James Inkster

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James Inkster, poet and author of Mansie's Röd, was born at Houll, North Roe, around 1850, the second of five children of Robert Inkster, who at nineteen had married Catherine Ratter of Uyea, a woman fourteen years older, already twice widowed with three children. The Inksters were originally from Brebister in Northmavine.

In adulthood James Inkster moved to Lerwick, where he worked as a bookseller and stationer, and there he married a local woman, Eliza Catherine Manson in 1881. She was the sister of Thomas Manson, who in 1885 founded 'The Shetland News', and the photographer James C. Manson. They had seven children, but tragically two of their three sons were killed in action in France during the First World War.

Mansie’s Röd originally appeared as a series of dialect ‘sketches’ in The Shetland News. Inkster was able to draw on the voices of his childhood in the north mainland to produce a dense and yet accessible written style that found a contemporary audience. The sketches were published in a collected edition in 1922, five years before the death of their author, and proved very popular.

The noun 'röd' relates to the verb 'ta rö' (to advise), as recorded in one of the fragments of old Shetlandic Norn provided by James Stout Angus for the Faroese philologist Jakob Jakobsen: ‘Guyt a taka gamla manna rö – It’s good to take old men’s advice’. Inkster is one those Shetlanders singled out for their assistance by Jakobsen in his introduction to his dictionary.