Storm’s Edge
Life, Death and Magic in the Islands of Orkney
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Storm’s Edge
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Narrated by:
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Kenny Blyth
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By:
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Peter Marshall
About this listen
'A surprising page-turner, full of humour and startling details' THE TIMES
'If I read a better history this year, I will be lucky' TOM HOLLAND
'An astonishing tour de force’ SPECTATOR
From Peter Marshall, winner of the 2018 Wolfson Prize, Storm’s Edge is a new history of the Orkney Islands that delves deep into island politics, folk beliefs and community memory on the geographical edge of Britain.
Peter Marshall was born in Orkney. His ancestors were farmers and farm labourers on the northern island of Sanday – where, in 1624, one of them was murdered by a witch. In an expansive and enthralling historical account, Marshall looks afresh at a small group of islands that has been treated as a mere footnote, remote and peripheral, and in doing so invites us to think differently about key events of British history.
With Orkney as our point of departure, Marshall traverses three dramatic centuries of religious, political and economic upheaval: a time when what we think of as modern Scotland, and then modern Britain, was being forged and tested.
Storm's Edge is a magisterial history, a fascinating cultural study and a mighty attestation to the importance of placing the periphery at the centre. Britain is a nation composed of many different islands, but too often we focus on just one. This book offers a radical alternative, encouraging us to reorient the map and travel with Peter Marshall through landscapes of forgotten history.
©2024 Peter Marshall (P)2024 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
'Engrossing and near-faultless… Orkney already boasts a roll call of distinguished writers. The list has just got longer'
Literary Review
'Peter Marshall’s new, very readable history of the archipelago is a wonderful corrective to our tendency to see Scottish history through a lowland lens… I have, I am ashamed to say, never been to Orkney. But reading Marshall’s book might just tempt me to make the journey'
The Herald
'A remarkable and wonderful book — extraordinary in both scale and erudition’
Church Times
What listeners say about Storm’s Edge
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Travelling Girl
- 27-08-24
A complex story worth telling and well told
Superbly narration (well-paced, sympathetically delivered and very well enunciated) by Kenny Blyth helps the listener follow Peter Marshall’s text which is both complex and detailed. I wondered at times whether I would have better reading rather than listening to this brilliant social, exciting and religious history of Orkney in the 16-29th centuries but with some repetition of sections where my concentration waned, I hung on and the narration increasingly drew me in to this story-telling history of the Orkney Commons. Marshall is well aware of whose voice history records. He avoids judgement without clear evidence but also gives us, in passing, the benefit of his opinion in a way that enlivens the narrative.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Rachel Redford
- 11-05-24
Excellent!
Born and raised in Orkney, Peter Marshall has written this tremendously deep and impressively detailed history through the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the ‘country of Orkney’, as Orcadians called their 70 scattered island of which only twenty are inhabited. Marshall’s intimate relationship with the islands, and Kenny Blyth’s accomplished narration add an extra dimension to the text.
One of the many threads which I enjoyed in Storm’s Edge is the development of the sea-dependent islanders’ language from the sixteenth century when Norn, a variant of Norse, was still spoken, through the centuries of gradual Scotification imposed by outside rule and invasions. Scots words with their Norse roots ,liberally used and explained by the author, are a great pleasure: from dulcie to ditties, from gunnells to glegs. Schooling in the Scots language finally wiped out Norn, but around a thousand words remained as when Orkney parents continued to call bedtime prayers with their children. Their ‘bonnie words’.
Marshall’ makes excellent use s use of contemporary sources as he recounts the history of the violent rebellions and wars which raged over the islands, almost all of it seemingly to the detriment of the impoverished Orcadians scraping a living on the rented farmsteads which they shared with their precious few cows. Bishops, kings and earls, many of them corrupt and others ‘shameless fornicators’, imposed harsh rules such as denying the islanders the right to ransack the wrecked ships of the spoils on which they depended.
The author takes us into the everyday existence of these ordinary Orcadians dependent for their survival on the sea, its seaweed, limpets ,fish and wrecks, and on the windswept and treeless soil. Using the ‘ditties’ , which were he written information on legal court business, Marshall provides vivid insights into their harsh lives.
Even more interestingly, h9 explores the inhabitants’ mindsets which made them believe in such as witchcraft, ‘charimng’ , spells, evil words - and selkies (seals which could shape-shift into humans). Between1594 and 1708, 97 witches, all but 16 0of whom were women, were executed. Later harsh Calvinist Scots teaching brought in relentless punishment for ‘sabbath breaching’. Neighbour reported neighbour for perceived breaches: a young boy was whipped for trading eggs on the Sabbath, and a mother brought to court for gathering edible seaweed for her hungry children.
A short review cannot hope to do justice to the breadth of this long, hugely rewarding book which probably needs to be read on the page, or at least listened to twice to do it justice!
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