Norn Words like Gruggy and Skump

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

There’s a new novel that’s been haunting me ever since I read it. It’s by Welsh writer Karis Davies, who now lives in Scotland, and her book is called Clear. And it takes place amid the Scottish clearances of the 19th century.

Now, these clearances were a relentless program of forced eviction that drove whole communities of tenant farmers off the land. Wealthy landowners were evicting the rural poor to make room to farm sheep because that was much more profitable. And some of this took place on the Orkney and Shetland Islands off the northern coast of Scotland, where the residents spoke the Germanic language of Norn.

Now, the last speaker of Norn is believed to have died around 1850, and the novel takes place a few years earlier on one of those tiny islands. A well-meaning Scottish minister named John Ferguson agrees to take the job of going to a tiny island halfway to Norway to inform the last remaining inhabitant, a man named Ivor, that he’s going to have to leave. And he arrives on the island by himself.

But before he’s found Ivor, he takes a terrible fall and he’s badly injured. And Ivor finds him and takes him home and nurses him back to health. But the thing is that neither of them speaks the other’s language. And so over the next several weeks, as Davies puts it, there’s a lot of pointing at things. And a lot of, as she writes, repetition and pantomime and charades and back and forth between them, lots of trial and error and head shaking.

Now, Davies has made a study of Norn herself, so we learn a lot of words from Norn the way that Ferguson learns them from Ivor. So the names of plants and animals, the word Lyra for the short, unreliable quiet between storms, and threatening weather there is gruggy and scump is a fog bank. And so we watch these two men slowly begin to learn to communicate with each other. And John eagerly learns Ivor’s language. And Ivor, who’s lived in isolation for years, finally begins to see himself in another person’s eyes again.

So, Grant, it’s this quiet novel. It’s marvelously descriptive. And there’s a helpful glossary of Norn at the end of the book. Now, I have to say that I wasn’t totally sold on the ending, but the journey to get there is absolutely worth it. I really think you’d dig this book.

Sounds delightful. Martha, give us that title and author again, please.

Yeah, the name of the novel is Clear. It’s by Karis Davies, C-A-R-Y-S Davies. And I just think the title itself is brilliant because it refers to the Scottish clearances, which I knew nothing about before reading this book, and also the struggle to make oneself clear, you know, reaching for words, trying to find words to make your meaning clear to someone else.

Martha and I love your book recommendations as well. We’ll put this book on our website, but you put your books and emails to us, words@waywordradio.org.

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