The Early English Settlement of Orkney and Shetland
31/10/07 10:18

Graeme Davis on how he came to write
The Early English Settlement of Orkney and Shetland.

The idea for The Early English Settlement of Orkney and Shetland came to me somewhere in the middle of my second and very uncomfortable night on a bunk on a Smyril line ferry from Shetland to Iceland. It was noisy, the sea was rough, and sleep just wasn’t going to happen. Rather, I started to read a book I had picked up in Shetland giving an account of what the author regarded as the Old Norse language spoken in Orkney and Shetland. Though this is the standard view, to me as a specialist in medieval languages it just didn’t add up. Many of the fragmentary texts from Orkney and Shetland simply looked wrong to be Old Norse. Seeking to pass the time I started listing the areas where the Orkney and Shetland texts were wrong, and to my surprise realised that they were wrong in a regular manner. There had to be some other explanation for just what language this was.

Of course it is a long way from an idea to a book. Underlying this book is research into the now-extinct language Norn, for centuries the mother tongue of Orcadians and Shetlanders. A central concept is the realisation that the language is something different from just a dialect of the Viking language, Old Norse. While clearly very close to Old Norse, it has features which mark it as distinctive to Orkney and Shetland. Embedded within Orkney and Shetland Norn is a linguistic fossil of a very early Germanic language, something which was present in Orkney and Shetland centuries before the Viking arrival. I’ve been able to contextualise this material, taking into account historical sources and considering evidence from DNA and archaeology.

This book adds a new chapter to the early history of Orkney and Shetland, which is not set out elsewhere today. Within an already very rich cultural and ethnic mix must be added one more people, the Early English, who settled in Orkney and Shetland a century or more before they settled in England. It provides a framework for answering some of the long-term puzzles in Orkney and Shetland history. It gives a reason why in a corner of the world so extensively worked over by archaeologists no evidence of a ‘coming of the Vikings’ has been found. It suggests a reason why place names are so overwhelmingly Germanic in origin. It shows that the language Norn is a home-grown product of the islands, not merely an offshoot of the Viking language. It suggests that the literary texts in that language which have survived are a precious remnant of a unique and vibrant Orkney and Shetland culture. The one long text we have in that language – The Ballad of Hildina – is a work of literature to be appreciated for its distinctive style and high quality.