"Hildina" is a traditional ballad thought to have been composed in Orkney in the 17th century, but collected on the island of Foula in Shetland in 1774, and first published in 1805. It tells a story of love, bloodshed and revenge among characters from the ruling families of Orkney and Norway. This ballad is written in Norn, the extinct North Germanic language once spoken in Orkney and Shetland, and is the only surviving work of any length in that language.
Contents
Synopsis
As the ballad opens the earl of Orkney makes off with Hildina, the daughter of the king of Norway, an act which the king vows to avenge. The king's daughter pledges her love to the earl and urges him to make peace with her father. This he attempts, offering the king a dowry, but his rival Hiluge offers a greater one. Hildina prophecies that someone will die if matters are not made up, and this indeed happens when Hiluge and the earl of Orkney fight a duel. The earl is killed, and Hiluge throws his rival's head into Hildina's lap. The king now agrees to allow Hiluge to marry his daughter, though warning that the match is ill-omened. At the wedding-feast Hildina drugs the wine, and when all but her are insensible she drags her father and the wedding-guests out of the hall. Finally she sets light to the hall, and, as Hiluge burns to death, tells him that he will never again harm one of the king's children.
Discovery
In 1774 George Low, a young Scottish clergyman, visited the small and remote island of Foula in Shetland hoping to find remnants of oral literature in Norn, a language then nearing extinction. He found there fragments of songs, ballads and romances, and from his best source, an old farmer called William Henry, the ballad now known as "Hildina". Low had no knowledge of the language himself, and even Henry was quite poorly acquainted with it, so that although he had as a child memorised all 35 stanzas of the ballad in the original Norn he could give Low only a summary of its content rather than a translation. In 1893, when the Faroese philologist Jakob Jakobsen visited Shetland, he found that, though further fragments of folk poetry could still be collected, all memory of the ballad had been lost.
Publication
Low's manuscript account of his expedition, "A Tour Through the Islands of Orkney and Schetland [sic]", included not only "Hildina", which he called "The Earl of Orkney and the King of Norway's Daughter: a Ballad", but also a translation into Norn of the Lord's Prayer and a list of 34 common words. The ballad was first published from Low's transcript by the Rev. George Barry in his History of the Orkney Islands (Edinburgh, 1805), then by Peter Andreas Munch in Samlinger til det Norske Folks Sprog og Historie (Christiania, 1838). Low's book was eventually published in Kirkwall in 1879. Finally, a scholarly edition of "Hildina" by the Norwegian linguist Marius Hægstad under the title Hildinakvadet med utgreiding um det norske maal paa Shetland i eldre tid appeared in 1900. Hægstad reconstructed from Low's inevitably garbled transcript a version of what Henry might actually have recited. No English translation of this study has ever appeared.
Language
The literary historian Nora Kershaw Chadwick called the language of "Hildina" "so obscure...as to be almost untranslatable", partly because there are so few other examples of Norn, and partly because of the difficulties produced by George Low's total and William Henry's partial ignorance of the poem's meaning. The language is certainly a branch of Norse, most closely related to its south-west Norwegian and Faroese varieties. It exhibits a few loanwords from Danish, Faroese, Frisian and English, but not from Gaelic. The grammar of "Hildina"'s Norn is fundamentally that of Old Norse, though with reduced morphological complexity. Stanza 22 illustrates the similarities and differences: