FRAGMENTS OF NORN.
As Norn expired before it was ever scientifically examined and studied, the continuous specimens of it which have been hitherto recorded for us are very few — only the incomplete Foula-song, and the “Lord’s Prayer”, together with a few corrupt trifles recorded in B. Edmonston and Jessie M. Saxby’s “The Home of a Naturalist”. The memory of the Foula-song is now quite forgotten; on the other hand, a few persons in Foula still remember the existence of the old “Lords’s Prayer”.
The fragments of Norn phrases and sentences which have been preserved in the Shetlandic dialect are small fragments of verse, nursery rhymes, fairy rhymes, riddles, a few proverbs, and some fragments of conversation. They come chiefly from the Northern Isles and Foula, and are, with a few exceptions, greatly corrupted, especially the remnants of verse. The fragments of conversation and the proverbs were still intelligible to the people who could repeat them. Some of the nursery rhymes and riddles were still intelligible or partly so. On the other hand, the fragments of verse and some of the riddles had become unintelligible.
In nearly all the fragments, the grammatical endings have been obliterated or fossilized. In many of them, especially those which first become unintelligible, the words have been corrupted by those in juxtaposition having had an assimilating influence, the one upon the other, so that the form of one has been made to approximate to that of the other; and (what makes the interpretation more difficult) words, sometimes even whole lines, have been twisted about, and, in the worst mutilated fragments, have been inverted, while, at the same time, words and phrases have dropped out altogether. The variant forms are therefore often very different.
“The last lisp of a dying child” is the striking phrase applied by S. Bugge to those last remnants of Shetland Norn[1]. Of the worst mutilated fragments it will hardly be possible to give any translation or adequate interpretation. To explain isolated words and phrases with more or less probability is all that can be contemplated. This is particularly the case with the remnants of verse from Unstn (the sea-song) and Foula (the eagle-song), which are only small, disjointed fragments.
- ↑ In a letter written to me after my return from my first Shetland trip in 1895, upon his receipt of the copy of most of my Norn records from the Isles. J.J.
