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Beyond the North Wind

by Catherine Madsen

What counts as circumpolar? We don’t ordinarily think of Great Britain in that light, but if we take latitude 55 as one possible boundary—that’s the latitude at which nautical twilight lasts all night at the summer solstice—a small area of England and virtually all of Scotland lie north of it. A Greek historian, Diodorus Siculus, wrote in 55 BCE of a northern island called Hyperborea, meaning “beyond the north wind”; he may have been referring to one of the Hebrides, which range from Iona at 56º19’ to the Isle of Lewis at 58º2’ (about the same latitudes as Petersburg and Juneau in Alaska). Orkney, at 59º —which is also the latitude of the southernmost point of Greenland—is a little below Homer (59º38); Shetland, at 60º20’, is a little above it. Even London, at 51º30’, is at almost the same latitude as Adak at 51º52’. Once, while staying in North Wales in mid-June, I looked out at night and descried on the northern horizon a faint line of midnight sun; it was the last thing I expected to see, and it changed my idea of Britain.

The Western Isles, as the Hebrides are called, are the cradle of an extraordinary singing culture. Waulking songs are women’s call-and-response work songs that make the process of exhilarating and social rather than heavy and tedious. Hebridean Gaelic psalms, with their remarkable , draw their power from the interaction between a , and the congregation: the harsh and beautiful landscape is surely a third party in the transaction. (Transported to North America, this style developed into .) Contemporary singer Julie Fowlis of North Uist gives a quick tour of .

Puirt-a-beul or “mouth music” is a beloved form of dance music all over the Celtic region, and has Scandinavian equivalents; it’s known in Scotland as diddling, in Ireland as lilting, and in Sweden as tralling. It encompasses nonsense refrains, entire nonsense songs, bagpipe imitations, and all the silliness a happy musical mind among friends can devise. A definitive compilation of Celtic mouth music (including some spinoffs in Québécois French!) is available .

Skye, in addition to hosting an important , produced the of the tiny township of Greepe. Something in their sound is so that if you had never felt nostalgia before, their singing would compel you to feel it.

Orkney has , but may be best known musically as the home of the Selkie myth. Seal was not part of the Orkney diet, but you could marry one; there are haunting stories of shape-shifting seals who became men and women, generally with sorrowful results. The tune for “The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry” made famous by was actually written by James Waters in 1954 in Cambridge, MA (though it has recently acquired a bit of circumpolar cred from Greenland multi- instrumentalist ); the traditional Orkney tune, less mysterious but very striking in its tragic gravity, is sung by Jean Redpath.

Moving northward to Shetland, we come to islands where Gaelic was never spoken; instead we find relics of Norn, an extinct dialect of Old Norse. One example is the , an ancient rowing song and prayer for the safety of men at sea. The oldest known Shetland fiddle tune, Da Day Dawn, was played from house to house on the morning of New Year’s Day; it’s played on jouhikko by Simon Chadwick, arranged with sophisticated chords for harp by , and supplied with inspirational winter solstice lyrics by .

North of Shetland—strictly speaking, northwest—lie only the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland. That’s circumpolar beyond a doubt. Though it may take a little mental rearranging to think of Scotland as a circumpolar country, there’s a case to be made for it, and some remarkable music to be heard when we do.

 

 

 

 

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