FSRS Online Seminar. Hildina-250 Years from Gutterm to Mareel

Shetland musician, Barry Nisbet, will present his work on the recovery of the Hildina Ballad from Foula. The ‘Hildina’ Ballad is by far the largest surviving example of poetry or song in the Shetland Norn language. It was collected in Foula in 1774, but was written down phonetically and without melody. It’s a fine example of the Heroic Ballad tradition that still thrives in Faroe, and that Shetland and Faroe once shared. 

In addition, the ballad features a strong female lead character and gives a fascinating insight into the culture and music that Shetlanders enjoyed in the Norn-speaking period.

As part of a Creative Scotland funded project, Barry has over the past 12 months reconstructed the ballad in Norn, and has used this to produce a translation into modern day Shetland (Shaetlan). This provides the opportunity to ‘give back’ the ballad to modern Shaetlan speakers, and will allow learning or performance of the ballad; it could also open the way for dancing (as is done in Faroe), and potential collaboration with Faroese and Nordic ballad groups. 

Barry Nisbet Bio

Barry will be joined by UHI Institute for Northern Studies PhD candidate Anthony Olsson who is researching Faroese and Irish/Scottish-Gaelic Balladry: motifs and intercultural connections. 

Anthony Olsson Bio

Anthony is a PhD candidate at the UHI Institute for Northern Studies. The title of his PhD is Faroese and Irish/Scottish-Gaelic balladry: motifs and intercultural connections.

The Faroese and the Scottish-Gaelic ballads share forms of seinn dúthchasach [culturally-rooted singing], displaying traditional acapella styles, embedded in locality and place. They developed in vernacular non-written languages, far from their respective colonial capital powers. The importance of Faroese heroic tradition is widely acknowledged, yet the lack of translation means that close study has been largely restricted to Scandinavia. A comparative analysis of the two traditions aims to negotiate and navigate the gap between the two realms.

The Phd will investigate the heroic journeys to Lochlann and Bretland as tropes and explore what are the joint motifs and intercultural connections between the fantastic exploits of Faroese and Irish/Scottish-Gaelic balladry?

The research will expore oral and literary representations of Bretland/Skotland in the Faroese ballad corpus, with comparative examples, from Scottish-Gaelic balladry of representations of Scandinavia (Lochlann). It will also present and translate several Faroese ballads in English, making them available for the first time, for contextualised study, for an English-speaking and non-Faroese audience.

Anthony is a full-time PhD student, supported by a University of the Highlands and Islands Studentship Award through the UHI Graduate School – INS Scholarship scheme.

Before he commenced his PhD in Shetland, he was based in Oslo at the Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) as a visiting researcher. There he undertook a 2 month research stay funded by the University of Bergen led, CAS funded project Ballads Across Border: The Faroe Islands in the Norse Story-Telling World (BARD). He has an MLitt in Island Studies and a BA in Anthropology.

Anthony is supervised by Dr Andrew Jennings, UHI Shetland and Abigail Burnyeat, Head of Research at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig UHI, as well as Dr Alan Macniven, Programme Director for Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

book online now

Privacy

Please read our policy on how we treat any personal information collected in relation to our events:
Data Protection Statement for Events