Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1964, Síða 159

Norn in Shetland
167
It is quite possible seventy years after Dr. Jakobsen’s
memorable study for older fluent country speakers to carry
on a conversation not entirely comprehensible to their own
teenagers or to many in their own capital, Lerwick. Still
less completely would such talk be understood in Orkney,
it would be partly incomprehensible to Scots speakers, and
almost entirely so to Englishmen. But such speakers would
have had to learn their words before the First World War.
I have been given eight test words in an island fifteen
miles from my birthplace. Four I recognised, two others
when explained had variants in my own island, the rema*
ining two were familiar to a neighbour who had had the
advantage of living with grandparents born in the 1830’s.
But the differences in pronunciation were as great as those
in any of the major Scandinavian tongues.
Low (1774), who knew no Norse, copied down
Hildinakvadet in English orthography from the recitation
of a Shetlander. He writes — “This man (William Henry,
a farmer in Guttorm in Foula) has the most knowledge of
any I found: he spoke of three kinds of poetry used in
Norn and repeated or sung by the old men, the ballad
(or romance, I suppose); the vysie or vyse, now commonly
sung to dancers, and the simple song. By the account he
gave of the matter the first seems to have been valued here
chiefly for its subject, and was commonly repeated in
winter by the fireside; the second seems to have been used
in public meetings, now only sung to the dance, and the
third at both.
“Most or all of their tales are relative to the history of
Norway; they seen to know little of the rest of Europe
but by names; Norwegian transactions they have at their
fingers’ ends”.
Edmondston (1809) says, “The Norse ballads, which a
few of the Zetlanders were in the habit of repeating about
thirty years ago, although not generally understood, were
admired for their softness of expression and smoothness of
versification”.