“Islands Not Far from Norway, Denmark and Germany”: Shetland, Orkney and the Spread of the Reformation in the North

Abstract

This chapter considers the relationships between the Norwegian city of Bergen and the Shetland and Orkney islands during the period from the 1520s, when Lutheran ideas began to arrive in Bergen, and the 1560s, when Scotland’s Reformed Reformation was introduced and implemented in Orkney and Shetland. Bergen was a key point of entry for Lutheran ideas in Norway; it was also the closest point of contact to Norway from Shetland and Orkney, and there were close trading links between Bergen and Shetland in particular. In the mid-sixteenth century, many (probably the majority) of the islanders will still have spoken Norn, probably bilingually with Scots, and Norn will certainly have been mutually comprehensible with Norwegian, and arguably also with Danish and Low German. However there is no evidence that Lutheran ideas had been accepted in Orkney or Shetland by the time the Scottish Reformation was implemented there in 1560. This chapter explores why this is the case, given the links to Norway and the importance of trade routes in the spread of the Lutheran Reformation from Germany to Scandinavia, and especially to Bergen. It argues that while there is evidence for quite contacts between Lutheran households and Luther priests in Bergen and individuals from Orkney and Shetland, the forms of trade in which Orcadians and Shetlanders engaged were not conducive to the spread of evangelical ideas. Moreover, the islands’ rural communities were probably relatively uneducated and this too mitigated against the reception of Reformation theology and practices.