Ethnicity and the origins of local identity in Shetland, UK – Part II: Picts, Vikings, Fairies, Finns, and Aryans

The population of the North Sea archipelago of Shetland, UK possesses a distinct sense of ethnic identity, which connects the island’s present-day community to that of its Old Norse/Viking settlers from Scandinavia. This sense of Viking ethnicity, however, is relatively recent, first arising in the 19th Century. This paper argues that Shetland’s cultural identity must be understood in terms of the islands’ historical interconnectedness with trends in literature and scholarship in mainland Scotland, Britain, and Europe as a whole. Part II of this two-part paper looks at how the rise of nationalism and philological research into race and ethnicity in the 1800s both drew upon and contributed to Shetlanders’ understanding of their history and culture. In the 1890s, Edinburgh scholar David MacRitchie promoted a theory to explain European and Asian fairy folklore. This theory was grounded in the history of Orkney and Shetland and eventually made a significant impact in Shetland itself, being used by the author Jessie Saxby to promote a distinctive local identity concept. MacRitchie’s work also contributed to later research connected to the development of neopaganism and racist Nazi ideology. The conclusion concerns the role of isolated island communities within flows of cultural development and exchange.