“MEÐ LÖGUM SKAL LAND BYGGJA”: NORN AND THE LOST NORSE SPEECH OF SHETLAND AND ORKNEY
- Hrolfr
- 7 hours ago
- 9 min read
Few phrases capture the old northern inheritance of Shetland and Orkney more powerfully than Með lögum skal land byggja — “By law shall the land be built.” In Shetland it survives as the council motto, but its roots reach much deeper into the legal culture of the medieval North. The proverb appears in a fuller form in Njáls saga, and a related form opens the preface to Jyske Lov, the Law of Jutland issued in 1241. It is one of those rare sayings that still carries the weight of the world that produced it: a world in which law, memory, kinship, and land were bound tightly together. For the Northern Isles, it is also a fitting doorway into a larger truth. The Phrase is used in a Shetland Coast of Arms and by the Icelandic Police - Iceland's "Viking Squad" - the National Police Special Forces and Counterterrorist unit. The Norse past of Shetland and Orkney was not just a matter of saga romance, longships, or heraldic ornament. For centuries it was spoken aloud, every day, in a language of its own: Norn.[1] The Chieftain of the Tribe has visited these islands.
The same Old Norse motto is used by the Icelandic National Police - Lögreglan. The Tribe has a member and many friends in Iceland. The motto is also used by The motto is derived from a phrase found in the Icelandic Njáls Saga and it also appears in the Jyske Lov (Law of Jutland) - Codex Holmiensis - dating from the year 1241.
Norn is often described in popular writing as an “old dialect,” but that phrase can be misleading. More precisely, Norn was the North Germanic speech of the Northern Isles, descended from West Norse and shaped locally over generations in Orkney and Shetland. It was not simply Old Norse frozen in time, nor was it identical with medieval Norwegian, though the oldest written remains from the islands are often so close to Norwegian or Old Norse that scholars prefer to describe them in those terms rather than as “Norn” in the narrower sense. Michael Barnes, one of the leading scholars of the subject, argues that the term is most useful when applied to the distinctive insular Scandinavian speech that developed in Scotland’s Norse world and survived longest in Orkney and Shetland.[2]
That speech came with the Viking settlement of the islands. Norse raiders and settlers entered the Northern Isles in the ninth century, and by around the year 1000, if not earlier, their language had become the sole medium of communication there, replacing the pre-Viking language or languages. In Orkney especially, later local scholarship describes Norn as the predominant language of the islands for roughly seven hundred years. This is worth lingering on, because it corrects a common modern instinct to treat Norn as a marginal curiosity. It was not marginal. For a very long stretch of island history, it was simply the language of ordinary life — the language of farms, boats, kin, quarrels, worship, weather, gossip, and law.[3]
Just as important is what Norn was not. Modern Shetland dialect is not Norn, and neither is modern Orcadian. Both are forms of Scots, though each preserves a strong Scandinavian inheritance in vocabulary, place-names, and local speech habits. Barnes is blunt on this point: modern Shetland dialect is fundamentally Scots, even if it contains a diminishing Scandinavian element. That distinction matters because the afterlife of Norn is often so vivid in the islands that people can be tempted to collapse the older language into the later dialect. But the relationship is one of inheritance, not identity. What survives now is the imprint of Norn within Scots, not Norn itself still walking whole among the living.[4]
The difficulty in studying Norn lies in the painful thinness of the record. Unlike Icelandic, which left behind a rich literary tradition, Norn survives only in fragments. There are runic inscriptions, a few legal and formal documents, place-name evidence, scattered words and phrases, and a handful of later texts copied down after the language was already dying or dead. The most famous of these survivals are the Lord’s Prayer and the Hildina ballad, both recorded by George Low during his visit to Foula in 1774. Hildina — thirty-five verses concerning Hildina, daughter of a king of Norway, and a Jarl of Orkney — is the great treasure of the language, the largest and most celebrated surviving text. Yet even here caution is necessary. Low wrote down the ballad from the recitation of William Henry of Guttorm, but later scholars have warned that what Low encountered may not have been a fully living community language so much as a remembered and imperfectly transmitted remnant.[5]
Even the smallest fragments, though, are revealing. An early Orcadian greeting recorded by “Jo. Ben” survives as goand da boundæ, glossed as “Guid day Guidman.” Barnes points out its kinship with modern Icelandic and Faroese góðan dag and notes that it preserves an old grammatical ending in the adjective. Tiny survivals like this matter because they show both continuity and intimacy. Norn was not some abstract historical category. It was once the language in which one greeted a neighbor at the door, hailed a man on the road, or exchanged the ordinary courtesies of the day.[6]
The loss of Norn did not happen in a single dramatic collapse. The pledging of Orkney and Shetland to the Scottish crown in 1468–1469 is an obvious political turning point, but language shift is rarely that clean. Contact with Norway did not vanish overnight, and the pace of change differed between Orkney and Shetland. What gradually weakened Norn was the steady advance of Scots into the powerful public domains of life: administration, law, religion, and schooling. Remco Knooihuizen, in an important study of the Norn-to-Scots language shift, identifies three major forces behind the change: the introduction of Scots into administration, law, and religion; the spread of Scots and English through formal education; and the weakening of Scandinavian contact alongside increasing contact with Scots. Official documents begin to appear in Scots earlier in Orkney than in Shetland, and the islands continued for a time under a mixture of Scottish and Norwegian law before Scottish law was fully established in 1611. In other words, the language did not disappear because someone formally outlawed it in a single act. It was worn down by institutions, incentives, and the practical demands of everyday life.[7]
That long transition also left its mark on the landscape. One of the deepest afterlives of Norn is found in place-names. In Orkney, Berit Sandnes shows how names of Norse origin survive within a Scots-speaking context, sometimes as wholly Norse formations, sometimes as Scots names, and often as hybrids in which Norse and Scots elements mingle. In Shetland, Doreen Waugh makes a parallel point from the opposite angle: the dialect is Scots, but many Norn words remained inside it rather than being translated away. Place-names and dialect words alike therefore preserve not just old vocabulary, but the history of contact between languages. They show a society that shifted tongues without entirely cutting its roots.[8]
The question everyone asks, of course, is when Norn finally died. Here romance and scholarship often part company. Popular retellings sometimes push the death of Norn late into the nineteenth century, but many scholars are much more cautious. Knooihuizen argues that by the last quarter of the eighteenth century most sources already describe Norn as a thing of the past, and he suggests that the decisive shift away from Norn as a first language probably took place shortly after 1700 at the latest in most of the Northern Isles. Barnes, reconsidering George Low’s evidence from Foula, came to agree with the historian Brian Smith’s harsh but memorable judgment that Low did not describe a living language so much as a dead one. That does not mean no fragments survived later. It means that remembered relics are not the same as a self-sustaining speech community.[9]
The nineteenth-century stories about “last speakers” therefore have to be handled with care. Barnes notes the often-repeated claim that Walter Sutherland of Skaw, said to be the last man to speak Norn, died about 1850, and that men in Foula living later in the century were also said to know it. But Barnes also points out that Jakob Jakobsen himself doubted how much real language those claims represented. By then, what remained may have been little more than remembered words, phrases, and scraps rather than a complete vernacular still used in ordinary conversation. That distinction matters. A language can leave ghosts long after it has ceased to live.[10]
Yet to say Norn died is not to say it vanished without residue. It remains in the islands in ways both obvious and subtle. The place-name map of the Northern Isles is heavily Norse. Modern Orkney dialect, by the museum’s own account, is Scots but still richly stocked with words that once belonged to Orkney Norn. In Shetland, older sea-language terms preserve Norn-derived coinages embedded in fishing practice, ritual, and taboo. Even where the language itself is gone, its shape can still be felt in the naming of shores, in local vocabulary, and perhaps in habits of rhythm and expression carried forward through later speech.[11]
That is why Norn deserves better than nostalgia. It should be remembered neither as a decorative Viking relic nor as a fantasy tongue lingering untouched into modernity. It was a real language of a real people, born from Norse settlement, sustained for centuries in island communities, and then gradually overtaken by Scots through shifts in power, trade, law, education, and allegiance. Its loss was part of a broad historical transformation in which the Northern Isles turned away from the Scandinavian sphere and toward the Scottish mainland. But its traces remain everywhere: in place-names, in vocabulary, in local identity, and in the stubborn northern memory carried by phrases such as Með lögum skal land byggja. The language itself may be lost, but the world it helped build is still present in the land.[12]
There are groups trying to preserve it and here is a link: https://nornlanguage.x10.mx/
Endnotes
[1] Shetland Islands Council’s Old Norse motto is noted in a 2025 Scottish Parliament motion marking the council’s fiftieth anniversary. For the phrase’s medieval legal background, see the discussion of Jyske Lov as a law code dated to 1241 whose preface begins “Med lov skal land bygges,” and the saga proverb preserved as “Með lögum skal land várt byggja, en eigi með ólögum eyða.”
[2] Michael Barnes, “The Study of Norn,” in Northern Lights, Northern Words (2010), argues that Norn is best used for the distinctive Scandinavian speech that developed in the Scottish Norse world, above all in Orkney and Shetland. He also notes that the term derives from Old Norse norrœnn / norrœna.
[3] Barnes states that Viking settlement in the Northern Isles belongs to the ninth century and that by the year 1000, if not earlier, Scandinavian speech had become the sole medium of communication in the islands. Orkney Museums summarizes Orkney Norn as a West Norse-based language that predominated for about 700 years.
[4] Barnes explicitly rejects the idea that modern Shetland dialect is a kind of Norn, calling it fundamentally Scots with only a diminishing Scandinavian element. Orkney Museums makes the same broad point for modern Orcadian speech, which it describes as Scots enriched by Norn vocabulary.
[5] On George Low’s 1774 collection, see Barnes, who notes that Low’s manuscript contains the Lord’s Prayer, the Hildina ballad, and a short word-list, and Frances J. Fischer, who describes Hildina as the major surviving example of Norn and identifies William Henry of Guttorm on Foula as Low’s informant. Barnes also later endorses the skeptical view that Low may have encountered the remains of a dead language rather than a flourishing one.
[6] Barnes discusses the greeting goand da boundæ, glossed as “Guid day Guidman,” and compares it to modern Icelandic and Faroese góðan dag.
[7] Remco Knooihuizen, “The Norn-to-Scots language shift,” identifies the spread of Scots in administration, law, religion, and education, as well as the weakening of Scandinavian contact, as major drivers of the shift. He also notes the appearance of Scots in official documents from the 1430s in Orkney and from the 1520s in Shetland, with mixed Scottish and Norwegian law continuing until 1611.
[8] Berit Sandnes shows how Orkney place-names preserve Norse, Scots, and mixed formations within a Scots-speaking environment. Doreen Waugh, writing on Shetland place-names in use, stresses that Shetland dialect is Scots but retains many Norn words directly within that dialect.
[9] Knooihuizen argues that by the late eighteenth century Norn was generally treated as a language of the past and suggests that the primary shift away from Norn as a first language probably occurred shortly after 1700 at the latest. Barnes likewise concludes that by the early nineteenth century real ability to speak Norn in Shetland had become an extreme rarity, and he quotes Brian Smith’s verdict on George Low’s evidence.
[10] Barnes discusses the claim that Walter Sutherland of Skaw died about 1850 as the last man in Unst said to be able to speak Norn, while also emphasizing Jakobsen’s doubts about how substantial such late survivals really were.
[11] Orkney Museums states that modern island speech remains rich in words inherited from Orkney Norn. The University of Edinburgh’s Shetland Sea Word Glossary notes that many older sea-language coinages in Shetland derive from Norn, which it describes as having been spoken in the isles until the eighteenth century.
[12] For the broad historical framing of Norn as a West Norse-derived language that became central to island life and was later displaced by Scots, see Barnes on definition and development, Knooihuizen on language shift, and Orkney Museums on the long predominance of Orkney Norn.
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