by Luca Fumagalli

Peter Marshall, a Scottish historian and academic born and raised in Orkney, is the author of the remarkable Storm’s Edge: Life, Earth, and Magic in the Islands of Orkney (William Collins, 2024). The book is a history of those islands from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, based on extensive archival research.

People will often talk and write about ‘the Orkneys’, but Orcadians have a vigorous prejudice against this usage. ‘Orkney’, by contrast, conveys a better sense of the unity of a place and of the community who live there. The islands are usually omitted from histories of the making of modern Britain, and often accorded only a passing mention in general histories of Scotland. When it appears at all, Orkney, more often than not, is glimpsed as a part of a distant duo with Shetland. Furthermore, in wider traditions of scholarship, ‘Viking’ Orkney has attracted considerably more attention than the later, post-medieval centuries.

However, if it is certainly true that the idea of remoteness has always defined perceptions of Orkney, the aim of Marshall’s volume is, as the author writes, «to make the peripheral central, to reverse the direction of the telescope and reorient the map». In fact, islands are paradoxical place. They are prescribed by the most non-negotiable of boundaries, but they can also be surprisingly open and permeable, the encircling sea as much a conduit as a barrier. Politically, the identities of islanders are resolutely local, but, at the same time, islanders are challenged to think about themselves in relation to the pull of other places.

In the Middle Ages, real power in the west lay in the hands of the MacDonalds, ‘Lord of the Isles’. The Lordship had been brought to an end by James IV in 1493, but the region remain restive. This is why his successor, James V, travelled first to the Hebrides and then to the Northern Isles in the summer of 1540. His journey was pure political theatre – a stately circumnavigation of regnal territories, affirming their boundaries in the sanctified presence of the monarch. And for the first time ever, a king of Scots made landfall on Orkney (memory of the visit lived long in the islands).

Along with Shetland, Orkney was the last major territorial acquisition of the Scottish crown. In 1468, James V’s grandfather, James III, had married Margaret, daughter of King Christian I of Denmark. Christian’s territories included Norway, of which the earldom of Orkney was an overseas tributary, although from the mid-thirteenth century, the old succession of Norse jarls having ended, the earldom had passed into the hands of Scots families. Christian could produce only a fraction of the dowry, and so for the remainder agreed to pledge to his son-in-law Orkney until ‘whole and full satisfaction and payment is effectually made by us’; Shetland was pledged separately, for a smaller sun, in 1469. It probably was not meant to be a permanent arrangement, but in the end it actually was.

Then began what several Orkney historians have called the ‘Scottification’ of the islands’ society, and the Norn language disappeared from written records. It remained imprinted on the descriptive veil of the landscape and the vast majority of place and farm names throughout Orkney were of Norse origin. Anyway, nearly a hundred years after the islands were acquired by the Scottish crown, they remained a place subject to pressure from both Norway and Scotland, in political and legal status, and in cultural and linguistic identity. For people who actually lived there, however, matters of national affiliation and international politics were usually not the most pressing ones. The only thing that mattered was the ‘Community of Orkney’.

One of the most significant vehicles for Scots language and influence was the Church. It was very important in medieval Orkney and the cult of the local St Magnus, an earl treacherously executed in 1115, spread across the Scandinavian world, taking root in Norway, Denmark, Iceland the Faroes and Shetland. In Kirkwall, the epicentre of the cult, Magnus’ relics were solemnly preserved in a shrine in the cathedral and he became the symbol of Scottish as well as Norwegian identity. However, during the second half of the sixteenth century, Orkney converted to Protestantism, thanks in part to the apostasy of the last bishop, Adam Bothwell, and there was also an increase in witch trials. Those were particularly turbulent years since the Stewart earls of Orkney – Robert, and his son Patrick – presided over a grim, gruelling period in the history of the islands.

In 1603, Orkney’s place in the world shifted. On the death of Elizabeth I, in default of any other plausible Protestant candidate, James VI of Scotland was crowned James I of England. For centuries, Orkney had been a frontier zone, not just between Scotland and Scandinavia, but also with a frequently hostile England. In times of both war and nominal peace, English mariners harassed Orcadians, on land and sea, with distressing regularity. After 1603, Scotland and England were, at least in theory, perpetual friends and allies and the lands of the earldom were annexed to the crown.

After the Battle of Carbisdale (1659), in which the Covenanters decisively defeated the Royalists, composed mostly of Orcadians, the islands were riven with feuds and factionalism. During Britain’s Civil Wars, although the main battles took place elsewhere, Orkney was no calm and peaceful refuge, and suffered the repeated bruising of factionalism, rebellion, invasion and occupation. After that, a progressive marginalization of the islands began, as they became less and less important. The eighteen century nonetheless saw sporadic but serious interest in their commercial potential.

The epilogue of Storm’s Edge follows the novelist Sir Walter Scott north in the summer 1814 and invites the reader to look at Orkney through an outsider’s detached and objective point of view, while encouraging reflection of how celebration of modernity and nationality remain haunted by preoccupations of the past, and hindered by the peculiarities of place.

Peter Marshall, Storm’s Edge: Life, Death and Magic in the Islands of Orkney, William Collins, London 2024, 560 pages, £ 25

Buy the book: https://www.williamcollinsbooks.co.uk/products/storms-edge-life-death-and-magic-in-the-islands-of-orkney-peter-marshall-9780008394424-2/

Follow Radio Spada: