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Introduction

Somebody once said that I had three interests – the Church, Shetland and photography. I would have loved to have filled this book with photographs for as they say ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. However the book does reflect my deep interest both in the Bible and in Shetland. ‘The Bible is in my soul and Shetland in my blood.’

I was born in Lerwick in 1951 and grew up in what was a fascinating and safe environment. Lerwick had lots of haunts for a young boy as well as an intriguing selection of lanes down to ‘da street’ with its shops and beyond its harbour which sheltered a variety of vessels.

However, there was something in me that hankered after the ‘country’ or rural Shetland with its crofts and wide-open spaces, and animals and birds. When I was very young I had already plotted my career path – I would be a minister till I was 40 and then retire to a croft and to what I considered, even at that tender age, to be ‘the good life’. The sheep and kye can be glad that I changed my mind for I don’t think I had the ability or patience to look after animals. In the country though, I loved to experience a traditional way of life and self-sufficiency and in the country the folk had held on to their traditional dialect much better than we had in the town. The accents were more pronounced, the vocabulary richer and there was an expression for every chore and situation as well as for every mood of the weather. So I learned and came to appreciate better the dialect of the islands.

Looking back though, I realise that most of my Shetland speech came from my mother. She had been born in Gulberwick which is now almost part of urban Lerwick, but in her day, and even in my young day, it was a world away. Her mother and aunt had come from South Nesting so there were influences from there as well. During the 1950s, there were no negative influences from television and listening to the wireless was confined to the news and the odd children’s programme. As children we were more interested in enjoying the outdoors than sitting in our homes. There were two things that helped us lose our dialect and one was the company we kept and the other was our school. Lerwick was and had been a fairly ‘cosmopolitan’ town with a lot of incomers from mainland Scotland as well as a few from England and that had the effect of diluting our Lerwick tongues. But probably worse was school where it was considered totally disrespectful to use any Shetland words – or even for that matter Lerwick words – in the classroom. We were also given the distinct impression that any dialect was an inferior form of communication and so it was the start of my conversion to Queen’s English.

The advent of television along with more incomers to the island and the pressing need to pass exams meant that dialect was less and less useful and although out of school we kept the sounds, the vocabulary was fast disappearing. At college in Aberdeen they still thought that I spoke with a strange tongue and I knew that when I started preaching I could only use my best English spoken in my clearest ‘English’ accent. After that, my Shetland accent was only used when I came home to Shetland on holiday or when for a fun my older brother and I would lapse back to the speech of our childhood.

In 1996 I felt called to minister in Shetland. That followed a summer when I helped out during a period when there were a number of vacancies in the islands. Returning to Shetland wasn’t easy for, as Jesus said, ‘a prophet is not without honour . . . ’. But there were greater challenges. Shetland was and had been for some considerable time a place where religion was ‘brought in’. For many years, religion was provided by Scottish preachers appointed by the islands’ Scottish lairds. During the dissenting years of the nineteenth century, lots of denominations descended on the islands giving us the rich variety of churches that we have today. From this has grown a perception in the Church that religion is of necessity something that we need to import and so our whole religious outlook is heavily influenced by and guided from ‘the south’.

In my young day, I was aware of folk who didn’t go to church yet who had a very quiet and deep faith in God. In their younger day, they would have attended church – everybody did – but why hold on to a faith that they didn’t openly express? I can only guess that it found meaning in a life that was full of hardship and toil – crofting long ago wasn’t the easy option I had imagined it to be. And crofting and indeed fishing were very much weather-dependent and dependent on other factors beyond human control and they would never provide a life of ease. And I know too that folk found inspiration in the beauty of the landscape they lived in and shared with a rich variety of flowers and creatures great and small.

In that struggle with outside forces, and in their appreciation of the beauty of their landscapes as well as in coping with life’s experiences, they have much in common with the writers and characters of the Scriptures. My attempt in trying to render some of the Scriptures in dialect has been to draw that association closer and to encourage people to find and develop their own faith.

Most of the work of the book was done as part of a ‘study leave’ exercise and I appreciated having the time to reflect on passages from the Bible before writing them in dialect. The writing is in no way any kind of translation. Putting Hebrew and Greek directly into Shetland dialect doesn’t really work – the languages are worlds apart – and all you would end up with is something that would be stilted and at best difficult to read. So I have attempted to convey the sense of the passage rather than attempt any kind of accurate translation.

I also found the writing relatively easy but what was for me extremely difficult was ensuring that the spelling and vocabulary were uniform. As someone noted, my knowledge of the Bible is better than my ability with the dialect. Shetland dialect is more spoken than written and because of the different accents from the different parts of the islands getting an agreed spelling as well as vocabulary is in many cases impossible. Despite these difficulties and limitations, I hope that people find the book useful and enjoyable. I was greatly heartened when someone, who hadn’t darkened the door of the kirk in many a long year, picked up a booklet of some of the passages and refused to put it down till he had read it right through.

I am told that what I write brings some freshness to the stories and teaching of the Bible and if that is so I am ‘blyde’. Since much of our dialect is now Scottish in origin, I trust that what I have written will be accessible to and enjoyed by people beyond these island shores.