James Stout Angus


James Stout Angus was a writer from Shetland, Scotland.

Life

Angus was born at Catfirth Haa in the parish of Nesting. His grandfather William Angus is recorded first at Burraness in Delting, but the lands of Catfirth were leased in 1782 to the Angus family who retained them until 1890. His son Hercules married Janet Stout of Scatsta. He was a merchant at Catfirth and it was here that the writer grew up. James had some tuition from Robert Laing, schoolmaster, land surveyor and teacher of navigation, and he assisted his schoolmaster uncle in Reawick for a time, but he subsequently bound himself as a housewright or joiner, then worked as a ship's carpenter, sailing emigrant and East Indian ships. He settled in Lerwick when he married, establishing a successful business as a housewright at No. 6 Commercial Street.
Angus began to publish poetry in the press in the 1870s, and is credited by Laurence Graham as having composed, in ‘Eels’, the “first truly original poem written in what we know as the Shetland dialect”. In 1910, aged 80, having been inspired by the work of the Faeroese philologist Jakob Jakobsen, he published his Etymological Glossary of Some Shetland Placenames, and four years later his Glossary of the Shetland Dialect. He lived to be 93, by which time his poetry had been collected in Echoes in Klingrahool, subsequently reprinted twice.