Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2004, Page 71

Norn
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no other” (Scott 1928:298). As Scott himself stresses, the reality is
more likely to have been that Magnus was himself a Norwegian; the
best place to have learnt how to communicate the word of God to
monoglot Unst dwellers must have been in Unst itself. Another indi-
cation of widespread knowledge of Scots is the 1577 report of an
inquiry into a comprehensive series of “complaints” made by the
Shetlanders — directed primarily against the depredations of
Laurence Bruce of Cultmalindie and Robert Stewart (Ballantyne and
Smith 1999:183-224). This document involved, and was of the utmost
importance to, large numbers of ordinary islanders. It is in Scots
throughout and in several places the complainants “depone in ane
voce” i.e. they all give the same testimony. It is scarcely conceivable
they could have done this without a good understanding of the terms
of the complaints they were making.
There are in fact various pieces of anecdotal evidence to suggest
that the Shetlanders were good at picking up foreign tongues — as one
might expect in a society where people were regularly confronted with
more than one language and needed more than one in the transaction
of matters of importance to them. A letter from the Lord High
Commissioner of Scotland citing “merchant skippers and others, that
has been in Shetland” notes (Ball 1965:8; I am grateful to Brian Smith
for this reference):
the constant uninterrupted trade they [the Shetlanders] ever have had with
the Hollander, Hamburger, Luebecker and Bremeners. So that there is
none in that Island of six or seven years of age, but they can speak
Hollands or Norse.
The trilingualism depicted here is confirmed by several other
sources (cf., e.g., Stewart 1964:163-5). Of course, such accounts
need to be considered critically. We must enquire about the ultimate
source of the information on language use, and whether the person
recording it had ever set foot in the Northern Isles. We must be aware
that names of languages have nothing like the precise sense we
invest them with. Thus what appears to be the native Scandinavian
of Orkney and Shetland may be called “Gothick”, “Norse”, “Norn”,