The Literature of
Orkney and Shetland

Should we start with the Devil, as I know he’s someone you’re writing about in your own poetry? Dennison’s version is partly a traditional folk-type Devil, a bit like the one Burns imagines in his poem ‘Address to the Deil’. In that poem, Burns conjures up quite a comical figure, lurking around country lanes to scare people’s grannies with his ‘eldritch croon’. So Dennison’s Devil, scooting up the chimney with the page of the psalms up his nose, is a bit like that — a way of bringing the Devil down to size.
He’s also part of a tradition in Scottish writing that associates language with magic. Vellyan says ‘the De’il’s i’ the words’ just as a common phrase, but it turns out that language does have supernatural powers. In Scots, the words ‘grammar’ (book-learning) and ‘glamour’ (a magic spell) have the same root. Quite a lot of Scottish nineteenth-century supernatural stories pick up on this—there a lots of ‘Black Books’ that have magical powers (perhaps the most famous one in is Scott’s poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel).

In the Dennison story, the psalm book has magical properties that physically exorcise the Devil when Vellyan smuggles a leaf into the keg of gin that he throws at him. Or perhaps it’s the gin that does the trick? The story keeps swinging between the possibility that it’s all down to magic, and the idea that booze is at the heart of it, so it’s both a story about superstitious beliefs and one about social realities.

I really agree with this idea—the Devil himself is oddly less powerful than the devilish humans. The story has a real problem with Lady Crawford —there’s clearly something not ‘normal’ about her. Even though the story isn’t primarily about her she’s the first to be introduced, and she’s not a ‘proper’ lady—she had the ‘the propensities in man which most nearly approach the nature of the lower animals’. She’s one of those female figures in nineteenth-century fiction who are Gothic because of their sexual desires (like mad Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre) and as you say is quite sadistic in the way she treats the hapless minister.

I find the story very hard-edged in the way it excludes certain characters. Lady Crawford is a ‘ferry-lupper’ from Ayrshire (or at least from an Ayrshire family, it’s not quite clear in the story). Her servant Rorie is a Highlander and equally devilish with ‘fiery black eyes and long shaggy red hair’ and he is despised on the island. It’s worth remembering that there was a lot of ant-Gaelic prejudice in Britain as a whole when the story was written in the 1880s. It’s almost as if it’s easier for the traditional aspects of the story to accommodate the folkloric devil in the humorous exorcism scene that it is to understand the outsiders, Rorie and Lady C., and Dennison is doing something quite sophisticated and modern with his apparently traditional folktale (a number of his other stories are like this).

Reading your post I see that we should take the two ideas of Devilry together—the story asks us to find characters sympathetic and realistic in surprising ways and to avoid easy judgments—I can really see this working well in the dialogue poem. What do you think of the ending of the story? Do you think it’s deliberately anticlimactic, saying: ‘well, these things were all sorted out in law’ and leaving open the fact that they weren’t really sorted out in other ways?

I also wondered how you were thinking about handling the idea of language in your poem? Are you going to reflect the Devil’s bilingualism (he reverts to Orcadian when angry)?

I really like the poem that you have written in response to our conversations (and enjoyed reading it with you at the ‘Creative Journey’s’ event in Stromness. It really catches the Devil’s tone. I like the way you merge the two stories (Vellyan and the Devil, Lady Crawford and the minister) which are otherwise oddly separate in Dennison’s story. It also brings together the massive appetite for drinking in the male diners (to the extent that they’ll only eat food as ‘ballast’ to soak up the booze), with Lady C’s sexual desires.

The story really supports your idea of characters who blend into each other’s heads or personalities—after all, the Devil puts the drinkers’ souls back into the wrong bodies. I find Dennison a very sophisticated writer who is always dangling various possibilities in front of the reader and leaving it up to us to take them or not.

The ending is very typical of James Hogg, an earlier supernatural writer but one who I think was probably an influence on Dennison. Or perhaps we should just understand it as a more general oral storytelling technique that both writers are picking up on. There’s a sense that stories emerge from a general background of things going on for the occasion of their performance, and then merge back into it as life or history goes on. There’s a nod towards historical process and the way the kirk session can’t deal with the devilment of Lady C and Rorie. The characters are interesting at the point the story is told, but Dennison and Hogg acknowledge that their background is more diffuse. Your poem is great at keeping the central ideas of the story, but giving them an entirely new form. I’m really looking forward to reading the dialect version.