Eels, words and water: Shetland's coastal geographies and amphibious writing

Abstract

The Shetland Islands lie 170 kilometers off the North East coast of Scotlandthe most northerly part of the United Kingdom. No part of the Shetland archipelago is more than five kilometers away from the ocean. Its coastlines are sculpted by waves into inlets known as voes, sea caves, and geos (gulleys cut into cliffs by waves) that bring the ocean into the landmass. For centuries the sea was the principal medium for transporting people and goods, and Shetland had almost no made roads until the 1840s (O'Dell 1939, 182). The peaty soil holds reserves of water, and the islands' economy, culture, and literature have been bound up for generations in a complex set of relations between land and sea, or earth and water. Travel to Shetland was difficult in the early nineteenth century, and, even if visitors succeeded in getting there, they complained about the problem of getting around such an apparently water-logged place: "The hills here are excessively wet and swampy, and to travel but a few miles over them becomes very fatiguing. We had frequently to fetch circuits around stagnant pools or deceitful marshes" (Neill 1806, 85). The fierce currents around the islands have shaped and continue to shape the coastlines into archipelagic patterns that render the northern limits of the nation porous and fragmented. As nineteenth-century Britain was defining itself as a singular island with power over its imperial island subjects, the example of Shetlandwhich looked north to Scandinavia as much as south to Britainchallenges the national geographic imaginary. To most of the rest of nineteenth-century Britain, Shetland was a distant, wet, isolated, and unproductive outpost. But looked at internally, the islands took their identitysocially and culturallyfrom their archipelagic position. A closer study of the literature produced there in the nineteenth century reveals how Shetlanders understood and expressed the condition of their coastal world.To tell the story of nineteenth-century Shetland is to trace its terraqueous condition, both in the ways that it was seen to be a problem, and how it was explored, acknowledged, and celebrated in the literature of the islands. My account of the relation of Shetland writers to their coastal environment will be broadly chronological, but will draw on three related modes intertwined throughout my argument. First is the role of literature as social critique the ways in which writers responded to the meeting of land and sea in agriculture, landownership, trade, and politics, and their effects on the people of Shetland. Secondly, I will