Storytelling in Shetland might accompany any sort of
indoor activity - carding, spinning or knitting for the women, winding
straw or heather ropes, making straw creels or mending nets for the men
perhaps - and it could shade imperceptibly into everyday gossip. Apart
from a few tales like The Boy and the Brüni’ which seem to have been
told only to children (generally, according to Tom Tulloch, with a moral
message), every sort of story, however wonderful, would be part of local
tradition. Travellers can generally draw a firm line between the
imaginary tales told just for amusement, where the usual hero is ‘Jack’
or ‘Silly Jack’ and seldom a traveller himself, and ‘true’ tales
of encounters with ghosts or Burkers which concern named people and
places (and even in these, if they are not about himself, Stanley
Robertson says he will freely change the names from telling to telling
just for variety). In Shetland not only tales of second sight or the
press-gang but migratory fairy legends and international wonder-tales
would often he told, if not of named people, certainly of named places
far back in time. Even that most imaginative of Shetland storytellers,
the late Brucie Henderson of Arisdale, Yell, noted for his ability to
make a story out of anything’ and a dramatic story at that, nearly
always named the place where the story happened and often added people’s
names and even precise dates - the last almost certainly invented on the
spot each time he told the story - to set it firmly in the historical
record. Tom Tulloch was surely showing a very modern scholarly
detachment from his own tradition when he remarked that though his
family set the scene of ‘The Boy and the Brüni’ at the Erne’s
Knowe, storytellers elsewhere would no doubt have set it at a knoll
close to their own homes.
The atmosphere of the stories differs from that of
travellers’ tales not only in this sense of belonging to a settled
order but in the whole attitude to what is being told. A traveller may
tell stories of princes and witches (seldom of fairies, who belong too
much to the ground they live in) from an outsider’s point of view, but
still get involved with their emotions. Women in particular are inclined
to take a sentimental view, though not excessively so: the family bond
was paramount to travellers, and cruel parents or disloyal children
would naturally be abhorred and good ones praised. Shetland
story-telling has more of the dour phlegmatic outlook of the supposedly
typical Lowland Scot, or perhaps the laconic intensity of the heroes of
Norse sagas. The story is left normally to speak for itself, and even
the speeches of the characters tend to betray little emotion, though
here there are differences in approach: Brucie Henderson’s snarling
voice for a foiled witch contrasts with Tom Tulloch’s preference for
indirect speech over direct. Shetland humour, according to the late
George Nelson, is generally cruel, consisting of skjimp or afftak,
sarcasm or the deflation of pretense; though there is also a rich
vein of picturesque speech and hyperbole in tall tales and anecdotes of
character, where the speaker -a Shetlander of course - is laughed with
rather than at. But the quick-fire fun-poking and the occasional common
touches which undermine the whole wonder-tale genre in Andrew Stewart’s
storytelling belong to a quite different tradition.
This brings in a final point, where again Shetland is closer to the
few older Scots folk-tales that have been printed than to traveller
renderings. Few Lowland travellers speak a very broad Scots, even in
Aberdeenshire, and unless they use cant words are generally much easier
for any speaker of standard English to understand than, say, the Scots
dialogue of the Waverley Novels. The decorative runs’ such as the Hey
the road’ passage or the alternative through sheep’s parks and
bullocks’ parks and all the high and low mountains of Yarrow’ are
rarer, briefer and less high-flown than their Gaelic equivalents.
Shetlanders have a stronger accent and a far richer dialect, mainly
Scots in basic structure (apart from the use of ‘is’ rather than ‘has’
to form the perfect tense) but full of Norse vocabulary. (Some features
of the accent can be very confusing to outsiders, for instance the
alternation between wh and qu which can make a Yell man
say ‘white’ for ‘quite’, but a Papa Stour man talk of a ‘long
quite beard’. We have avoided over-phonetic transcriptions but tried
to suggest the dialect, and in one particularly confusing case, the
change of voiced and unvoiced th to something more like d and
t respectively, have left the usual spelling when it is possible
to tell, say, ‘there’ from ‘dare’, except in ‘The Fiddler o’
Gord’, whose teller maintains that for his dialect at least the sounds
are identical, as they are written in the Shetland books.) There are
also hundreds of dialect proverbs and turns of phrase which can add
greatly to the expressiveness of the storytelling, particularly dialogue
- ‘the thing can tell a tale ‘at canna bear a burdeen’, ‘Gud be
about thee.’, ‘I warrant thee thu couldna..?’, ‘I have a craa to
pick wi him!’, ‘they focht and they better focht.’ The result can
he a spare and rather formal use of language, with a poetic ring to it
akin to the older Scots tales and indeed to the best Gaelic
storytelling, though perhaps it leaves more details to the hearer’s
imagination than the vivid colloquial torrent of most travellers’
style. -AJB
