Laurence J. Nicolson

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Laurence J. Nicolson Shetland poet and songwriter, was born on April 26th 1844 in Lerwick, the son of an Unst mother, Margaret Gray, and a Fetlar father, Andrew, by then an established general merchant and shipping agent in the town. The family is recorded as resident at 98 Commercial Street, Lerwick in the 1851 census.

In adulthood, Laurence moved to Dalkeith in Midlothian, where he worked as a cabinet-maker, and later as a clerk in the Burgh Engineer’s Office. By the time of the 1881 census, he is resident at 20 Heriot Place, Edinburgh, employed as a commercial traveller in tobacco. He married Jessie Martin (date unknown as yet) and they had four children. In the 1880s, he was one of those active in what has been referred to as the ‘Golden Age’ of Shetlandic Scots poetry. His work, though often political and radical for its time, was often in a lyrical form suited to song: many of the poems were set to music. They were collected in 1894 as Songs of Thule. Nicolson died in Edinburgh on the 30th June 1901.

Nicolson was a prominent member of the Leith Thule Club, and an Edinburgh poet gave him the title of ‘Bard of Thule’.

“ … in the mid-eighties, Haldane Burgess, L.J. Nicolson and Basil Ramsay Anderson had begun to feature in the local press as fine dialect poets, following the examples of James Stout Angus and George Stewart, who inaugurated modern Shetlandic writing in 1879. Burgess and Nicolson were especially inventive: Nicolson wrote atheist verse, and Burgess explored radical and eventually socialist ideas in the dialect. They were irreverent. Both Nicolson and Burgess wrote hilarious pastiches of Tennyson’s gruesome jubilee ode of 1887, Nicolson from a socialist point of view …” Brian Smith, ‘The Development of the Spoken and Written Shetland Dialect’, in Shetland’s Northern Links, Language & History (1996)

“ ... Nicolson's work is all in the form of songs and poems, most of which have been collected and published in the book Songs of Thule. Some of his poems, such as 'Lullaby' and 'Da Last Noost', have been set to music. Nicolson won the proud title of the 'Bard of Thule', being acknowledged by his countrymen as their 'poet laureate' ...” Peter Jamieson, Letters on Shetland (1949)

“ … Nicholson ... rather handicapped himself by allowing the name of the "Bard of Thule" to be applied to him. Moreover he wrote principally and deliberately for a much wider public than the islands afforded, so that his dialect suffers, and even his lovely songs 'Da Last Noost' and 'Lullaby' are less characteristically Shetland in phrasing than are the works of other poets … " William Sandison, in Shetland Verse: Remnants of the Norn (1953)

See 'Songs of Thule', Laurence J. Nicolson, ‘The Bard of Thule’, (Paisley, 1894)