REGIONS

Orkney and Shetland Islands

In the ninth century, the whole western world was rocked by the movement of Norsemen away from their own countries, their longships leaving the fjords for new lands across the sea.

Their adventuring and colonisation in time took them to the Holy Land sailing south, Greenland and America heading west. Much of northern England and Scotland - Caithness, the Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland - succumbed to these forays, and the natives gave way to this powerful force that came and stayed. Not just warriors, but farmers and their families, and a new culture.

From 872 AD, a powerful Viking earldom had been established in Orkney, and although actual Scandinavian rule in Shetland was to last until the mid 15th century, in reality that influence is still very prevalent. Wherever the Vikings went they took their law and their language and most of Shetland's place names are Norn.

The earldom of the islands was of great Norwegian importance. In the fifteenth century however, Norway had fallen under the control of Denmark, and the Danes held little interest in their acquisitions to the west.

Christian I was King of Denmark and Norway and in 1468 his daughter, Margaret, married Scotland's James III. Her dowry was set at sixty thousand florins of the Rhine. Christian pledged his lands and rights in Orkney for the first fifty thousand florins due, and was to pay the remaining ten thousand in coins. He could only spare two thousand, and so pledged the Shetlands to cover the remaining unpaid eight thousand in 1469.

The paperwork has never been completed for these transactions and so the lands pledged have not been formally transferred. In 1667 this was questioned, with the conclusion that Scandinavia still had the right of redemption. Under Norse law, the man who worked a piece of land was the owner of that piece of land, but the new Scottish masters soon reduced the islanders' lives to misery, using fraud and violence to strip them of their rights and develop a regime of extortion and slave labour.

As a reminder, if one were ever needed, of Shetland's Scandinavian past, every year the festival, Up Helly Aa, features a procession of a thousand torch-carrying revellers, a squad of Vikings in horned helmets and full regalia, and a longship, dragged through the streets of Lerwick, before its ceremonial burning. There's more than a hint of myth and history in this extraordinary celebration.