Abstract
Drawing on letters and her Diaries, this chapter treats Edith’s 1901 summer in Shetland. There she plunged into local life and collected stories much as she had in Barra. She was much helped in her researches by Laurence Williamson (1855–1936), an amateur scholar with an encyclopedic knowledge of Shetland’s language, culture, and history. She expected to incorporate stories she heard into stories of her own, but she soon found them coalescing into what became The Reaper (1904). Publishers initially considered Reaper too highbrow for the reading public, but reviews were excellent. Edith had found her finest voice.
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Notes
- 1.
Edith’s early novels regularly include song. The Golden Hawk (1907) and The Beggar in the Heart (1909) are replete with it. Folly (1906) contains poetry instead. There is no song or poetry in Edith’s post-war novel drafts.
- 2.
“The Bard of Thule.” For the words, https://www.sssa.llc.ed.ac.uk/whalsay/2015/0/25/.
- 3.
On Williamson who had an encyclopedic knowledge of all aspects of Shetland life and history, https://www.shetlandmuseumandarchives.org.uk/collections/archive/people-estates-businesses-and-societies/laurence-williamson; Laurence G. Johnson, Laurence Williamson of Mid Yell (Lerwick: Shetland Times, 1971).
- 4.
Williamson preserved further versions of this story among his notes (Johnson, Williamson 136–7).
- 5.
The story is best known from its variant in the Icelandic Saga of Grettir the Strong.
- 6.
Josie was forty when she had Margaret.
- 7.
Williamson, himself much interested in language, assisted Jacobsen in his researches into the remains of the Norn language in Shetland (Johnson, Williamson 67).
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von Nolcken, C. (2024). Shetland. In: The "Lives" and Writings of Edith Rickert (1871-1938). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53264-1_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53264-1_9
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