The Orkney Isles, or the Orcades as they were once known, scattered carelessly
in the icy waters of the Northern Sea, are among the most magical places
in the whole of the Islands of the Mighty. Here culture after culture has
met and intermingled, piling upon each other until it is hard to find where
one begins and the other ends. Neolithic, Bronze Age, Pictish, Celtic, Norse
and Scottish peoples have found their way there and have settled, each adding
their own layers to the rich leaven of the magical, archaeological and spiritual
loam of the islands.
The sheer richness of sites worthy of visiting make it difficult even to
begin this brief description; yet all who have in their hearts a love of
the cultures which make up our island race should go there, at least once.
Those who do, usually return, drawn back by the sense of numinous otherworldliness
which seems to hover over the very rocks of the Orkneys.
It is a fact well known among both visitors and archaeologists that one
cannot go more than a dozen meters in any direction without stubbing one's
toe on a chambered tomb, an iron age burial mound, or a circle of megalithic
standing stones. The reasons for this are part of the mystery of Orkney,
which was long believed to be - if not actually a part of the Otherworld,
then at least a doorway through which one could gain access. For this reason
the islands became virtual necropoli, sacred burial places in which the
great dead were interred with ritual and ceremony, after being ferried there
from the mainland. Who knows how many great kings and heroes of the Gaels
are buried there still, their spirits rising above the green and windswept
islands like smoke?
Above all, the mystery of the Orkneys derives from this fascination with
the Otherworld and the shadowy borderland where the ancestors strayed, ever
ready with knowledge of that other place. When Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote
his famous History of the Kings of Britain in the 12th century he gave the
name of one of the Kings of Orkney as Gwanuasuis Rex Orcadum, a name which
can be shown to derive from Gwynn ap Nudd, the lord of the Otherworld! In
the Arthurian section of the same text, the Queen of Orkney is Anna, who
in later texts became Morgain le Fay, half-sister of King Arthur and his
bitterest foe. However, in yet another text she is named Morcades, a name
which clearly derives both from the Orkneys themselves, and from the Greek
word orcus, death. Thus Morgain-Morcades is indeed the Queen of the Otherworldly
Isles of the Dead, and if we think of the story of Arthur's last days, when
wounded at Camlan he is carried to the Otherworldly island of Avalon by
Morgan le Fay...we may wonder if, at some point in the long and complex
history of Arthur, a story existed which saw him carried to the Orkneys
to be healed of his wounds....
This is only to touch upon the richness of magical lore and history to be
found in this locale. The Practicum concentrates on one single theme, although
there is much rewarding work which can be carried out while visiting these
remarkable islands.