THE ORKNEYS AND THE SHETLANDS
In the days of the great world-war of 1914–16, the Orkneys rose into
fresh notice, especially because here the British cruisers, that had
intercepted the neutral steamers to Holland, Scandinavia, and Denmark,
took their semi-prizes and detained mails and passengers, causing
much exasperation. Here, too, was the western terminal of the line of
blockade, with ships and steel netting, by which passage into Germany
was made nearly impossible. During this period many Americans were
involuntary and not over-happy visitors to these islands, which to them
were, literally, the Bleak House of the British Empire.
“Orcades” was the name the Romans gave to this northern extremity of
their world. Their existence had been unknown, nor was it suspected
that Britain was an island, until the time of Agricola in A.D. 78. Then
the fleet of triremes ploughed the waves, unveiling the contour of the
country, centuries later called Scotland.
[Illustration: THE HARBOR OF KIRKWALL, ORKNEY ISLANDS]
To-day the two archipelagoes, Orkney and Shetland, form one British
county, with a representative in Parliament. Of the sixty-seven
Orkney Islands, seven are inhabited by fewer than thirty thousand
persons. Populated once by the Picts, whose rude memorials are seen
almost everywhere, these islands became part of Norway and Denmark,
and constituted no portion of the Scottish realm, until America was
discovered. It was when James III--as in our time Edward VII--wed the
“sea-king’s daughter from over the sea,” that the Danish sovereign,
by bestowing these storm-swept isles as the marriage portion of his
daughter, made them part of Scotland. James III was son of the Dutch
Queen, Mary of Gelderland. He married Margaret of Denmark, in 1469.
Pomona is the largest island and Kirkwall its chief town, with which
not a few involuntary American tourists have made themselves acquainted
in the war years.
The Pentland Firth, stormiest of any and all firths in Scotland, is
eight miles wide. What are its peculiarities of behavior, during
centuries, when hectored and goaded by the winds, may be realized from
the great storm of 1862. Then the waves ran bodily up and over the
vertical cliffs, two hundred feet in height, lodging portions of the
wrecked boats, stones, seaweed, etc., on their tops. This attrition,
continued during ages, effecting the destruction of the cliffs and
heaping up torn rock masses by sea action, proves, say the geologists,
that many of Nature’s ruins along the coast of Scotland are the work
of the sea when agitated by storms, rather than that of icebergs.
The spring tides of the Pentland Firth run at the rate of over ten
nautical miles an hour, and are probably by far the most rapid marine
currents around the British Islands. When aided by powerful winds,
these undersea forces lend incredible force to the breakers in the
northern sea.
Still farther north, beyond the Orkneys, are the Shetlands, on which
are bred the little ponies, known by the name of “Shelties.” With
Americans born in a city, among the first childish impressions of any
other animals than the average city horse, cat, and dog, are those of
Shetland ponies, with which they are enraptured when a visiting circus
company makes a street parade.
In old days the ponies were regarded, on the island on which they were
born, as common property for all. This primitive stage of communal
society having long ago passed away, the hardy little creatures are
reared in large numbers, chiefly for export into England. There most of
them have to leave the sunlight and live down in the darkness, being
made very useful in hauling coal in the narrow galleries of the mines
underground.
The Shetlands, or Zetland group of islands, are the most northerly
British possessions in Europe. The name “Shetland” is supposed to
be simply a modernized rendering of the old Norse “Hjalt-land,” the
meaning of which is given as “high-land”; or, “Hjalti’s land,”--after
a man whose name occurs in ancient Norse literature; or, “Hilt-land,”
in allusion to an imagined resemblance of the configuration of the
archipelago to the hilt of a sword. Many remains, in the form of stone
circles and “brochs,” are still to be seen. The people were converted
to Christianity in the sixth century by Irish missionaries, but the
Norse language and customs survived in Foula till the end of the
eighteenth century. Besides the remains of old Scandinavian forts,
there are ruins of twenty ancient chapels. Fitful Head is the Ultima
Thule of the ancients. Unst is the most northerly island of the group.
Near Lerwick is the largest and best-preserved of the old Pictish
towers, so numerous along the coast and which long served for beacon
fires and signals.
The scenery is bleak and dreary, consisting of treeless and barren
tracts rich in peat and boulders. The summer is almost nightless, print
being legible at midnight; but in winter the days are only six hours
long, though the nights are frequently illuminated with brilliant
displays of the aurora borealis. As for visitors, the whales, of
various species, are perhaps more numerous than human outsiders, being
from time to time captured in the bays and sounds. The natives are
daring cragsmen, and hunt the waterfowl, which live in immense variety
and numbers on the cliffs. In one place is Gallows Hill, where they
used to hang witches and criminals.
It was probably in this region, so long subject to the incursions of
the Danes and Norsemen, that the story of the thistle, now the national
emblem, arose. A Danish army was moving at night to surprise the Scots,
when one of the invaders in his bare feet stepped on a thistle and felt
something not pleasant. His howl of pain awakened the sleeping host and
the Scots, seizing their weapons, drove off the enemy. Later the emblem
was stamped on coins and the Order of the Thistle, or Order of St.
Andrew, was established.
The Shetlanders are famous for their skill with both needles and looms.
It is interesting to note that knitting is quite a modern invention;
yet what an addition to the resources of civilization and what an asset
of the sedentary life it has become! How handsomely it supplemented the
æon-old art of weaving! In the Shetlands knitting has helped notably
to enrich life and supplement industry in a region where existence
is hard. To these islands the gift came from Spain, the original
country of Santa Claus, in which many of our air castles lie. It was
through Holland that the red robe and ecclesiastical associations
of St. Nicholas came first to us, but it was by way of Norway that
his fur-trimmed cap and coat, somewhat shortened, and his reindeers,
arrived later in America; but to the Shetlands the Spaniards came in a
ship direct.
From the survivors of a vessel in the Armada of Philip II, which went
ashore in 1588, the Shetlanders are said to have acquired the art of
knitting the colored hosiery for which they are noted. The shipwrecked
Spanish sailors taught the people how to prepare dyes from the plants
and lichens, and many of the patterns still show signs of Moorish
origin.
Shetland’s starting-point of chronology was this year, 1588, when the
Spanish admiral, commanding the Duke of Medina, Sidonia’s flagship, was
wrecked on this iron shore. About two hundred of the would-be invaders
of Britain were rescued and lived, with the hardy islanders of Fair
Island, on shell fish and wild fowl, until the monotony and sparseness
of such unusual diet drove them to the “mainland.” There they were
kindly received and were subsequently sent to Scotland. This name
“Fair” comes from the Norse “faar,” a sheep, which is also the meaning
in the name of Faroe Islands, which belong to Denmark.
At Oban we wondered at the fine knitted goods made in the Shetlands,
each parish having its own specialty. This is true particularly of Fair
Island on which the Spaniards were shipwrecked. Traces of the visit
of these Southerners, both economic, moral, and physical, as we have
noted, are still discernible. So delicate is the workmanship and so
amazingly fine the fabric that stockings have been knitted which could
be drawn through a finger ring. The women do most of the farm-work,
laying aside the hoe and spade to spend their spare time with the
needles in knitting caps, gloves, stockings, and waistcoats of the most
varied patterns and in many combinations of color. In one of Murillo’s
pictures, in the Dulwich Galleries, near London, is that famous one of
the Flower Girl. She wears a shawl, which shows the pretty patterns
reproduced in the knitted work of the Fair Island fair. “Parallel
lines, diamonds, crosses, mathematical figures of every bright color
are here, intermixed thread by thread, in the brightest contrast and
beauty, each row being about one inch in size.”
Fishing is the chief occupation in the Shetlands and the mainstay of
existence of the men, who with their families are very primitive and
orthodox--for “orthodoxy,” of the traditional sort, besides being very
easy, is a great saving of brain labor. Of old, the Dutch used to
control the fisheries, and during their handling of them, it is said
they derived a total sum of more than a billion dollars in profits
from the business. One must read “The Pirate,” by Scott, to get the
atmosphere of this little island world.
In the Town Hall at Lerwick, which is the capital of the Shetland
Islands, are modern stained-glass windows which illustrate the history
of the Shetlands. Visitors go by steamer to the Shetlands, chiefly to
behold the wonderful cliff scenery, and men of science to study the
work of glaciers. So well used have these wonderful graving-tools
of the Almighty been, in ages past, that it is said that no place in
the Shetland Isles is more distant than three miles from the sea.
Scott’s last novel, which he named “Castle Dangerous,” refers not to
this insular group, but what a good name for these remote regions of
Britain, so feared by sailors, the title of his romance would make!
Yet in addition to Nature’s handiwork, done by glaciers, and to
the weird scenery of the rocks, chiselled by ice and lashed by the
ever-corroding sea waves, there are works of early man peculiar to the
whole north of Scotland beyond the Great Glen or Caledonian Canal,
which awaken curiosity, challenge attention, and hold the interest of
the thoughtful.
These are the round towers, called “burghs,” “brochs,” or “Picts’
castles.” We noticed these in Sutherland and Caithness. They are
cylinders of masonry tapering upward into a truncated cone, or are
waisted, like a dice-box. The walls, composed of an outer and an
inner concentric shell of untrimmed stone, have been evenly set, but
without mortar. The rude masonry is bound together by four or five
courses of slabs of slate, placed crosswise, so as to leave, in the
thickness of the walls, a gallery of inclined plane winding up to the
top, like a cork-screw. They are lighted by small openings or slits
in the inside. The rest of the wall is filled in with loose stones,
and it may measure in thickness from ten to fifteen feet. The towers
vary in height, from twenty-five to forty feet, and in diameter, from
thirty to fifty. The little doors, on the ground level, are low and
narrow; sometimes not over three feet high. There are over four hundred
examples of these towers in the north and northwest of Scotland, and
in the isles, but are all more or less ruined. In the Shetlands are
seventy-five; in the Orkneys, seventy; in Caithness, seventy-nine; in
Sutherland, sixty; on Long Island, thirty-eight; in Skye, thirty, etc.
Not less remarkable are these stony memorials of the past than are the
peculiarities of the religion, social life, dress, and literary aspects
of the Highlanders and North Scottish people--composed as they are
of Norse and Celtic strains. These have blended to produce a race of
people that differs perceptibly from the southern Scotch Lowlanders.
Moreover, in the north and west there was not, as in the south,
such a long-continued struggle of many and varied elements, local,
continental, religious, artistic, moral, and economic, nor, until a
century or two ago, such a blending of many ethnic stocks, but only of
two or three.
This comparative isolation on the one hand, and exposure to, and
penetration by, the manifold forces of culture on the other,
have left their differing results visible in both history, human
characteristics, and deposits of thought. Civilization is of the south
and the Lowlands; but Scottish music and poetry, in their nascent,
original, most forceful forms, are of the north and west. This is
true, also, because among the most potent causes of difference are the
aspects of nature, so strikingly in contrast as one nears England or
Norway.
Scottish song and verse were born among the mountains nearer the
North Star, and the first bards were hunters and cragsmen. In the
early poetry and music of no land, more than in that of Scotland, are
primitive art and pre-ancient nature more in accord. “Amid all the
changes of human feeling and action, we seem to hear the solemn surge
of the Atlantic breakers, or the moan of the wind across the desolate
moors, or the sigh of the pine woods, or the dash of the waterfalls and
the roar of the floods as the rain-clouds burst among the glens.”
The poems of Ossian mirror, not the Lowland life and scenery, but that
of the north and west. This is proof of the age-long differences that
once divided Scotland. Archibald Geikie, geologist and prose poet,
who has been familiar with the scenery of the western Highlands from
boyhood, believes that, laying Macpherson aside altogether, there is in
the poems of Ossian “a true poetry of local form and color, which could
only have been created in the Highlands, but which must be of old
date, for it alludes to characteristics that have long since passed
away.... If poetry was to take birth in these regions and to deal
largely with outer nature, as well as with human feeling and action, it
must have been essentially Ossianic--sad, weird, and solemn.”
Geikie says, again, that in “the well-known contrast in style and
treatment between the northern and southern ballads, our national
poetry seems to me to lead us back to the fundamental distinctions
between the physical features of the border country and those of more
southern and civilized parts of England.... The varied scenery of that
wild borderland forms the background of the scenery in the poems, and
according to their themes, we find ourselves among rough moss-hags, or
in fertile dale, on bare moorland, or sheltered clowe, by forest side
or river ford, amid the tender green of birken shaws, or the sad russet
of dowie dens.... In the southern ballad, on the other hand, the local
coloring is absent, or at least is so feeble that it could not have
had the dominant influence which is exercised upon the imagination of
the Northern minstrels.... To my mind this tame, featureless character
is suggestive of the sluggish streams and pleasing but unimpressive
landscape amid which the southern minstrels sang.”