The Literature of Shetland by Mark Ryan Smith (review)

If you were to listen to Hugh MacDiarmid, Shetland has never produced anything worth reading. MacDiarmid opined in his The Islands of Scotland that ‘not one of its people through all the centuries of human history has ever achieved expression on any plane of literary value whatever’ (Smith, p. 113). MacDiarmid’s offensive statement is typically tendentious yet it reflects how little valued the archipelago’s literature was in the 1930s when he resided there. Although there has been an improvement in critical awareness and understanding since then thanks to Brian Smith, Lollie Graham and Penny Fielding among others, Shetland’s literature has generally received remarkably little attention in academic and lay texts on Scottish literature.

Smith’s The Literature of Shetland improves this situation a great deal. The book provides the first comprehensive survey of the archipelago’s contributions to Scottish literature from the early nineteenth century to the present and is an excellent introduction for anyone interested in Shetlandic literature and the plurality of Scottish writing.

Shetland does not lack, as MacDiarmid contended, a literary pedigree, albeit, in comparison to many other regions of Scotland, its literary tradition is a fairly young. With its distinctive Scandinavian past and distance from the Scottish mainland, the Northern Isles were excluded from a Celtic bardic culture that blossomed in the Western Isles and Highlands before and after Culloden. Its Scandinavian heritage meanwhile did not, as on neighbouring Orkney, leave a medieval or early modern written imprint due to the disappearance of the local language, Norn, which was spoken between the ninth and eighteenth centuries. While words and fragments of ballads survived, Norn was by 1800 no longer a living language that could sustain what would have been an undoubtedly rich oral literature. Shetland’s recorded literary history begins therefore in the nineteenth century.

Shetland might not have produced an Ossianic bard or an Orkneyinga Saga but it has, as Smith reveals, produced and inspired a remarkable body of work. Rather than dwelling on absences and voids, this book showcases and informs its readers about the islands’ literary treasures. The book ranges from the little-known nineteenth-century writer Dorothea Primrose Campbell to the contemporary poet Jen Hadfield. Smith takes a broad view of what constitutes Shetlandic literature, including poems composed by MacDiarmid while he stayed on Shetland and Walter’s Scott’s Victorian blockbuster The Pirate, which Scott wrote following his visit to Shetland in 1814.

Smith includes brief biographical information and historical contexts for each writer he covers. His focus is not on critical theory but on the individual merits and concerns of each writer, and what imprint Shetland has left on their writing. Smith emphasises that he wants to show ‘a multiplicity of voices’ rather than presenting a canon (p. 245). This approach also connects to his approach to regional writing which, he argues, is to show how pluralistic both Scottish and British writing is.

Themes do emerge from the book, though. One is how authors have navigated writing about a landscape that conventionally has been perceived as ‘unpoetic’. Here the writing of the nineteenth-century poet Margaret Chalmers, in particular, fascinates. Chalmers boldly proclaimed herself to be ‘the first British Thulian quill’ (p. 14) and she repeatedly sought poetical inspiration in an environment deemed barren in both a literary and literal sense. Chalmers did indeed find a landscape worthy of poetry. It was found in ephemeral moments of beauty such as the discovery of a solitary rose on an excursion to Ness in the beautiful poem The Rose of the Rock. MacDiarmid, who was probably oblivious to Chalmers, likewise grappled with the same issue of how to read and narrate Shetland’s landscape. This can be seen in his monumental ‘On a Raised Beach’, a poem that reflects the stern landscape of the beach of Linga. Smith here provides an interesting analysis of the influence that the English travel writer and geologist Charles Doughty had on MacDiarmid.

A large number of the texts...