Haldane Burgess

James John (J.J.) Haldane Burgess (1862 - 1927) was a Shetland historian, poet, novelist, violinist, linguist and socialist, a noted figure in Shetland's cultural history. His published works include Rasmie's Büddie, Some Shetland Folk, Tang, The Treasure of Don Andreas, Rasmie's Kit, Rasmie's Smaa Murr, and The Viking Path, the latter being translated into German. He was one of the Shetlanders who gave assistance to Jakob Jakobsen, in his researches into the Norn language in Shetland.

Burgess was born on 28 May 1862. He was a son of Lerwick, whose grandfather had left Dunrossness as a soldier during the Napoleonic period and lived in Edinburgh for a time before settling in 'da toon' as a shopkeeper.

Haldane Burgess won first place in the Glasgow Bursary Competition. He spent four years as a teacher in Bressay in order to pay for his university education. He studied Divinity at Edinburgh University, but found himself in disagreement with certain doctrines. He lost his sight in his last year of study, took his final exams orally and returned to Lerwick. Later his promotion of socialist ideas made him a popular and radical figure. He was a major supporter of the development of the Shetland Festival Up Helly Aa.

He was a linguist and a champion of Esperanto. He developed a lifelong interest in Norse culture and taught himself Norwegian, later contributing articles to journals in Norway. In his lifetime he was best known for a novel entitled The Viking Path – A Tale of The White Christ (1894), set in Shetland and Norway at the coming of Christianity. The best-known of his work now is probably his verse in dialect, as published in Rasmie's Büddie: poems in the Shetlandic (1891), which was republished in 1913, and later in 1979 with illustrations by Frank Walterson. The poem 'Scranna' is one of the acknowledged classics of Shetlandic literature.

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