Shetland Literature - British Period

British Period

In the British era, which properly began for Shetland with the Napoleonic Wars, Shetlanders have developed a literature in variant written forms of the spoken Shetlandic tongue, as well as in English - the first widely published writers were two daughters of the Lerwick gentry, Dorothea Primrose Campbell and Margaret Chalmers writing for the most part in a rather formal English. Subsequent Shetlandic writers such as James Stout Angus, George Stewart and Basil R Anderson helped forge the written form of the native tongue.

There are now a number of titles that might properly be termed ‘Shetlandic' or 'Shetland' classics, in the sense that they found a ready market among Shetlanders when first published and became, in time, somehow definitive of some part of the islands' culture. These works are not always the works of natives - 'incomers' and 'blow-bys' have made considerable contributions, as in the cases of Jakob Jakobsen and Hugh MacDiarmid for instance, to literature about Shetland. It is a sad fact that much of this literature is currently out of print and has been, in some instances, for a very long time. As a result, subsequent generations of Shetlanders have grown up unaware of this tradition – and specialist readers, the scholars beyond the islands who might be interested, remain oblivious to the work.

This article incorporates text from the article Shetland's_Literature on Shetlopedia, which was licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License until September 14, 2007.