Historic Hildina Ballad
Barry Nisbet leading the floor at the Shetland Folk Festival 2026, in a workshop to dance the Hildina ballad.
Hildina is Shetland’s oldest song. It survives in Norn, a form of Norse which was spoken in Shetland and Orkney for centuries before it died out. The ballad tells a story of love, bloodshed and revenge among the ruling families of Orkney and Norway, with an avenging heroine, Hildina, who takes her fate into her own hands (in a Game of Thrones kind of way).
It belongs to a tradition of long narrative “heroic ballads” — epic songs, sung and danced in a linked circle — that Shetland once shared with Faroe and the wider Norse North Atlantic. In Faroe that tradition lives on; in Shetland it was lost. Hildina was rescued only by chance, written down phonetically and without melody in Foula in 1774, by George Low, a young visiting clergyman who knew no Norn. By the time the Faroese scholar Jakob Jakobsen came looking in the 1890s, the song had vanished from living memory.
Over the past year, Barry Nisbet has brought it back, setting the words to Faroese melodies and translating the ballad into modern Shaetlan. After a recording at Mareel in November 2025, the workshop took it a step further. Over 60 folk gathered at the Festival Club in Islesburgh to sing and dance the Shaetlan version in a linked chain, before a “hard core” of 28 (photographed above) did the same again in the original Shetland Norn.
In Barry’s words: “Dis represents da first time it a Shetland ballad has been danced till in Shetland for ower 200 year, possibly since da ballad wis first collected à Foula ida year 1774.”
More information, with video and sound recordings, on Barry Nisbet’s website.
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