Orkneyology Podcast

On this December "cold"full moon we have a visit from a new friend, who recently visited us in Stromness: the creator of Morph, Creature Comforts, Wallace and Gromit and many more animation favorites. Please do forgive the less-than-perfect sound quality in the first half hour. We did our best, recording from a distance on a dreich night with interference from the rumbling ferry across the street. Such is life on a northerly island, but this chat was worth persisting with. We hope you agree!

If you're inspired to do so, you can buy us a dram on Ko-fi, with our hearty thanks: https://ko-fi.com/orkneyology

Tonight, Tom Muir and Peter Lord have a talk about these things and much more:

• Early days with good friend David Sproxton, and a fondness for plasticine - schoolboys on a kitchen table
• Ray Harryhausen inspirations
• Morph in Orkney and elsewhere: almost 50 years, and forever young
• A new career in advertising: fun and lucrative!
• Enter Nick Park, "brilliant and stubborn" genius
• The return of the evil penguin
• Academy Awards
• War Story
• Filming Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer video ... amongst decaying fish and chickens
• Chicken Run, plasticine on the big screen: The Great Escape ... with chickens
• Wallace and Gromit - when Gromit had a mouth!
• Curse of the Warerabbit
• Handmade, human animation in a world of AI
• And last but not least, Shaun the Sheep, who has "many more stories to tell".

Aardman's website: https://www.aardman.com/about/

Our deep thanks go to Fionn McArthur for permission to use the musical interludes between dropped calls to Peter. Fionn recorded these lovely peedie musical bits for us a few years ago to use in a story app set in the Orkney West Mainland landscape. You can find out more about the Orkney Foklore Trail app on Orkneyology.com: https://www.orkneyology.com/orkney-folklore-trail.html

Fionn has many more talents other than music. His professionalwebsite for his photography and film work is here:https://www.startpointmedia.co.uk/about-us

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We have a visit on this full November frost moon from BBC presenter and author Sally Magnusson, who gives us a few readings from her writings, including her newest book The Shapeshifter's Daughter. Join Tom Muir and Sally Magnusson for a fascinating blether on the eve of the Stromness launch of her latest novel, set in Orkney. "Before she was a hideous monster, the Queen of the Underworld was simply Hel ..."

If you're inspired to do so, you can buy us a dram on Ko-fi, with our hearty thanks: https://ko-fi.com/orkneyology

Tonight, Tom and Sally have a talk about these things and much more:

• Sally's father, the "proudest Icelander"- Magnus Magnusson - journalist, translator of sagas, writer and television presenter
• About Sally's journalism work and being a presenter on Scottish TV since the 1980s
• Icelandic sagas and the Icelandic landscape
• Sagas as "extremely good historical fiction"
• Are small communities isolated, or are big cities isolated - who is more remote?
• The importance of knowing your kin
• The literature of Iceland: was it the adition of Celtic dna that brought it to flower?
• The tendency to romanticize the Viking era
• Viking women - strong and scary!
• The Flying Scotsman: The Eric Liddell Story - Sally's first biography
• Dreaming of Iceland - a personal account of the geography, history and legends of Iceland, written by Sally and her father
• Other books of fiction, non-fiction and children's books
• Marketing books and making choices about how to spend one's creative time
• Writing as a way to work out what we think about things
• Sally's mother's dementia
• Sally Magnusson's charity, Playlist for Life - music as positive therapy for dementia
• About inhabiting the characters you're creating
• Have we lost the more fleshed-out female characters from old Norse mythology?
• "When everything is lost to us, the stories in our heads allow us to continue."

Sally Magnusson's website: https://sallymagnusson.com/about/

Playlist for Life: https://www.playlistforlife.org.uk/

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If you're inspired to do so, you can buy us a dram on Ko-fi, with our hearty thanks: https://ko-fi.com/orkneyology

Tonight, we'll have a blether about these things and more:

• How Dennison first heard the stories from the old crofter folk of Orkney
• How he recorded and published them
• And - maddeningly - hints of many stories that got away
• Assipattle the Viking
• Who pulled the roof off Noltland Castle?
• And who on earth would burn a boat burial?!
• Making a cog for Time Team in Sanday
• The story of the mester ship
• The Mither o' the Sea - a goddess who rules Orkney's seas in the summertime
• Find out what Valkyries weave with ... if you're not squeamish.
• The story of Assipattle and the Stoorworm
• The terrible Nucklavee, description by Dennison
• What Dennison recorded about sea trows, the finmen and Eynhallow
• How Tam Scott Lost his Sight
• Beauty amidst poverty: the story of Arthur Deerness and the Mermaid
• And of course, a selkie story
• Other writings of Dennison, including the first written Orkney dialect

Link to Historic Environment Scotland's film about the Sanday shipwreck, featuring the voice of Orcadian Tom Muir MBE

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Tonight we have a moonlit blether about these things and more ...

  • Guising traditions in Shetland, masks, ceremonies, folklore, the hidden people of Iceland, storytelling around the world and how all is connected to performance - even (or maybe especially) politicians!

  • Walter Traill Dennison - the first person to write in Orkney dialect - and his importance to preserving Orkney's stories, customs and traditions

  • How is an Orcadian different from a Scot?

  • Iceland/Scandanavian connections to Orkney/Shetland?

  • Why the national spirit lives within the working classes and what national tales have to do with creating culture

  • Why the Danes were annoyed with the brothers Grimm, and are Swedish stories really "better than the Danes"?

  • Collectors from many lands - searching for identity

  • "The broken isles of Orkney" and Viking romancticism

  • The "varden" spirit in Orkney and its similarities to the banshee

  • Orkney at the Scandanavian/Celtic crossroads, how the stories are shared and Orkney's own myths

  • Do Orkney stories emphasize the supernatural/witches as evil, vs simply supernatural?

  • Book of the Black Arts stories in Orkney and Iceland

  • The difference between mermaids and finnwives in Orkney

  • Tom and Terry swap and compare Scandanavian/Orkney folktales: Witches, magicians, beach creeps, sea creatures, selkie, hidden folk, mermen and mermaids, trolls, land and sea nature spirits; spirits in the mounds, changelings, hogboy/hogboon, the nucklavee, land trows and sea trows

  • About Terry's project, the Icelandic database of 10,000 Scandanavian legends to be found in writing, with maps tracing the spread of the tales; also a sound archive to listen to on location - bringing stories back to the land.

  • What has the Black Death got to do with communications bewteen the Nordic lands?

  • Are Orkney stories more Nordic or Scottish?

  • Terry tells about Iceland's Wild Ride

  • Wintertime as darkness, earth, knowledge of past present and future, and women

  • Bibles, light, mullaca beans (Mary beans) and salt, and how they were used in protecting vulnerable souls in transitional states; in Iceland, it was silver and steel

  • Icelandic beliefs in ghosts, power points, premonitions, hidden people, protective animal spirits and dreams; haunted families vs haunted houses; and other supernatural beings

  • Three Orkney stories of unbaptized babies

  • Trolls in Orkney, and how they developed from Norwegian trolls

  • Stories as maps of behavior

  • Finding drowned people and the connection with revalatory dreams

  • The liminal, dangerous place between high tide and low

  • Are the finfolk a reference to the Sami?

  • The seen but unseen within the landscape

Links: 

Sagnagrunnur folklore database: https://sagnagrunnur.arnastofnun.is/orkney/

More about Terry Gunnel: https://english.hi.is/staff/terry

Terry Gunnell's lecture on family ghosts: https://isfnr.org/2025/08/the-next-online-lecture-terry-gunnell-17-september-2025/ 

Earlier lecturer on nature of belief: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-3_Gq7iSsg 

Terry Gunnell on Shetland guising traditions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lC4O46oyFQ 

Support Orkneyology on Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/orkneyology

Orkneyology shop: https://shop.orkneyology.com/

Orkneyology on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHQSp7iqejatLV9g5OAF7FA

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August 9, 2025 - On this full "sturgeon" moon, Tom Muir of the Orkney Islands talks with dear friend and internationally-known archaeologist, Professor Colin Richards.

If you'd like to, you can buy us a dram on Ko-fi one-time or regular: https://ko-fi.com/orkneyology

Tonight we have a moonlit blether about these things and more ...

• How early educational prejudice and discouragement ("You'll never amount to anything, Richards.") led to Colin's early career as ... a television repairman
• Putting the lie to the misaprehension that only "really clever people" can get a degree
• Indiana Jones as archaeological inspiration
• Balanced judgements of voices writing from the past
• When Tom met Colin, summer of 1985, Broch of Howe, Orkney
• How Colin (and partly due to his friend Miranda) discovered the Neolithic village of Barnhouse, and other Neolithic settlements
• Descriptions of how an archaeological site is excavated
• Stories from Colin's many archaeological digs in Orkney
• Ongoing discoveries: re-evaluating and changing assumptions in Orkney Islands archaeology
• Barnhouse, Skara Brae, Maeshowe, Ring of Brodgar, Stones of Stenness, Ness of Brodgar, Knap o' Hower, Stonehall ...
• Why were these settlements abandoned? What were they up to?
• What happened when Colin Richards spent the night inside Maeshowe?
• Guardian spirits in the mounds!
• What will Tom never forgive Colin Richards for? (Hint: It involves archaeology.)
• The Spirit of the Corn
• "We're all Jock Thomson's bairns" - people are the same, through space and time

Podcast theme music courtesy of Fionn McArthur.

"Ower wi' the moon" artwork created by Jenny Steer.

Support Orkneyology on Ko-fi one-time or regular drams: https://ko-fi.com/orkneyology

Tom Muir's Tales in the Landscape Crowdfunder: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/tales-in-the-landscape

Orkneyology shop: https://shop.orkneyology.com/

Orkneyology on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHQSp7iqejatLV9g5OAF7FA

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Episode 19: July 10, 2025 - On this full "buck" moon, Tom talks with environmental storyteller, poet and artist, Gordon "Creeping Toad" MacLellan.

Tonight we have a blether about these things and more ...

  • Why we need to react creatively to the world around us 

  • Finding the right stories to tell with heart 

  • Exploring stories of the natural world and its features 

  • Finding inspiration from the Scottish landscape

  • The joy of writing poetry

  • Lending a helping hand with our non-human neighbors, the wee hoppy people, via the toad bus

  • Gordon shares a story told to him by a nine-year-old boy

  • Working with children and imagination

  • Who owns the selkie stories, anyway?

  • The violence inherent in old tales

  • Keeping vigil with the unknown dead

  • Tom tells the true story of Betty Corrigal, Hoy

  • The story of the hundred-handed giants

  • Similarities between the story of Odysseus and an Orkney finfolk tale

  • A story-swap between two Scottish storytellers

  • Ragna, the AI Viking woman at Orkney Museum ... and what's she got to do with Tom?

  • Raven tales through different cultures

  • About the London Creativity Conference

Support Orkneyology on Ko-fi one-time or regular drams: https://ko-fi.com/orkneyology

Tom Muir's Tales in the Landscape Crowdfunder: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/tales-in-the-landscape

Orkneyology shop: https://shop.orkneyology.com/

Orkneyology on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHQSp7iqejatLV9g5OAF7FA

More from Gordon MacLellan: 

https://creepingtoad.com/

https://creepingtoad.blogspot.com/2024/05/witches-snow-and-wonderful-creatures.html

https://giftsfromcrows.bandcamp.com/album/whisper-along-the-wind

https://www.creativityconference.is/gordon-maclellan

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Be part of Tom Muir's Tales in the Landscape crowdfunder: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/tales-in-the-landscape

Episode 18: June 11, 2025 - full "strawberry" moon with Angus Konstam, naval historian and author of The Pirate Menace: Uncovering the Golden Age of Piracy

Tonight, Tom is joined by his friend, Naval historian and writer Angus Konstam. Interestingly, this full moon night coincides with the 300th anniversary of the hanging of Orkney's pirate, John Gow.

Hear about:

   • The Valient Book of Pirates - early days

   • Unraveling the difference between pirate fact and fiction

   • Cuddly pirates?

   • Why not to use a live parrot at a pirate event

   • Orkney's most-known pirate, John Gow - not the stuff of legends

   • Did an oppressive system create piracy?

   • The pirate John Gow's early days in Stromness

   • Privateering - the big business of licensed piracy

   • The difficulty of tracking down information about a pirate's early life

   • Gow, a navigator and a literate pirate

   • Gow's first failed attempt at a life of piracy

   • Dire happenings on the Caroline, and the birth of the Pirate Gow

   • Re-imagining the Caroline, according to pirate tradition; enter the Revenge

   • About drying fish for transport by ship

   • The Navy's pirate pardon scheme

   • Gow the fish pirate?

   • Finding a place to lie low when the scene got too hot - Stromness! - and how Gow's story came to an end

   • Love pirate-style: Helen Gordon, the Odin Oath, and what happened to Gow's hand?

     The pirate press gang

   • The attack on the Hall of Clestrain - pirates soundly defeated by clever women

   • Where was the original Hall of Clestrain?

   • Final bungled attempts at Carrick House, the home of Gow's old schoolmate

   • The pirates' come-uppance "sooth"

   • Where was Execution Dock in London?

   • Twice-hang-ed Gow

   • How Pirate Gow's telescope came to the Stromness Museum and a shoe buckle from James Fea the pirate-catcher in the Orkney Museum

   • What is known about John Fullerton: Orkney's other pirate?

   • Mrs Captain Mary Jones the pirate-killer

   • A bit about the dread pirate Blackbeard and psychological warfare, and how many times did hid headless body swim around his ship?

   • Women pirates from the Bahamas, who "pleaded their bellies"

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Episode 17: May12, 2025 - full "flower" moon: friends and colleagues, Tom Muir and Ellen (Baikie) Pesci, have a fascinating blether about Ellen's father, Orcadian artist and professional musician Jim Baikie.

The Jim Baikie exhibition is showing at the Orkney Museum in Kirkwall from May-September, 2025.

Help preserve Orkney's stories by joining our Tales in the Landscape Crowdfunder: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/tales-in-the-landscape

Tonight we have a visitor! Ellen Pesci, Orkney lass and Social History Curator at the Orkney Museum, talks with Tom Muir about the life of her father, the celebrated comic book artist and all-around good guy, Jim Baikie.

Among other things, you'll hear about:

• Jim's early years: the war years in Orkney
• The post-war landscape, and how it garnered inspiration and adventure for the bairns
• Jim Baikie's The Dome painting (on display at Lyness' Scapa Flow Museum) and what it represented to Jim
• "The phony war" as experienced from London, contrasted with what was happening in Orkney at that time
• What washed up on the shores of Hoy that changed the course of Jim Baikie's life?
• Where do science and art meet?
• How poor families in Orkney used to be discouraged from attending art college, and how Jim Baikie overcame that early evil
• The "jaw harp" and getting started in the music scene
• Jim meets Wendy: "sex on legs!"
• Bonus: Ellen shares a genuine 1970s recipe for Potato Jane!
• The modern disturbing fashion for changing history
• Jim and Wendy's early married life; the Cyprus and London years
• "Ready, Steady, Win!" and running from screaming teenagers
• Jim's musical life, the opportunities he had and the folk he met: Eric Clapton, Screaming Lord Sutch, Brian Jones, John Ford, Jimmy Hendrix, The Eagles, The Kinks, Deep Purple, Spike Milligan, Santana, Jack Bruce ...
• The Baikies return to Orkney
• Jim's father, and his strong link with Hoy and the Scapa Flow Museum
• Jim's avant garde idea (at the time) of remote working
• Comic book art at last: doing what he loved and being able to feed his family
• The wisdom to know the life that will make you happy
• The full family circle at the Scapa Flow Museum, Hoy

Links:

An article that Tom wrote for an earlier Jim Baikie exhibition, with photos can be found here: https://www.orkneymuseums.co.uk/orkney-artist-jim-baikie/

The Jim Baikie Facebook page, tended by his family: https://www.facebook.com/taucetiorkney

Show notes: https://www.orkneyology.com/orkneyology-podcast-show-notes.html#episode17

Orkneyology Press books: https://shop.orkneyology.com/collections/orkneyology-press-books/books

Orkneyology on Youtube: (Tom's Orkney stories collections) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b54G57-vLc&list=PLzYF_h_h5O1GsxP7DuhKGKQ8oEfSp-Axz

Tales in the Landscape Crowdfunder: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/tales-in-the-landscape

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Episode 16, April 12, 2025 - full "pink" moon: The Orkneyinga Saga part II: Christian Era Jarls - Orcadian storyteller and historian Tom Muir, MBE, tells the old stories of Orkney's jarls

Tales in the Landscape Crowdfunder: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/tales-in-the-landscape

WARNING: Tonight's chat involves some descriptions of gore and violence, as you might expect with the Vikings.

Tom will tell us a few very old family stories by the light of tonight's full moon. We'll look deeply into Orkney's Viking history, as preserved in the Orkneyinga Saga. If you've ever considered reading the sagas, this episode of Ower wi' the Moon will set you up for a more informed first reading. You'll get a condensed overview of the myth, the stories, the culture and the thinking behind these tales, to prepare you to tackle the Orkneyinga Saga in full. This is part II of III.

Tonight we discuss:

• What happens after the last pagan Jarl of Orkney dies at the Battle of Clontarf in Ireland in 1014?
• We hear about some rather unlikeable, greedy and grasping sons of Sigurd the Stout - Einar Wrymouth among them, who wasn't a very successful Viking
• Holding a Thing at Dingieshowe in Orkney's East Mainland (the assembly mound), where a young farmer, Thorkel, makes a bold move ... and lives to regret it.
• Sigurd's youngest son, Thorfinn Sigurdsson, gets involved in the fight for the family jarldom of Orkney
• Specific locations in Deerness where treacherous events took place
• A promising two-year-old hostage, Rognvald
• Kings being killed and Vikings getting around: Constantinople and Russia, for instance
• What Olaf's Wynd in Kirkwall has to do with the Vikings
• How Kirkjavagr (Kirk Bay, Kirkwall) got its name
• Papa Westray or Papa Stronsay - where did the malt for the Yuletime ale come from?
• The perils of a slip of the tongue
• A Pictish monastery on PapaWestray
• The old Christchurch in Birsay
• Making a bid for the English throne
• And along comes Magnus Barelegs - another great Viking name
• The early days of Saint Magnus
• Treachery in Egilsay and a mother's plea
• The connection between St Magnus and Orkney's skald, George Mackay Brown

Tales in the Landscape Crowdfunder: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/tales-in-the-landscape

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The Fairy Tellers is a fascinating history of fairy tales told through the lives of seven tellers of fairy tales. You've likely have heard of one of these storytellers, but unless you study fairy tales, you'll probably not have heard of the others. Find out what you may have been missing!

Support our heritage work here, if you'd like to: https://ko-fi.com/orkneyology

Tom and Nick's conversation wends its way through the centuries touching on these topics and many more:

   • The "earthy" tales of Giambattista: Find out if it's true that "everybody likes a shart joke", where the cockroach hides and old versions of Cinderella and Rapunzel

   • Hannah Dyab, who was responsible for preserving Aladin and Alibab, among others

   • Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve and her vision and backstory of Beauty and the Beast, and the difficulties of being a woman creative in her day

   • Dortchen Wild, and how did she benefit the brothers Grimm? And what does this woman have to do with the trope of girls doing housework in fairytales?

   • Ivan Khudiakov and Somadeva

   • Hans Christian Andersen: there's more to him than you might know, and isn't The Snow Queen an amazing story?

   • What can we get away with through satire when those in "authority" aren't paying attention?

   • Why are ogres the speakers of truth in some fairy tales, and why we should always listen to the "monsters".

   • Wicked stepmothers ... or wicked mothers?

   • Is a monster who can tell a story a monster?

   • Should the originator of the "gathered" stories be credited?

   • "Original" fairy tales, new and old

   • Is a selkie a monster? Read Nick's new book, Monsterland, and get his viewpoint!

Nicholas Jubber's website and books

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