This volume is designed as a contribution to European ethnology. The Northern Isles, Orkney and Shetland, were and are a crossroad of North-Atlantic Europe, and that is the context in which they are placed in this book. The common factors and differences between Orkney and Shetland are charted against the competing influences of Scandinavia and Scotland. This study of the material culture is combined with thorough linguistic analysis. It is a synthesis rather than a survey, illuminating the complexity of numerous interlocking factors, and draws a picture not of the simple life, but of a varied existence. The past is revealed not as a static tableau, but as a process of continual change, with subtle elisions of time scale. Much of the material is based on field research by the author, on manuscript sources and on the knowledge freely imparted by many people from the islands. As a result, there is much reappraisal of existing works, and conventional viewpoints have often been amended. The book recreates the physical environment in which the people lived, their work with crops and beasts, the harvest of the sea, their houses and the food they ate.
These things dominated their lives and form the background which is a key to the understanding of the character of the islands. Alexander Fenton is the author of Scottish Country Life.