Swimming with Seals

by Victoria Whitworth

  Since 1997 and the re-establishment of the Parliament in Edinburgh, there has been a lot of money available for the promotion of the Gaelic language in Scotland. One of the most successful projects has been the establishment of Gaelic-medium primary schools, and the teaching of Gaelic in English-speaking schools. But Orkney has never been Gaelic-speaking. Scandinavian from the ninth century, the islands only came under the Scottish crown in 1468, by which time Scots was firmly established as the language of power in the royal court. The funds for promoting Gaelic were made available to Orkney after 1997, but have never been taken up. A semi-serious suggestion that Orcadian children would do better to learn Norwegian gained considerable traction. Norn, the Scandinavian language spoken in Orkney, only faded out of use in the eighteenth century. Enough scraps survive for it to be reconstituted, but it is a Frankenstein’s monster of a language, cobbled together from spare parts and artificially reanimated. No one has ever seriously suggested teaching the primary school kids Norn. There are hints, though, that Norn had great riches, that the world of Orkneyinga Saga rumbled on through the Reformation and into the hungry years of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

  In 1761 the English poet Thomas Gray came across some Old Norse poetry in Latin translation, in Thomas Bartholin’s splendidly named Three Books of Danish Antiquities Concerning the Causes of the Contempt of Death by the Danes while They Were still Heathens. The poems seized Gray’s imagination, and he translated them into English. A popular success, their publication is a significant milestone in the re-emergence of awareness of Viking culture in the modern world. If you picture a Viking warrior as a fatalist Odin-worshipper who laughs in the face of danger it’s Gray – and ultimately Bartholin – you have to thank.

  One of the poems Gray translated was ‘The Song of Darrad’, a masterpiece of the Norse macabre, which Gray renamed ‘The Fatal Sisters’. Darrad, a Caithness man, sees mysterious riders entering a bothy. Through a crack he spies on women weaving on a loom made from spears, strung with human guts, weighted with human heads. As they weave they sing. In Gray’s words:

  Now the storm begins to lower,

  (Haste, the loom of hell prepare,)

  Iron-sleet of arrowy shower

  Hurtles in the darkened air.

  Glittering lances are the loom,

  Where the dusky warp we strain,

  Weaving many a soldier’s doom,

  Orkney’s woe, and Randver’s bane…

  Soon after the publication of ‘The Fatal Sisters’, a minister in Orkney’s northernmost island, North Ronaldsay, hit on the idea of reading it to some of his elderly parishioners, thinking they would be interested in a poem that had so much relevance to the history of their islands. He had got as far as verse three or four when they interrupted him: ‘We know this poem,’ they said. ‘Don’t you remember?’ When he had asked them if they could sing him anything in Norn, they had sung it. Many times. They called it ‘The Enchantresses’. But their version hasn’t survived.

  I want to be a time-travelling fly on the wall, to watch the faces of the old crofters as they recognize the echoes of a familiar pagan song, read to them by a voice more used to lengthy sermons or metrical psalms. Were they in the church, or in the minister’s parlour, or gathered around the hearth in one of the croft houses? The minister – was he smirking and superior, or bouncing and eager to share Gray’s poem? When his patronage was so abruptly scuppered, did he blush or bluster?

  And why on earth did he never write ‘The Enchantresses’ down?

  In 1761, when Gray came across Bartholin’s wonderful book on Danish antiquities, it was already a century old. Bartholin had been a maverick in his medical dynasty: his brother Caspar gave his name to the Bartholin glands, the source of vaginal lubricant in a sexually aroused woman, and both their father and grandfather were noted physicians and anatomists. But Thomas Bartholin’s interest in death and corpses had taken him in a different direction, cataloguing rune-stones and ferreting in old Icelandic manuscripts. Discovering the dark magic of ‘The Song of Darrad’, letting it out of its cage to fly free, until it fluttered to rest in Orkney – and turned out never to have been caged at all.

  The North Ronaldsay minister in that story stands in for so many of us ferry-loupers, with our readiness to patronize, our assumptions about this place and its people. Writers about Orkney tend to stress the wildness of the islands, their barrenness, their distance from the trials of modern life. Any article about the archipelago in the national press gets us playing Orkney Cliché Bingo – so many points for references to the wind, to the Neolithic, puffins, seals; a bonus point for every use of the words remote or timeless. But it’s all a question of perspective. Look at a map of the North Atlantic rather than a map of the United Kingdom. In its context, Orkney is mellow, fertile, central. Ground frosts and lying snow are rare. The insular maritime climate makes it one of the most temperate places on the planet, with just four degrees Celsius separating the average winter and summer temperatures. Rainfall is comparatively low but still plentiful; fresh water is abundant, as are natural harbours. Grass and oats and barley flourish.

  The first time I visited Shetland, around a hundred miles further north, on the 60th parallel rather than the 59th, with much more jagged geology and acid soil, folk asked me if I’d been there before. ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I’ve visited Orkney several times.’ A roll of the eye, a shake of the head, the smile you’d have got if you’d told a Yorkshireman that you’d often been to Kent. To Shetlanders, Orkney is the south, the soft option.

  Turn your map upside-down, and the centrality of the archipelago becomes even more apparent. Set your prow towards Orkney from any of the wind’s airts – not just rocky Shetland or Faeroe, but from the peat-bogs of Caithness or the mountains of Sutherland, the much more rugged Western Isles, from Iceland or the Norwegian fjords – and you could be forgiven for thinking that you had stumbled on some snake-free Paradise. Wealthy and well connected, not romantic and remote.

  To the untutored eye – to my eye, when I was twenty-one – Orkney does look mythic. Elemental. Moving air, light, rock, water, grass. Cattle an Iron Age chieftain would exult in. Fat sheep. Houses built with stones you might find on the beach. A culture of self-sufficiency, bricolage, make do and mend. A dog whelk on the sand, worn away to reveal its perfectly graded spiral core. Seals barely distinguishable from speckled boulders. Nature stripped to its essential components. Very easy to let your eyes drift out of focus, the millennia fade away like mist from the purple hills; to repopulate Skara Brae with sturdy girls from five thousand years ago, seashells braided into their hair, speaking an unknown language with a recognizable easy lilt, their mothers hunkered round the hearth fires, eating hazelnuts, trout, gannets’ eggs. Time feels gossamer-thin, the profiles of hill and cliff eternal verities.

  Yet this is romance, seductive but patronizing, editing the landscape to suit a particular tourism and heritage agenda. The complex of Neolithic sites in West Mainland, Maeshowe and Skara Brae and the stone circles, are about the only place in the archipelago from which you can see no wind turbines: to mar the horizon with technology would be to risk losing UNESCO World Heritage status. Farmers mutter and grumble, worried that they will be prevented from raising new barns and byres in the vicinity as well.

  Orcadians have looked wistfully back to a golden age of Viking owner-occupiers under Norwegian law that respected their rights, all swept away by being brought into the feudal kingdom of the Scots in 1468. Whether true or not, it’s a powerful myth, a shaper of consciousness. Partly as a result, Orkney has a different relationship with England from most of the rest of Scotland. The Orcadian national narrative is one of oppression by the Scots, with Westminster legislation such as the Crofting Acts of the 1880s bringing some relief. Island politicians play Holyrood and Westminster off against each other with consummate skill. In the independence referendum of 2014 Orkney had the lowest turn-out for Yes in the whole of Scotland.

  *

/>   Ice on the puddles, frost on the windscreen. The rising sun rolling in a near-flat arc along the crest of the hill, and the waning moon low in the west. Clear and almost cloudless. Two herons on the beach, lifting and flapping low over me as I went into the flat but choppy water. The sand has been stripped back by the storms – on the right of the breakwater the underlying rock strata are now fully exposed again. South-westerly breeze (but cold), ebbing tide, beach very weedy. No seals.

  *

  It’s no surprise that the Scots lairds got the reputation that they did in Orkney. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they were largely rack-renting absentees, and even when in the nineteenth century they were more hands-on and philanthropical they still had extraordinary power. David Balfour owned Eynhallow (and much else), and when in 1851 a mystery disease, possibly typhoid from a contaminated well, caused several deaths he decided his tenants needed to relocate to healthier surroundings, on another, less-marginal island. The four families on the island had been living in an interconnected warren of little houses, and the laird felt these were best burned. (He was interested in public health; the Balfour Hospital in Kirkwall where I got my plantar fasciitis diagnosed was another of his projects.) Elsewhere in Scotland lairds who forcibly moved their tenants and burned their homes got a terrible reputation, but David Balfour’s name has a Teflon coating.

  As the timber partitions and straw thatch of the Eynhallow crofters’ homes went up in flames the skeletons of much older stone buildings were revealed. The site has no known history, but it has been argued – on very shoogly evidence – that it must be one of the recorded monasteries whose location within Orkney are unknown. Earlier generations of scholars read the ruin as a typical Cistercian or Benedictine house – which it is certainly not – because they badly wanted to prove that the outlying corners of Scotland were fully part of the European mainstream. A later generation of interpreters emphasized the unusual layout and alignment of the church and associated buildings, now wanting Eynhallow to manifest a quirky North Atlantic identity. A more recent suggestion is that it is not a monastery at all, but a church attached to a centre for processing the natural riches of the Eynhallow estate, which belonged to the bishopric of Orkney at the end of the Middle Ages. We see what we want to see.

  Whatever its original function, the church had long slipped out of consciousness to be reborn as the matrix into which Balfour’s tenants could slot their homes, like starlings nesting in a drystone dyke. Eynhallow has been unpopulated ever since they left.

  Beyond Gurness, across Eynhallow Sound, you can make out Trumland House on Rousay, built by General Traill Burroughs in 1875 after his return from a successful army career in the Crimea and India. Traill Burroughs spent nearly twelve thousand pounds building Trumland, at a time when a crofter’s cottage cost around five. Traill Burroughs is remembered as just about the worst of the lairds, a tiny man with a bullying bellow, determined to modernize Rousay. He owned almost the whole island, and he was deeply frustrated by what he saw as the backward nature of indigenous Orkney farming practices, based on communal subsistence.

  All was tolerable as long as the tenants showed gratitude for the laird’s improvements – he built a pier; funded an annual Agricultural Show, and a School Picnic, and a Best-Kept Cottage Award; set up the first steamship service (the boat was named for his wife, the Lizzie Burroughs) – but when his money ran out, and the rents were raised, any crofter who challenged the laird was harried off the island. Traill Burroughs set them up to fail – his leases said ‘A crofter is obliged to keep his buildings in good repair, on pain of eviction’ and ‘All mineral and quarrying rights are reserved to the landlord’. If he wanted to get rid of someone, he only had to wait till they needed stone to repair a dilapidated wall. But they weren’t the fools Traill Burroughs believed them, though, those Rousay farmers: they used the local and national press to publicize their plight just as we would use Facebook and Twitter now. In the end it was the laird who fled, to die in London in 1905. That serenely rugged green and brown coastline of Rousay was a battlefield for years.

  There are quieter voices, too, echoing along these shorelines.

  Robert Rendall devoted his life to studying the molluscs of Orkney’s coast. He published both scientific and popular accounts of them; and he begins his scholarly paper ‘Mollusca Orcadensia’ by saying that its publication (in 1956) fulfils ‘a resolve made in boyhood’. He was also a poet of the Orkney landscape. His work in English is sometimes brilliant, but mostly competent, hampered by formality and full of well-worn images of nature. But at the same time he was also writing in Orcadian, and his poetry in his native language is extraordinarily powerful. He is a pastoral poet of land and shore and sea, the rhythm of the farming year, and the rise and fall of the tide.

  Both his poetry and his scientific writing are embedded in the particulars of place, including my beach: ‘For bivalves the best sandy beach on the mainland of Orkney is at Aikerness, Evie.’ The shells he records from here are wonderfully named: the Pale Venus, the Fragile File, the Distorted Scallop, the Arctic Rock-borer, the Small Wentletrap (wenteltrap is Dutch for a spiral staircase). It was Rendall who accidentally discovered the Broch of Gurness while using the grassy mound as a convenient viewpoint for painting a watercolour: the leg of his stool went down a hole, and he peered in to see a winding staircase (a wentletrap!) disappearing into the dark. He used to wander along this beach, his tweed cap in his hand, filling it with shells. I try to channel him when I do the same, but I don’t have his eye, or his knowledge.

  In one of Rendall’s best-known English poems, ‘Angle of Vision’, an Orkney man is asked if he has seen the world’s great cities, their technological marvels and ancient monuments, and he replies that he hasn’t – but he has seen the curved horizon of the Atlantic from the Birsay shore, comparing the sea to the universe, Orkney to the Earth, and the ferocious tides of the ocean to the energies that fuel the cosmos. Microcosm and macrocosm. The horizon, the limit of vision, contracts to become the edge of all there is. Orkney expands to planetary scale, suspended in interstellar waters. There’s an irony in Rendall – a man who loved to travel – claiming that the world visible from Orkney was enough – no, more than enough: it contained all that he needed and surpassed everything else he saw. There is also a bitter lesson here, central to contentment on an island. Don’t hanker. Let the horizon limit your desire.

  However, the poem of Rendall’s that haunts me is not ‘Angle of Vision’, but ‘The Fisherman’. In this ten-line poem in Orkney dialect Rendall depicts the death of an old fisherman, Jeems o’Quoys, who had spent his life taking his small boat, his yole, out into the wild waters of Eynhallow Sound to fish and set his lobster-creels under the Westness crags; and yet died at home, alone, his little cruisie lamp guttering out with its wick untrimmed. The final couplet describes how his memorial stone was raised to him by his fellows rather than his family. It peoples the exact seascape I am looking at now, both with Jeems and with his yamils, his age-mates, perhaps the other fishermen. The dark, irregular outline of the Westness crags is visible across the water from the Sands of Evie, over to the left, just past Eynhallow. Jeems attains heroic stature in the poem, despite dying what the Norse would have called a straw-death, in his bed.

  We have seen what the rosts of Eynhallow Sound can be like, and Jeems ventures out there alone, in his small wooden boat. Although yoles are no longer much used in Orkney, there are always a few moored in Stromness harbour, so their clinker-built, two-masted profile, pointed fore and aft, remains a familiar sight. They are closely related to the Viking four-oared boats or færings in which two men were buried in the ninth century at Westness on Rousay. When Rendall published this poem, in 1946, most yoles had already been fitted with outboard motors. But the material culture of the poem suggests a pre-modern world, not just the yole, but the thatch and above all the cruisie lamp, formed of two boat-shaped iron bowls, one placed above the other, the upper one holding a rush wick an
d filled with fish or seal oil, the lower catching the drips. The untended wick in Jeems’s cruisie is left to gutter itself out: an image not only of solitude but also lack of care. That no one of a younger generation commemorates him reinforces the sense that he is among the last survivors of an old world, one of a tribe who lived and worked close to the elements. The poem’s claim to authenticity is strengthened further by the reference in the last line to the ‘memorial stane’, inviting the reader to imagine the gravestone, even implying that the whole poem is inscribed on it as an epitaph.

  I wondered, when I first read this poem, whether I could find Jeems’s gravestone, or indeed any material truth behind the poem. Quoys is a common enough Orkney farm name, from Old Norse kví – enclosed field; there’s one next to our house, another on Rousay. A James Kirkness lived at the Rousay Quoys in 1871: did he inspire the poem? If so, he would have been one of General Traill Burroughs’s long-suffering tenants. Kirkness had a wife and four children, but Rendall’s poem could mean not that Jeems had no family but that they were too poor to commission a memorial.

  As it turns out, there probably never was a Jeems o’Quoys. On closer investigation, for all its bewitching local detail, the seemingly solid narrative of ‘The Fisherman’ dissipates like the haar. The name Quoys was probably chosen precisely because of that generic quality. Rendall’s poem is mapped almost word for word on an elegy by Leonidas, who wrote in the third century BC in southern Italy. Rendall knew Leonidas’s poem in Andrew Lang’s translation:

  Theris the Old, the waves that harvested,

  More keen than birds that labour in the sea,

  With spear and net, by shore and rocky bed