To Noroway o’er the Faem

by Billy Kay

To Noroway, to Noroway, To Noroway o’er the faem; The king’s daughter of Noroway, ‘Tis thou maun bring her hame.

THE LINES from the great ballad of Sir Patrick Spens ring down through the centuries as testimony to a shared cultural heritage on both sides of the North Sea. For, beginning with the first Viking attacks on Iona and Skye in the year 795, for over six centuries the Norsemen dominated huge areas of what we now call Scotland. Indeed the formation of Scotland as we know it today, was marked by two crucial events relating to Scandinavia: the mortgaging of the Northern Isles to the Scottish Crown in 1468, in lieu of a dowry for princess Margaret of Denmark on her betrothal to James III, and the ceding of the Hebrides from Norway to Scotland following the treaty of Perth in 1266. Still today, you hear those outer isles referred to in Gaelic as Innse Gall, the foreign islands because of the Norse influence there. In the Lowlands too, it is the Norse element which still marks major differences between our Scots language and Standard English. We have e.g. kirk, kist, breeks, brig and rig for the English church, chest, breeches, bridge and ridge. This shared cultural and linguistic inheritance, of course worked both ways, and the Scots migrated in turn to Norway especially between the 16th and 19th centuries, and profoundly influenced the development of the hugely important timber and fishing trade there.