Notionally Norse

Scottish Academic Press, #14.99 (pp 212)

THIS is a sad book; sad in its unfulfilled yearning for a personal

homeland, in its sometimes peevish nostalgia for older, quieter times,

and in the rather faltering, frail tone of its writing. Saddest of all

is the fact that Professor Donaldson died before this revision of his

earlier Isles of Home: Sixty years of Shetland could be published.

Gordon Donaldson was Professor of Scottish History at Edinburgh

University between 1963 and 1979 and authored over 30 books. An

historian of international repute and editor of the massive Edinburgh

History of Scotland, his mind and body may have been devoted to a

mainland career, but his heart was Shetland's. His paternal

grandfather's birth in the islands led to childhood holidays beginning

in 1921, and a further 80 trips north (''all carefully noted'') until

1992.

These visits ranged from summer-long student idylls to fleeting

weekends snatched from the demands of academic life. Shetland seems to

have been a drug to which Donaldson was hopelessly addicted; yet he

never settled there, even in retirement, preferring instead the more

accessible, gentler climes of the West Highlands.

Therein lies this book's central conundrum; it is an obsessive,

occasionally ranting work; allowances for its writer's age

notwithstanding, it is not a Shetlander's book; it is by a

Shetlandophile, a collector of experiences, yet an emotionally involved

one (''I was completely obsessed with anything to do with Shetland'')

whose trainspotter-like devotion to noting down the minutiae of every

visit, the timings of ancient steamers, the make and model of outboard

motors used in the past, signifies an enthusiasm which becomes in the

end wearying.

An entire page is given over to a dissection of the name Donaldson and

an attempt to give it Norse roots, rather than cave in to ''daft

Celtomaniacs who want to claim me as a member of the Clan Donald''; this

is followed by an illustrated, six-generation family tree showing that

Professor Donaldson and former Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont

-- born in Lerwick of a Shetland mother and southern surgeon father --

share a third cousin, and the lofty announcement that ''I count myself

fortunate that I have no personal relationship with a man who, by

mispronouncing his name, tries to efface his northern ancestry and turns

good Norwegian into bad French.''

One wonders whether a little jealousy of Lamont's much more direct --

and openly acknowledged -- relationship with Shetland and Shetlanders

may have crept in here.

In fact ''daft Celtomaniac'' concerns with transatlantic Gaels' ''the

blood is strong'' ancestral research seems somewhat similar to Professor

Donaldson's determination to prove himself a Norseman and Shetland a

throroughly Scandinavian place. With place names and physical

characteristics wielded in a rather disturbingly cavalier, if not

Viking, manner, Shetland's Scottishness is bypassed in the single-minded

search for Norsemanship.

The book is strong on personal reminiscence and gives a good flavour

of crofting life, particularly on the island of Yell in the 1940s. But

Donaldson's dry detailing of long and frequently tedious boating trips

dwells too much on his own achievements (''I must surely have looked a

competent sort of chap'') and his evident love affair with the little

Shetland Model he had built in 1933 is tempered for the reader by a

truly bizarre attention to what he spent on it.

In six years of ownership he calculates a mileage of 900 (''about two

thirds with the outboard and a third with oars''), and thanks to keeping

''precise notes of expenditure of every kind'', including petrol, an

overall cost of #28 5s 1d, after taking into account the sale of boat

and motor for #14 10s and ''an unexplained discrepancy'' of 2s 2p.

Perhaps this is what makes a good historian of a man.

There are sideswipes at the revolting youth of today's Lerwick and

grumpy comments about the scars left on Shetland's landscape by

quarrying and road improvements. But nowhere is the question most

prominent in the reader's mind answered: if he loved the place so much,

why didn't he settle there, or at least buy a house where he could spend

the summers, instead of these continual flying (though always seaborne)

visits?

Perhaps the answer is all too simple: Gordon Donaldson's Shetland

isn't real. It is a fantasy world of childhood, where everyone is a

Viking at heart and in ancestry and the backbreaking travails of

crofting without proper roads, ferries, electricity, or running water

inculcated a purity of spirit lost to this oil-rich, accessible island

age. Gordon Donaldson's isles were never his home, and perhaps he knew

that if they had been, he would have been unable to celebrate them and

himself in as partial away as he does in the book.

There is no seasickness in Donaldson's travels to and from Shetland, a

matter in which he takes great pride. ''The approach to Shetland by sea

is something that never palls,'' he writes. All I can say, as a

non-Shetlander resident in these frequently infuriating islands, is that

the sea voyage from Aberdeen more often than not appals.