Orkney Quotes

I gave him a smile that I hoped was as dazzling as one of his. "I realized I'm in love." Marcus, startled, looked around as though he expected to see my object d'amour in the car with us. "And you just realized this? Did you just have some sort of vision?" "Didn't need to," I said, thinking of Wolfe's ill-fated trip to the Orkneys. "It's always been right in front of me.

He caught hold of my hand. “Sydney, please don’t do this,” he begged. “No matter how confident you feel, no matter how careful you think you are, things will spiral out of control.” “They already have,” I said, opening the passenger door. “And I’m going to stop fighting them. Thank you for everything, Marcus. I mean it.” “Wait, Sydney,” he called. “Just tell me one thing.” I glanced back and waited. “Where did this come from? When you called me to tell me you were coming, you said you’d realized it was the smart thing to do. What made you change your mind?” I gave him a smile that I hoped was as dazzling as one of his. “I realized I’m in love.” Marcus, startled, looked around as though he expected to see my object d’amour in the car with us. “And you just realized that? Did you just have some sort of vision?” “Didn’t need to,” I said, thinking of Wolfe’s ill-fated trip to the Orkneys. “It’s always been right in front of me.

Did ye so? said Sir Meliagaunce, then I will abide by it: I love Queen Guenever, what will ye with it? I will prove and make good that she is the fairest lady and most of beauty in the world. As to that, said Sir Lamorak, I say nay thereto, for Queen Morgawse of Orkney, mother to Sir Gawaine, and his mother is the fairest queen and lady that beareth the life. That is not so, said Sir Meliagaunce, and that will I prove with my hands upon thy body. Will ye so? said Sir Lamorak, and in a better quarrel keep I not to fight. Then they departed either from other in great wrath.

If only he didn't believe he was Shamu's distant cousin. It was such a shame for someone so sublime to be certifiable.

Did you know that on one of the islands of Orkney, in the North of Scotland, there are some runes that when translated turned out to be Viking graffiti? Eight feet up a wall it says "A tall Viking wrote this." You gotta love that.

Writing is like breathing underwater. It's really hard to do unless you can imagine yourself a nice set of gills.

No more men. I swear it. They’re nothing but trouble. Them, and their damned penises.

He caught hold of my hand. "Sydney, please don't do this," he begged. "No matter how confident you feel, no matter how careful you are, things will spiral out of control." "They already have," I said, opening the passenger door. "And I'm going to stop fighting them. Thank you for everything, Marcus. I mean it." "Wait, Sydney," he called. "Just tell me one thing." I glanced back and waited. "Where did this come from? When you called me to tell me you were coming, you said you'd realized it was the smart thing to do. What made you change your mind?" I gave him a smile that I hoped was as dazzling as one of his. "I realized I'm in love." Marcus, startled, looked around as though he expected to see my object d'armour in the car with us. "And you just realized that? Did you have some sort of vision?" "Didn't need to," I said, thinking of Wolfe's ill-fated trip to the Orkneys. "It's always been right in front of me.

Don't you know, even yet, why I came back to Orkney?" Rognvald said. Than Thorfinn looked up. Rognvald's gaze, waiting for his, took and sustained it. Thorfinn did not look away, but his face held no expression. Rognvald said "I am the dog at your heel. Everything I have ever done has been an attempt to be like Thorfinn.

As best we can tell, the gods of Asgard came from Germany, spread into Scandinavia, and then out into the parts of the world dominated by the Vikings—into Orkney and Scotland, Ireland and the north of England—where the invaders left places named for Thor or Odin.

When asked if he thought that the French Revolution had been a good thing, Zhou Enlai famously answered that it was too early to tell, which is trite about the Terror, but it would be true about America. It’s too early to tell. If you take a timeline from the first settlements in the 1600s to the present, and compare it with the foundation of modern Europe from the end of the Roman Empire, at the same point in our history the Vikings are attacking Orkney, and Alfred is the first king of bits of what will one day be England.

The Orkney islands and the Shetlands were in fact not surrendered to Scotland until the latter half of the sixteenth century, and Norwegian was still being spoken in the Shetlands at the end of the eighteenth century; the island accent is still much closer to Norwegian than to Scots or English.

Operations so far north required bases in Scotland, not England; anticipating this need, the navy five years earlier had begun to improve Rosyth, in the Firth of Forth, as the primary base for a North Sea campaign against Germany, with Scapa Flow, in the Orkneys, identified “as another potential main base.”37

The King’s daughter, the Princess Gemdelovely must be given to the Stoorworm.

Writing is like trying to escape quicksand. The harder you try the faster you sink.

Kenneth MacAlpin unifies the Picts and the Scots.

Without the story - in which everyone living, unborn, and dead, participates - men are no more than 'bits of paper blown on the cold wind . . .

People write tragedies in which fatal blondes betray their paramours to ruin, which Cressidas, Cleopatras, Delilahs, and sometimes even naughty daughters like Jessica bring their lovers or their parents to distress: but these are not the heart of tragedy. They are fripperies to the soul of man. What does it matter if Antony did fall upon his sword? It only killed him. It is the mother's not the lover's lust that rots the mind. It is that which condemns the tragic character to his walking death. It is Jocasta, not Juliet, who dwells in the inner chamber. It is Gertrude, not the silly Ophelia, who sends Hamlet to his madness. The heart of tragedy does not lie in stealing or taking away. Any featherpated girl can steal a heart. It lies in giving, in putting on, in adding, in smothering without pillows. Desdemona robbed of life or honour is nothing to a Mordred, robbed of himself--his soul stolen, overlaid, wizened, while the mother-character lives in triumph, superfluously and with stifling love endowed on him, seemingly innocent of ill-intention. Mordred was the only son of Orkney who never married. He, while his brothers fled to England, was the one who stayed alone with her for twenty years--her living larder. Now that she was dead, he had become her grave. She existed in him like the vampire. When he moved, when he blew his nose, he did it with her movement. When he acted he became as unreal as she had been, pretending to be a virgin for the unicorn. He dabbled in the same cruel magic. He had even begun to keep lap dogs like her--although he had always hated hers with the same bitter jealousy as that with which he had hated her lovers.

Now he understood what it was to be a man: that it was to be weak as well as strong, to be foolish sometimes and wise sometimes, to know love as well as to kill. And he had learned that there were other paths for him, other gods who called in the deep places of the earth, in the lap of wavelets on the shore, in the breath of the wind. He had learned that there were other kinds of courage. He knew, with deep certainty, that the islands held a new path for him. He need only move forward and find it.

King Lot of Lowthean and Orkney married Morgause, and from their union came Gawain. King Nentres of the land of Garlot wed Elaine. Igraine’s third daughter, Morgan le Fay, was put into a nunnery where she learned the mysteries of the magic stone as well as other secret arts. In later years Morgan le Fay was married to King Uriens of the land of Gore; they bore a son who became known as Sir Uwain of the White Hands. Much trouble was being stored for the future of the kingdom. Day by day Igraine grew greater with

I bet he's hightailed it into Canada. Somewhere into Canada." "Let me put it this way. Basically, there's Canada and there's the United States of America, and Orkney, since he was a boy, never had one spark of interest in going to the latter.

Ancestral DNA research suggests that when the last real Viking died in an attack on Dublin in 1171, his marker carried on – with great vigour. A relatively new sub-type of M17 – S375 – is now prominent in the North Isles of Orkney, on the five major islands north of Gairsay. It is also carried by 30 per cent of men with the surname of Gunn who have taken DNA tests. Tradition, genealogy and history all begin to come together to form a narrative. It may be that the prevalence of S375 on the islands of Rousay, Westray, Eday, Sanday and Stronsay is linked to the well-attested phenomenon of social selection, where powerful men in the past sired many children with different women. In that way their Y chromosome markers were spread widely and quickly, much faster than if they had remained monogamous. And few men were more powerful in 12th-century Orkney than Svein Asleifsson.

This was the modern Orkney, one of the few places on Earth that could boast an energy surplus from renewables, that had Hydrogen plants, wind turbines and progress.

Did you know Orkney was a favorite stop of Viking ships along their voyages?" "She's been at the almanac again," her sire said dryly. Rohan succumbed to a fond grin. "Our little bluestocking.

The monks go on about miracles performed by Christ. Let’s be honest: compared with things done by Vivien of the Lake, the Morrigan, or Morgause, wife of Lot from the Orkneys, not to mention Merlin, Christ doesn’t really have much to boast about.

friend tells me that the cairn is – like the tomb of Maeshowe on the Orkney Mainland – aligned with the midwinter sun. At Maeshowe, on the solstice and a few days on either side, on the rare cloudless days at that time of year, the setting sun will shine directly down the entrance corridor. Webcams are set up there and one midwinter afternoon I watch over the internet as the golden light hits the end wall.

The Orkneys and Shetlands were the original motherlands of civilization, said Beaumont. Upon these landmasses exists the evidence purposely overlooked by archaeologists, anthropologists and historians desperate for personal glory and apparently obsessed with centering the cradle of culture in eastern climes. Indeed, early in 2012, a megalithic site on Orkney was discovered predating the construction of Stonehenge in southern England. Given what scholars such as Ignatius Donnelly, Conor MacDari and Comyns Beaumont state, and given what objective study reveals, we conclude that the Biblical Philistines, Amorites, Armenians, Thracians, Minoans and Phoenicians, as well as many other eastern tribes, had their racial and cultural origins in the lands of the north-west. ...from this ancient center of the earlier world, bearing copious witness of habitation from the Early Paleolithic Age onward, flourished the Cretans or Sethites, all racially Pelasgi or Phoenicians or Chaldeans, Cimmerians or Hyperboreans

The Deaf and Dumb Mother.—The late Countess of Orkney, who died at an advanced age, was deaf and dumb, and was married in 1753 by signs. She resided with her husband at his seat, Rostellan, near Cork. Shortly after the birth of her first child, the nurse saw the mother cautiously approach the cradle in which the infant lay asleep, evidently full of some deep design. The Countess, having first assured herself that her babe was fast asleep, took from under her shawl a large stone, which had purposely been concealed there, and, to the utter horror of the nurse, who largely shared the popular notion that all dumb persons are possessed of peculiar cunning and malignity, raised it up, as if to enable her to dash it down with greater force. Before the nurse could interpose to prevent what she believed would bring certain death to the sleeping and unconscious child, the dreadful stone was flung, not at the cradle, however, but upon the ground, and fell with great violence. The noise awakened the child. The Countess was overjoyed, and, in the fulness of a mother's heart, she fell upon her knees to express her thankfulness that her beloved infant possessed a blessing denied to herself—the sense of hearing. This lady often gave similar indications of superior intelligence, though we can believe that few of them equalled the present in interest. Filial

After all the dangers of the past few hours, she savored the tranquil beauty of the Orcadian landscape, with its delicate pastel wash of lavenders and blues. "This is a beautiful place," she whispered, especially charmed by the flock of hardy swans honking and clacking on the hillside, and by the shaggy black pony that was staring at them from the edge of a barren meadow nearby, its long mane blowing in the breeze. "Beautiful?" Rohan had turned to her. She could feel him staring at her. "You think so?" She looked at him. "Don't you?" He shrugged, then shook his head. "Bleak and harsh and difficult." "Perhaps." She smiled gently, gazing at him. "But there is an exquisite sensitivity in the color of the light. And the sweep of these hills bespeaks a calm strength," she said slowly, her gaze traveling over the landscape. "Noble, but unpretentious. It is what it is. A hard land, maybe. But plain and honest." She glanced at him. "I could live here." The morning light matched the soft blue shade of Rohan's eyes as he gazed at her, sensing she was not talking only about Orkney. His wordless stare was so overwhelmed with emotion for her that although she was covered in grime and dressed like somebody's footman, the way he looked at her made her feel as beautiful as a princess.

It is not known precisely when the earldom of Orkney became Christian, for the saga account of King Olaf Tryggvason’s forced conversion in c. 995 may not be reliable. It may have happened gradually here and elsewhere in Scotland, according to personal choice, during the tenth century, when pagan burial customs were abandoned (Plate 24) and Christian funerary monuments were adopted.

As Earl Rognvald of Orkney in in the Orkenyinga Saga (1200 AD) tells us: "I can play at Tafi, Nine skills I know, Rarely I forget the Runes, I know of Books and Smithing, I know how to slide on skis, Shoot and row well enough, Each of the Two arts I know, Harp playing and speaking poetry.

I am sad,’ said the Bishop of Orkney to Lord James Stewart as the tables were gently drawn and the floor cleared and the candied ginger passed from place to place. ‘I am sad because we live, you and I, on two sides of one river. And whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hart we both covet.’ ‘There is a remedy,’ said the Queen’s half-brother. ‘Is there? I doubt it,’ said Reid of Orkney. ‘There might have been, in the past. But this hart is ten years too young, I fear, for his destiny.

No,” said Erskine of Dun. “Come naked of creed or of kind or even of purpose, but bring with you what Orkney saw, all those years ago. We are too small a nation to be able to spare saints to Rome or Geneva, or any other refugees seeking to glorify either the flesh or the spirit. There is no one to understand us, except ourselves.” “That I know,” said Francis Crawford.

No Orkney weather lasts long, and you can see new weather coming a long way off. There are frequent scraps of rainbow. And birds. At any point you can stop walking, or pull over and lower the car window and hear the cries of peewits and tremulous curlews.

night in Nethergate when he mentioned the Russians and their poison-tipped umbrellas. Always three steps

whoever lived on Orkney certainly possessed an uncanny ability to build impressive stone circles. Walking the ceremonial route from Stenness and past the Ness of Brodgar, one sees along the ridge a long line of dark fingers reaching to the sky: the second stone circle, the Ring of Brodgar.

I looked at Rae, and the tears were streaming down her face, as if that person lying there who purported to be her brother was some sad imposter. Maybe the disaster that befell him was all a lie, and had befallen this poor creature who bore no resemblance to her brother Lawrence. But no, this was Lawrence, attested by the hands on the counterpane, and the cleaned and repaired coat that hung in the room in preparation for the need of its owner that would never come. His suit too hung there, cleaned and repaired, as if he would step out of bed and wear it tomorrow. Rae knew these things, and knew right away that this man lying in bed would never sit up and dress again in those familiar things that belonged to her brother. From "Orkney: A Novel" by Maggie Toner Available on Amazon

between Orkney and the Shetland Islands to the north.[15

And my favourite thing, my moment of greatest happiness, was to take the buckskin mare down the path toward the next village and to turn her head to home and let her run as fast as she dared. This, I thought, must be what the bird feels, what the arrow feels.

I was born before the Industrial Revolution, and am now about two hundred years old. But I have skipped a hundred and fifty of them. I was really born in 1737, and till I was fourteen no time-accidents happened to me. Then in 1751 I set out from Orkney for Glasgow. When I arrived I found that it was not 1751, but 1901, and that a hundred and fifty years had been burned up in my two-days' journey. But I myself was still in 1751, and remained there for a long time. All my life since I have been trying to overhaul that invisible leeway. No wonder I am obsessed with Time." (Extract from Diary 1937–39.)

What astonishes us about Earl Patrick's castle works is the extraordinary beauty and refinement of their architecture. At all of them it is obvious that he employed the same architect. And it is equally obvious that this architect was an artist of the first rank, with a scholarly ans sensitive acquaintance and understanding contemporary design, particularly in France. Yet this group of buildings, so beautiful and so refined, were erected to serve the tyrannical purposes of the worst scoundrel of his time in Scotland.

The Orkney Viking ruler, Jarl Sigurd the Mighty, died in 892 A.D. after he was bitten by a man he had decapitated in battle.

Its

To the locals, he realized, the Orkneys were the center of the world.

I set a line and looked back at the valley. It was like a green open hand among the hills. The cliffs stood near and far, red, gray, black. In the valley chimneys began to smoke, one of them mine. Ingi was up. A green offering hand, our valley, corn-giver, fire-giver, water-giver, keeper of men and beasts. The other hand that fed us was this blue hand of the sea, which was treacherous, which had claws to it, which took more than ever it gave. Today it was peaceable enough. Blue hand and green hand lay together, like praying, in the summer dawn.

From Scotland, north means the Orkney Islands, but on the Orkneys, north means faraway Zembla.

John Wild, however, suggested that a Roman breeding programme produced a sheep more akin to the Orkney sheep of South Ronaldsay that produced a thicker fleece,

What it is is amazing: a fresh burst of sweet, briny crab flavor, beautifully complimented by just a hint of lemon, followed by a soft crunch from the biscuit, which dissolves more slowly than the mousse and has a slightly salty, vegetal flavor. Susan's sorry when it's done; she could happily eat a dozen of these, or just a bowl filled with that mousse. But she doesn't want to show her hand, so she keeps her face as still as she can manage and just makes a little "hmm" noise as she wipes a little mousse off her fingers with a kitchen towel (hard to resist licking them clean). "Is that seaweed?" she asks, indicating a tray of biscuits, lined up nearby. Without the mousse topping, she can see that they weren't really biscuits at all, but many layers of paper-thin seaweed, pressed together to form a semi-firm base. "It is," Gloria confirms. "Foraged from Scottish coasts, with Orkney crab mousse and Scottish salmon roe. Scotland's waters, on a plate.

In 2008 geneticists at the University of York discovered that mice have left genetic trails in much the same way as humans. Rodents that traveled into Orkney on Viking ships ended up leaving much of their DNA in the mouse populations on the island. Indeed, the Scandinavian mice left a pattern so clear that scientists have found they can draw an accurate map of human movements based on mouse movements alone. A more recent study tracked marauding mice of the early tenth century into Greenland from Iceland and before that from either Norway or the northern part of Britain.

Scapa, aged ten years. A fine Scotch from the Orkney Islands. The ten-year is actually better than the fifteen.

The Orkney I was born into was a place where there was no great distinction between the ordinary and the fabulous; the lives of living men turned into legend.