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While in Caith­ness and Orkney, I had some delight­ful con­ver­sa­tions. Many were with Orca­di­ans I met briefly, but did not exchange names with. An Orkney bus dri­ver, in par­tic­u­lar, gave me a fine word pic­ture of what it’s like to be a south­ern­er relo­cat­ed in Orkney. “My chil­dren are Orca­di­ans,” he said, after some reflec­tions on the ambiva­lent sta­tus of new­com­ers in a very tra­di­tion­al place. Like many new­com­ers, he had fled the fast pace and com­plex­i­ties of the south to find a safe and qui­et place to raise kids. Sev­er­al farm­ers answered my agri­cul­tur­al ques­tions terse­ly, but intelligently.

I had all-too-brief, but splen­did dis­cus­sions with Dr. Alexan­dra San­mark and Dr. Ragn­hild Ljosland, of the Cen­tre for Nordic Stud­ies. Kevin Sin­clair shared his mem­o­ries of archae­l­og­i­cal digs on Orkney, and of the rise and fall of the Nuclear Pow­er indus­try in Caith­ness. I was able to sort out a small mys­tery with David Mack­ie, the Gan­dalf of the Orkney Archive. The name “Pomona,” which is occa­sion­al­ly used as a sub­sti­tute for “Main­land,” appar­ent­ly orig­i­nat­ed with a mis­print in some edi­tions of a Latin work by a Dan­ish trav­eller. While the orig­i­nal mere­ly men­tioned that the island pro­duced excel­lent apples, the mis­print cap­i­tal­ized it into “Island of Apples.” From this error arose a false notion that “Pomona” was an archa­ic name for Main­land Orkney. We dis­cov­ered this in remark­ably short time because the Orkney Archive con­tains many rare works, splen­did­ly orga­nized. Its col­lec­tion of Cana­di­an mate­r­i­al aston­ished me. I had oth­er dis­cus­sions with nat­u­ral­ists and biol­o­gists, where names did­n’t make it into my note­books, but which were nev­er­the­less high­ly enlightening.

Final­ly, I must men­tion one pecu­liar con­ver­sa­tion, which took place on the train between Thur­so and Inver­ness. The train is a local run, stop­ping fre­quent­ly. At one point, an old­er and a younger woman board­ed the train, and sat next to me. They pro­ceed­ed to con­verse in the sweet tones of Gael­ic. I lis­tened, for quite awhile, just to get the feel­ing of the lan­guage. But the younger woman spoke in a man­ner quite dis­tinct from the oth­er, and for ten min­utes, some­thing about it scratched at the back of my mind. Final­ly, I sum­moned up the courage to inter­rupt them. “Excuse me,” I said, sheep­ish­ly, “but am I right in think­ing that you are speak­ing Gael­ic with a Cana­di­an accent?” The woman acknowl­edged that she was indeed Cana­di­an. From Cape Bre­ton, Nova Sco­tia, of course. The old­er woman was her moth­er-in-law, and she was mar­ried to a man on the Isle of Skye. Noth­ing could have pro­vid­ed a bet­ter coda to a theme that has run through these blog postings.

I mused on the tragedy of the vio­lent sup­pres­sion of Gael­ic, so that it is now spo­ken only by small num­bers of peo­ple in remote places. No oth­er lan­guage is more delight­ful to the ear. If it had not been dis­cour­aged by brute force, it might today be the vehi­cle of grand operas and time­less novels.

Chan eil aon chà­nan gu leòr. Mar sin leibh an dràsda.