It is unsafe to dogmatise on the early races of Orkney; but from the undoubted community in blood, speech, and culture with other northern counties of Scotland during the Celtic period, we may fairly conjecture that the Islands must have similarly shared in whatever pre-Celtic population—Iberian or other—these regions as a whole possessed.

Into the vexed question whether any remnant of Celtic population survived the Norse settlement of the Islands in the ninth century we cannot enter here. It is certain that for centuries after that era Norse speech, law, and custom were as universal and supreme in Orkney as ever Anglo-Saxon speech and institutions were in Kent or Norfolk. The place-names of the Islands are, save for a late Scottish and English element, entirely Norse.

The Scottish immigration into Orkney, which commenced about 1230, came for centuries almost exclusively from the Lowlands—the Lothians, Fife, Forfarshire, and those parts of Stirlingshire, Perthshire, Aberdeenshire, Banffshire, and Moray which lie outside the “Highland Line,” being the chief areas drawn from. A later and much slighter strain of immigration from Caithness, Sutherland, and Ross, which affected the South Isles more especially, was itself quite as much of Norse as of Celtic ancestry. The people of Orkney must therefore be put down as in the main an amalgam of Norse and Lowland Scots.

There never was any very rigid line of division between these two races in the Islands. So much is it the case that, while the Norse were being Scotticised in speech and custom, the incomers were at the same time being Orcadianised in sentiment, that the opprobrious epithet of “Ferry-loupers,” hurled by native Orcadians at successive generations of Scots intruders, is itself of Scottish origin. The genius loci was a very potent spirit, and the Scoto-Orcadian was often prouder of being an Orcadian than of being a Scot.

The humblest Orcadians have for centuries past spoken English more correctly and naturally than was at all common among the Scottish lower orders before the advent of board school education, a circumstance largely due to the fact that a great portion of the population exchanged Norse speech for Scots about the period—the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—when educated Scots were themselves adopting English. Add to this the constant presence of passing English vessels and the presence of Cromwell’s soldiers. At the same time a modified Scots dialect is commonly spoken by the less educated classes, but even in this the admixture of pure English is pronounced. A few Norse words, mostly nouns, survive imbedded in the local speech, whether English or Scots. Norse speech lingered in Harray until about 1750.

The population of Orkney, which numbered 24,445 in the year 1801, increased almost uninterruptedly to a maximum of 32,395 in 1861. Every subsequent census, except that of 1881, has shown a decrease, and the 9.8 per cent. rate of intercensal decline recorded in 1911 was the heaviest revealed by the census of that year for any Scottish county. The population in that year was 25,897, being 69 to the square mile.

Under modern conditions Orkneymen have resumed the roving instincts of their Norse ancestors, and the variety of capacities under which the sons and daughters of the Islands live in the far corners of the earth is astonishing. The ostensible local causes of this movement are in reality of secondary importance. The real causes are improved education, improved communications, and the grit to take advantage of them. Can any Scottish or English county show the equivalent of The Orkney and Shetland American, a little newspaper published for years in Chicago? “A Shields Shetlander,” too, is a current descriptive tag which might well be supplemented by “A Leith Orcadian.”