Quotes About Orkney

Orkney has the kind of landscape that sort of lends itself to a relationship with the people. I think that relationship is intensified because of its remoteness and the long periods of time when there was no interaction with other cultures.

Don't you know, even yet, why I came back to Orkney? Rognvald said. Than Thorfinn looked up. Rognvald's gaze, waiting for his, took and sustained it. Thorfinn did not look away, but his face held no expression. Rognvald said I am the dog at your heel. Everything I have ever done has been an attempt to be like Thorfinn.

No," said Erskine of Dun. "Come naked of creed or of kind or even of purpose, but bring with you what Orkney saw, all those years ago. We are too small a nation to be able to spare saints to Rome or Geneva, or any other refugees seeking to glorify either the flesh or the spirit. There is no one to understand us, except ourselves." "That I know," said Francis Crawford.

John Wild, however, suggested that a Roman breeding programme produced a sheep more akin to the Orkney sheep of South Ronaldsay that produced a thicker fleece,

It is not known precisely when the earldom of Orkney became Christian, for the saga account of King Olaf Tryggvason's forced conversion in c. 995 may not be reliable. It may have happened gradually here and elsewhere in Scotland, according to personal choice, during the tenth century, when pagan burial customs were abandoned (Plate 24) and Christian funerary monuments were adopted.

Did you know that on one of the islands of Orkney, in the North of Scotland, there are some runes that when translated turned out to be Viking graffiti? Eight feet up a wall it says "A tall Viking wrote this." You gotta love that.

The Orkney Viking ruler, Jarl Sigurd the Mighty, died in 892 A.D. after he was bitten by a man he had decapitated in battle.

The Orkney imagination is haunted by time.

No Orkney weather lasts long, and you can see new weather coming a long way off. There are frequent scraps of rainbow. And birds. At any point you can stop walking, or pull over and lower the car window and hear the cries of peewits and tremulous curlews.

The Orkney islands and the Shetlands were in fact not surrendered to Scotland until the latter half of the sixteenth century, and Norwegian was still being spoken in the Shetlands at the end of the eighteenth century; the island accent is still much closer to Norwegian than to Scots or English.