- THE ISLE: OF ..FOULA
By Ian B. Stoughton Holbourn
The late Mr. Stoughton Holbourn was one of the few people who knew 211 about
• Foula before Mr. Michael Powell made it famous through The Edge of the World. From 1900 till his death in 1935 Mr. Holbourn was laird of this outlying • ' island of the Shetlands, and lived on it for several months every year. This book (Johnson and Greig, Lerwick, 7s. Od.) has been compiled by his wife -from papers which he left at his death. It is scrappy, as such compilations often are, a mixture of reprinted articles and notes AVtiicly -the- author 'obviously -Meant In-.. work up more fully, but it contains a great deal of most interesting Material. Mr. Holbourn was seriously and know- ledgeably interested in the island's history, geography and wild life, and in the people's customs and language. Norse was spoken till comparatively recently—Jakobsen, the philologist, took down i,000 Norse words from one man— and there are several Norse word in the rhymes and ballads which are reprinted here. Mr. Holbourn had the advantage over the professional historian, folk-lorist and philologist, in that he was writing of people he knew as friends and neigh-. bours, and not just as specimens for study. Unlike many sensitive and cultured men who are attracted to remote places on the fringes of civilisation, his eyes were not fixed on the past ; and he was as interested in the Foula of today, in the islander's struggle to get a living from the dangerous seas and grudging soil, as in the Ultima Thule of legend.
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