Excellent!

Born and raised in Orkney, Peter Marshall has written this tremendously deep and impressively detailed history through the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the ‘country of Orkney’, as Orcadians called their 70 scattered island of which only twenty are inhabited. Marshall’s intimate relationship with the islands, and Kenny Blyth’s accomplished narration add an extra dimension to the text.

One of the many threads which I enjoyed in Storm’s Edge is the development of the sea-dependent islanders’ language from the sixteenth century when Norn, a variant of Norse, was still spoken, through the centuries of gradual Scotification imposed by outside rule and invasions. Scots words with their Norse roots ,liberally used and explained by the author, are a great pleasure: from dulcie to ditties, from gunnells to glegs. Schooling in the Scots language finally wiped out Norn, but around a thousand words remained as when Orkney parents continued to call bedtime prayers with their children. Their ‘bonnie words’.

Marshall’ makes excellent use s use of contemporary sources as he recounts the history of the violent rebellions and wars which raged over the islands, almost all of it seemingly to the detriment of the impoverished Orcadians scraping a living on the rented farmsteads which they shared with their precious few cows. Bishops, kings and earls, many of them corrupt and others ‘shameless fornicators’, imposed harsh rules such as denying the islanders the right to ransack the wrecked ships of the spoils on which they depended.

The author takes us into the everyday existence of these ordinary Orcadians dependent for their survival on the sea, its seaweed, limpets ,fish and wrecks, and on the windswept and treeless soil. Using the ‘ditties’ , which were he written information on legal court business, Marshall provides vivid insights into their harsh lives.

Even more interestingly, h9 explores the inhabitants’ mindsets which made them believe in such as witchcraft, ‘charimng’ , spells, evil words - and selkies (seals which could shape-shift into humans). Between1594 and 1708, 97 witches, all but 16 0of whom were women, were executed. Later harsh Calvinist Scots teaching brought in relentless punishment for ‘sabbath breaching’. Neighbour reported neighbour for perceived breaches: a young boy was whipped for trading eggs on the Sabbath, and a mother brought to court for gathering edible seaweed for her hungry children.

A short review cannot hope to do justice to the breadth of this long, hugely rewarding book which probably needs to be read on the page, or at least listened to twice to do it justice!

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