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.
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.”