Meet the ancestors?

[imomus]

My mother and I travelled to Shetland and Orkney to find our ancestors. So did we meet them? Well, we got plenty of glimpses of people we're probably related to... some of them inspiring, others slightly scary.


"I have come with my sword Nægling, and the usual aches and pains..."


A typical Shetland couple, both bearded, and the awkward moment television reaches the island and nobody can find the on switch.


Crofter with a fine head of cro-magnon hair and his not-so-pretty wife.


The ancestors of Franz Ferdinand and The Proclaimers, but not of Del Amitri and Momus.


Eric Linklater -- who wrote the third Penguin ever published -- and dandy Orkney Futurist Stanley Cursiter.


George Mackay Brown as a young and an old poet.


A Shetland-sweater-clad parishioner and his frighteningly Old Testamental minister.


An Orkney intellectual weaving a wicker chair, and a Berlin intellectual sitting in it.

Comments

[jezebelsunite.livejournal.com]

I would love to visit Scotland with my mother and attempt figuring out our history. It must be an amazing/scary experience.

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

..Much of the old story-telling has withered before the basilisk stare of newsprint, radio, television. Maybe, the people reckoned, after 1873, it was better to forget the ancient sorrows and joys. There had been too much hardship. The promised land lay all before them.

But not many modern stories hold children from play, and old men from the chimney corner.

Every community on earth is being deprived of an ancient necessary nourishment. We cannot live fully without the treasury our ancestors have left to us.

Without the story -- in which everyone living, unborn, and dead, participates -- men are no more than 'bits of paper blown on the cold wind...'


-from the foreword to "Winter Tales" - the only G.M. Brown book available at my local library.

[lupoleboucher.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the photos; wonderful stuff. Cursiter is new to me also.

[wringham.livejournal.com]

It's terribly silly that you're in Scotland right now. I live in Scotland and I've been spending this week in Berlin. It appears we've done the old switcheroo. There's only room for so much genius in a country.

All the same, I hope to catch your gig in Glasgow on Juy 27th.

Mar sin leibh an dràsda!

"Dour"

[(Anonymous)]

Dour is one of the most hideous words in the language. It is how flighty, fruity, self-mocking southerners describe the cool, laconic north. As if we should want to be cartoon characters, children's entertainers.

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

An Orkney intellectual weaving a wicker chair, and a Berlin intellectual sitting in it.

I only see a chair on the right. Is there supposed to be a person there?

[obliterati.livejournal.com]

Ah, timeliness (http://africa.reuters.com/odd/news/usnL21226656.html)!