T. A. Robertson

           Only a few of those who knew T.A. Robertson as a boy were able to glimpse beneath his extreme shyness and reserve the qualities of intellect and imagination that he displayed so notably in later life.  He took refuge in silence, possibly to avoid misunderstanding of his sensitivity, but all the time he was, as it were, clutching to himself the whole life and landscape of the islands with a fierce inarticulate delight.  When he wasn’t working (on the croft) he was exploring, and this delight in the landscape continued right through his life, finding expression in many of his poems.

His schoolmaster at Happyhansel, Waas, was James MacCullie who developed the boy’s love of literature and encouraged him to go to university.  At senior secondary school in Lerwick he displayed a flair for languages and literature, as well as athletics, and won the prize for best scholar-athlete in 1926-7.  He graduated MA from Edinburgh in 1932 and was offered the possibility of postgraduate work at Oxford, which he turned down, mainly for financial reasons. After qualifying as a teacher and four years of temporary jobs, he was eventually appointed to a post teaching English and History in Lerwick Central Public School, where he remained until he retired.  Given his quiet nature and academic leanings, he did not find teaching in a vocational secondary school an easy profession.  However, he was much admired by many of his pupils, who could see his deeper qualities.

Alex cared for his ailing mother for many years, but the most significant relationship in his life was with Martha (Pat) Andrew, daughter of the local minister in Waas.  He had always hoped that their paths might cross.  One of his most moving poems is the short love lyric ‘Water-Lilies’.  Written in Shetland dialect when he was away from the islands, it expresses memories of time spent with her at the peat hill at Lungawater and how much he misses both her and the moors and lochs of his home. 

           Laek gold ida cups o white water-lilies,
           Whaar I drank sweetness afore I göd.

They eventually married, when they were already in their middle years, on New Year’s Eve 1953. Theirs was a marriage of mutual loving support. He wrote her a poem to mark each anniversary. It was also a collaborative relationship. In 1973 they edited Da Sangs at A’ll Sing ta Dee, a collection of dialect songs and music. After his death, she was responsible for editing his collected poems. 

T. A. Robertson adopted as his nom-de-plume the old Norse name for the area, Vagaland. No Shetland concert in the mid-20th century was complete without a Vagaland recitation or a song composed from one of his poems (for example, ‘Stoorbra Hill’ or ‘Da Sang o da Papa Men’). He was an unofficial poet laureate for Shetland, writing poems for local special occasions.

His poems were published regularly in The New Shetlander, a literary and cultural magazine which he helped set up in 1947, and which is still produced quarterly in Shetland.  The Shetland Times published two collections of his poems, the first in 1952 (Laeves fae Vagaland) and the second in 1965 (Mair Laeves fae Vagaland). 

His poems, whether in Shetland dialect or English, have shape, rhythm and a rhyme scheme.  His use of dialect is particularly rich and the writing close to the natural speech pattern of the islands.  Though his thematic range was perhaps somewhat restricted, he was a poet of considerable technical ability. 

The Collected Poems contains one hundred poems in dialect, including a handful of bairn-rhymes, as well sixty poems in English.  He also translated many poems, mainly into dialect rather than English, from Danish, Norwegian, German and French, as well as the Latin of Virgil and Horace. He transposed these to a Shetland context but, by retaining rhyme schemes and rhythms without compromising meaning, demonstrated his accomplishment and sensitivity to the original author’s work.  For example, Vagaland captures the slightly tongue-in-cheek mood of Horace’s Ode V, Book 1, ‘Ad Pyrrham’, about the inconstancy of the woman.  John Milton’s translation of the third stanza

           Who now enjoys thee credulous, all gold,
           Who, always vacant, always amiable
                        Hopes thee, of flattering gales
                        Unmindful. Hapless they

           To whom thou untried seem’st fair.

is transformed, while retaining the metaphor of weather and sailing, to become

           Sae he sails on, firyattin foo a gael
           Fae a black calm can spring apo da sea.
           Nae man sood ever trust a Joolie sky
           An, less, he’ll fin at hit’s da sam wi dee!

A July sky sums up all vagaries for the sailor and the erstwhile lover.

Of his poems, the best known are in the dialect.  Marwick, in his helpful introduction to the Collected Poems, comments on the potential problem of the lack of abstract nouns in the dialect:  ‘The concrete word, the precise phrase, the exact observation, the clear image, are, with the richness of imagination and purity of diction, the stones and mortar of the poet; and we find them constantly in the Vagaland poems.’

Interestingly, the wedding anniversary poems are all in English, possibly because Pat’s family roots were mainly in the south, although she was born and brought up in Shetland.

Besides his poetry, he was active in local cultural matters. In 1945, Vagaland was instrumental in the founding of the Shetland Folk Society and was an office-bearer from its inception until his death.

Another fruitful and important collaboration was with John J Graham. They co-wrote Grammar and Usage of the Shetland Dialect (1952), since used as a model for a similar book on Scots.  They also co-edited the influential anthology of Shetland verse and prose Nordern Lights (1964,) and a number of volumes of the Shetland Folk Book. 

T. A. Robertson died in Lerwick on 30 December 1973, one day before his twentieth wedding anniversary. John Graham, curator of Vagaland’s literary work for many years, wrote in The New Shetlander:

His constant passion for maintaining the continuity of local tradition… was no mere antiquarian indulgence. It was fired by a real conviction, founded on personal experience, that the past revealed true insights into the art of living; that out of the lives of ordinary folk, engaged in their daily tasks and sustained by the warmth of close communities, there emerged basic truths about the human situation. And his poems were evocations of that life and affirmations of those truths.

Anyone who wishes to understand the essence of Shetland, particularly around the middle of the 20th century, need look no further than Vagaland’s poetry.

Christine De Luca

2012