Scottish Renaissance of the 20th century...

for instance, to literature about Shetland. It is a sad fact that much of this literature is currently out of print and has been, in some instances, for a very long time. As a result, subsequent generations of Shetlanders have grown up unaware of this tradition – and specialist readers, the scholars beyond the islands who might be interested, remain oblivious to the work.
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