A bit of Shetland reading

Good and useful books about Shetland

Writing The Shetland Witch began in summer 2019 and finally ended in December 2022, though is still, technically, continuing as I change a word here and there when setting up each episode for you.

I had help: from the Middleoak writing group who read and critted pieces of chapters in our monthly meetings, from my agent Stephanie Cabot for keeping on telling me to keep writing, from Una McCormack and Nicola Griffith for starting me off and keeping an eye on progress, from Tom Spray for the Old Norse, and from Val Turner, Shetland’s archaeologist, who gave my excavation writing a careful check so that it didn’t annoy any real archaeologists who might happen to read it.

Here are the books I drew from when doing my research. You might be a little surprised to see some of these sources, but this novel goes a long way, and one or two characters do a fair bit of travelling, for good, sound plot purposes. I’ve stood in all the novel’s landscapes, and used imagination to move them back in time as needed.

• Lynn Abrams, Myth and Materiality In A Woman’s World. Shetland 1800-2000 (2005).

• Mary Beard, Pompeii (2008).

• Katharine Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies (1976).

• Linda Christmas, ‘Shetland and the gift of oil’, in Chopping Down the Cherry Trees. A Portrait of Britain in the Eighties (1990).

• Kevin Crossley-Holland, The Penguin Book of Norse Myths. Gods of the Vikings (1980, 2011).

• Joan Dey, Out Skerries. An Island Community (1991).

• David Gange, The Frayed Atlantic Edge (2019).

• R G Finch (trans), The Saga of the Volsungs (1965).

• Brian Froud and Alan Lee, Faeries (1978).

• Joanne Harris, Ten Things About Writing (2020).

• Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1908).

• Paul Harvey, Shetland Summer Birds (2018).

• Homer, The Iliad (various translations).

• Stephen P Kershaw, A Brief Guide to the Greek Myths (2007).

• The Ordnance Survey Landranger maps 1:  Yell, Unst & Fetlar, 3: North Mainland and 4: South Mainland.

• Radio Saxa Vord podcast, https://saxavord.buzzsprout.com/.

• Shetland Amenity Trust website, https://www.shetlandamenity.org/.

• Shetland Community Wildlife Group website, https://shetlandcommunitywildlife.org/.

• Shetland ForWirds. Promoting Shetland Dialect, https://www.shetlanddialect.org.uk/.

• Snorri Sturluson, The Prose Edda. Norse Mythology (ed. Jesse L Byock) (2005).

• Jenny Uglow, The Pinecone (2012).

• Liz Williams, Miracles of Our Own Making. A History of Paganism (2020).

Lately I’ve discovered two more books that I wish I’d read several years ago. Both are the best sources so far that I’ve found for Shetland dialect, which I find easy to understand but hard to write as it’s more complex than my own Aberdonian, East Coast mainland dialect. There isn’t very much dialect in the novel, but what there is needs to be accurate, and readable, to give the flavour of a different way of speaking. Val gave an early section of dialect a thorough revision but new patches have appeared since then, which contain all my own mistakes.

Peter Jamieson’s Letters on Shetland (1949) is a series of essays on Shetland life in the past and the then present. It’s a curious book in itself, because he begins by pretending to be writing to a correspondent, and then gives up on that halfway through. Modern Shetland history, deep-dive detail on life on the croft, in the fishing boats, travelling at sea as a Shetland seaman, how Shetland experienced both the world wars, music, lambing and the union organisation of the Shetland knitters (he was a leading Shetland Communist, which at that period wasn’t so unusual). Reading this is like having a monologue from a strongly opinionated grandfather in your ear: sometimes boring or repetitive, but when he forgets himself he is absolutely fascinating.

Sheila Gear’s Foula. Island West of the Sun (1983) is a timeless memoir of life on a croft on Foula, an island four hours’ rowing west of Shetland. For all that she is writing about crofting in the 1970s, the farming methods are mostly pre-industrial due to topography and poverty. She’s a zoologist married to a crofter, and with her own island upbringing to make her own claim to being a Foula native. She’s an excellent writer about crofting, sheep herding, pony breeding, food preservation, birdlife, geology, economics and the seasons. Foula’s weather is more extreme than most islands experience so when she writes about storms, these really are storms. You can read more about Foula, and Sheila, here.

Both these books are reprints from Northus Shetland Classics.

Enjoy them!