THE ORKNEYS AND SHETLAND.* Tuts book is so enjoyable, contains
so much solid information, and is in all important respects such a conscientious perform- ance, that we hurry at once to discharge the necessary duty of fault-finding. We should have had nothing but praise for Mr. Tudor, had he not introduced into his narratives and de- scriptions an exasperating amount of the slang and hideous jocosities of the race-course, the billiard-room, and that portent of the day, the sporting journal. What are we to think of such writing as "Verily, Earls Robert and Patrick had esta- blished a healthy funk in the Orcadian mind ? " Then Mr. Tudor is so fond of little sneers at churches and clergymen, that when one gets accustomed to his style, one turns over every fresh page in nervous dread lest he find a Dissenting minister described in gamin phraseology as "the reverend bloke," or "the cove in the pulpit," or, " the party with the white choker ;" and it is owing in all probability to accident that before we have done with the book we are not asked to sup on such horrors. Finally, there is far more of vulgarity than of humour in writing like this about a mysterious rock carving :—" Now Jeri Riignvald had a daughter called Ingired or Ingigerd, who was married to Erik Slagbrellir, shortly after her father's return to the Orkneys. Can Erik in a spoons, fit have cut this tribute to his young woman's good looks ?" The next time Mr. Tudor writes a book for the general public, and intended from its character to be of a permanent value as a work of reference, jet him remember that in fifteen or twenty years the School Board system will have swept such monstrosities as " spoony " and " funk " into the dust-bin of oblivion. He should, indeed, have secured for his share of "The Orkneys and Shetland " the revision of his coadjutors, who have written so carefully on the geology of these interesting islands.
When, however, the reader has trained himself to shut his eyes—it is by no means easy to do so, we confess —to the un- lovely peculiarities of Mr. Tudor's style, he will find a great deal in this book to admire. Mr. Tudor's enthusiasm and industry place him far in advance of ordinary guide-book makers. He -writes as one who had been repeatedly over every inch of the ground be describes and discourses on, and had learned positively to love it. The tourist will find here abundant And accurate information of the kind he needs when he reaches what is to him a terra incognita, about hotels, steamers, land conveyances, and the like. Mr. Tudor has ransacked all the authorities, from the Norse sagas to the daily newspapers of the day, bearing on the history and industries of his favourite islands. The book is everything that could be desired, alike from the historical and the topographical point of view. The maps, the geological and botanical chapters, a very full glossary and index, and appendices, including elaborate statis- tical tables, also deserve a word of praise. Mr. Tudor has, too, a quick eye, and some of his " graphic " writing is happy enough. Any one who has seen a congregation of those absurd -sea-fowl the puffins will recognise the truth of his description of them as " grave, aldermanic-looking birds." When he divests himself of his fantastic garb of slang, he can write, not bril- • The Orkneys and Shetland: their Past and Present Mute. By John R. Tudor. With Chapters on Geology, by Benjamin N. Peach and John Horne ; Notes on the Flora of the Orkneys, by William Irvine Fortesme; and Notes on the Flora of Shetland. by Peter White. London : Edward Stanford. 1883.
liantly, perhaps, but realistically, and to the point, as thus :— "It was a still, intensely cold night in August, with not a breath of air stirring, and the surface of the sea outside was like a painted ocean,' yet the roar of the tide over the shallows was something appalling, the only thing the writer can liken it to being the hurtling rush, on a still, frosty night, down an incline, of a heavily-laden goods train."
It was in 1468 that the Orkneys and Shetland came into the hands of James III. of Scotland, as a pledge for the dower of the Norwegian Princess whom he espoused, and as that pledge they have remained connected with the British Empire up to the present time. Before that date they had enjoyed three cen-
turies of the rule of the Norse Jarls, who figure in the Sagas, of whom the daring Thorfinn and the pions Magnus, who, having been assassinated by his own cousin, became the patron saint of a cathedral of Kirkwall, seem to have been the most remarkable. The Jarls had overthrown a Celtic Christianity, as is proved by
many curious antiquarian discoveries of recent date. It may be doubted if the Orcadians, and still more the Shetlanders, benefited, at all events at first, by becoming subjects of the Scotch Monarchy. The Earls of Angus, Stratherne, and St.
Clair, and their clerical accomplices or rivals, were every whit as rapacious as the Jarls. The islanders were spared, however, most of the political and ecclesiastico-religious storms that swept the mainland. They had, indeed, visit's from Bothwell and Montrose, but it may be doubted if these made very much more stir than the later exploits of the pirate Gow, which are the central incidents of one of Scott's most spirited romances. The Orcadians took much more quickly and kindly to Scotch ways, customs, and laws than the Shetlanders, who " remained till nearly the end of the sixteenth century, to all intents and purposes, as Scandinavian, not only in their customs, but also in their language, as if they bad been still subjects of the Norwegian Crown." The Shetlanders are, indeed, essentially Scandinavians still.
There is almost as great a difference in character and pursuits between the inhabitants of Shetland and of the Orkneys as there is between the grotesque and rugged grandeur of the scenery of the one group of islands, and the somewhat flat monotony which characterises the other. There is a world of truth in the shrewd saying, quoted by Mr. Tudor,—" Shetlander is a fisherman who has a farm ; the Orcadian a farmer who has a boat." The Shetlander seems to have been, and, indeed, to be still, a rather easy-going, simple creature, though not without the cunning that is frequently found associated with simplicity. Up to 1826 he allowed the enter- prising Dutch to reap the important "harvest of the sea" in the shape of the herring fishing, and even yet the Scheveningen
bomschuits "coin money," as Mr. Tudor would, no doubt say. The Orcadians have of late made great strides in material prosperity. Mr. Tudor says bankruptcy among the farmers of the Orkneys is unknown, and that during the four months he spent in wander-
ing through the islands in 1880, he never saw a bare-footed man, woman, or child, nor was he once accosted by a beggar. In the bettering of the condition of the Shetlanders, Mr. Tudor makes proposals which we may quote without comment :-
" So long as the present crofter-fisherman system continues, so long will the evils exposed by the Truck Commission, although they may have been lessened since 1872, continue. With the best inten- tions in the world, so long as farm produce, stock, and fish appear on oue side of the account, whilst rent and goods sold and delivered are on the other, a state of things that is inevitable so long as fishing and farming are combined, there will always be an idea, erroneous though it may be, that a lesser price is paid for what is sold, and a larger for what is purchased, than should be the case. Again, at the present time not only are the men, as often as not, compelled to be at their farms, when they might to greater advantage be prosecuting the fishing, but the land itself does not receive the development which it is capable of. To render anything like permanent improvement possible, not only in the cultivation of the land, but also in the condition and morale of the people, the writer believes the following changes to be necessary : — 1st. The separation of farming from fishing, and the prosecution of each industry by men who devote their whole energies to whichever pur- suit they take up. 2nd. This of course would necessitate larger hold- ings than exist at present. 3rd. The abolition of the present yearly tenancy, with its forty days' notice to quit, and the substitution of leases of sufficient length to protect the cultivator against loss, and to make it worth his while to cultivate his land on somewhat better agricultural principles than he does at present. 4th. The abolition of the scathold system, or, if it is retained by each proprietor, after his own scathold has been marked off from that belonging to adjacent owners, so far as his own tenants are concerned, the stinting the num- ber of stack kept by each tenant. That many will say the foregoing propositions are impossible in Shetland, the writer is prepared for. Long-line fishing with large boats was said to be impossible in 1876, and in 1877 there were only eleven boats larger than sixareens registered in Shetland, last year there were 117. We have seen the enormou‘strides that have been made in the Orkneys in the last forty years, and once matters are put on a straight and satisfactory footing in Shetland, there is no reason why a similar improvement in the condition of the district and its inhabitants should not take place, and that, too, without either depopulating the islands or convert- ing them into huge sheep farms."
As might be expected, much of the entertainment provided by Mr. Tudor in this volume consists of folk-lore and "good stories," associated largely with alcohol and clergymen. The Shetland minister who, in the days when wreckers reaped their harvest, prayed, " If it please Thee to cause helpless ships to be cast on the shore, oh ! dinna forget the poor island of Sands," seems to have been almost as frank as his Ojkney brother who, on being charged with drunkenness, replied, " Reverend Moderator, I do drink as other gentlemen do." Some of the old Shetland superstitions are interesting, even if they cannot be said to be altogether admirable :— " klehermen foretold, from the knots in the bottom boards of a boat, whether she would be lucky at the fishing or not ; be upset under sail, or be cast away; and Edmondston stated that he had known boats to be rejected and torn up in consequence of such a prophecy. When on their way to their boats fishermen were careful to avoid meeting any one who was supposed to be unlucky, and especially, a minister. If a man trod on the tongs (ciivin), or was asked where ho was going to, it was considered useless for him to go to the fishing that day. Once afloat, they were careful not to turn the boat withershins, that is, against the course of the sun. When setting their lines they avoided, and do still, mentioning certain objects, except by certain special words or phrases. Thus a knife is called skunie, or tullie; a church, bilanhoos, or banehoos ; a minister, upslanda, hoyd.een, or preslingolva ; the Devil, da Auld Chield, da Sorrow, da ill-healt (health), or da black tief ; the cat, kirser, fining, vengla, or foodin. Mr. Arthur Lanrenson is of opinion that the objection to the minister or char, h being mentioned arose from some lingering, half-pagan notion, that the sea-god would be jealous of any reference to the new faith. If, when hauling the lines, a stone should be brought up on a hook, it is carefully taken ashore, as it would be unlucky to throw it back into the sea. Saturday is looked upon as a lucky day for the smacks to sail for the FAroe fishing, though an irreligious Englishman might fancy that the crews chose that day to escape kirk on the following one. It was long considered unlucky'to rescue people from drowning. Scott mentions that when the crew of a wrecked vessel were warping themselves ashore in Ernst by a hawser, a native cut the rope, lest they should consume their winter stock of provisions. Mr. Lanrenson gives three instances as having occurred within forty years before he wrote. In the first instance, a fisherman not only refused to attempt to save a drowning man, but even took the oars out of his own boat to prevent others doing so. In the second, three men looked calmly on at a neighbour drowning, and then walked home. In the third, a man pulled past a floating woman, and took no heed of her. Mr. Laurenson's theory is that there is an idea that the sea must have its victims, and, if defrauded, will avenge itself
on the person who intervenes." •
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