Chapter 10

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for having broken the peace of king Cearbhall and would have set upon him, had not Eyvind's brother, who was Önund's friend, intervened.
       A daughter of Eyvind and the Irish princess was married to Thorstein the Red, a son of Olaf the White and Aud the Deepminded, and grandson, therefore, of old Ketil Flatneb. Thorstein seems to have respected Cearbhall's peace in Ireland and the Isles, but in Scotland he harried far and wide 'and was ever victorious'. He settled, after Ketil's death, with his mother and their company in Caithness, where he entered into an alliance with Jarl Sigurd of the Orkneys, and together these two made considerable conquests in the mainland of Scotland, so that in the end the Scots were forced to cede to the viking chieftains the north-east corner of Alban. Thorstein the Red was killed there (murdered treacherously by the Scots, so it is said) about the year 900.
       Sigurd was the brother of Ragnvald Möre-jarl of Norway. Probably many of the Orkney vikings were of their kin and Ragnvald, who did not choose to live in the islands himself, was content to let Sigurd be the resident chieftain. The story goes that the jarldom was conferred on this distinguished Möre family by Harald Fairhair, first upon Ragnvald and afterwards, when he declined the honour, upon his brother, and according to Ari's chronology this traditional account is satisfactory; but it is really more likely that Harald was still a young boy when Sigurd was first installed in the Orkneys, perhaps as early as the '70s or '80s, and therefore the appointment made by Harald must have been a subsequent confirmation of the existing governorship on the occasion of his punitive expedition to the western seas in the '90s. For by that time Ragnvald and Harald were sworn friends and the continuance of Sigurd's jarldom would commend itself to the king once he had satisfied himself of his loyalty and his power.
       The first earl (if the reader will allow here and henceforth in this chapter the use of the more familiar spelling) of Orkney was a redoubtable warrior, for, aided by Thorstein the Red, he became master of Caithness and Sutherland, continued his conquests right up to the banks of the Oykell, and, adventuring farther, is said not only to have subjugated a part of Ross but also to have built himself a fortress on the south of the Moray Firth. When he died, poisoned by a scratch from the tooth of a decapitated Scottish chief whose head was hung at his




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saddle, he was in the mainland portion of his dominion and was buried near the Oykell; but his death put an end to the supremacy of the Orkney earl over northeast Alban, and worse was to come, for a little while afterwards even the authority of the earl in the islands themselves was challenged. This came about for the reason that Sigurd's son, Guthorm, died childless after reigning only a year, and Hallad, a son of Ragnvald the earl of Möre, who was thereupon sent over from Norway to become earl, proved himself a weak and miserable governor, allowing the islands to be overrun with marauding vikings; he could give the Norse bönder no protection from these attacks and himself suffered so many indignities at the hands of the pirates, who usurped his power and his rights, that at last he most shamefully abandoned his charge and returned to Norway.
       The youngest son of Ragnvald, Turf-Einar (so called because he taught the islanders to cut peat for fuel), subsequently replaced Hallad and is the best-known of the early governors. His first act was to defeat in battle two Danish vikings who had recently settled in the Orkneys, and, this done, he quickly recovered the lost authority of the earl in all the islands of the archipelago and established himself as a great and powerful chief. He never sought, however, to regain the extended dominion that Sigurd, his uncle, had possessed before him, and on one occasion he even lost the island-earldom, this happening when one of Harald Fairhair's truculent and rebel sons, Halfdan Halegg, after assisting in the murder of the great earl of Möre, fled to the Orkneys and there set himself up as king. Einar escaped to the mainland of Scotland, but in the same year he returned, gave battle to Halfdan, and was victorious, the Norwegian prince himself being captured the following day and cruelly put to death. This act of vengeance earned for him the bitter enmity of Halfdan's brothers in Norway, and there were threats of an expedition to the islands; but Einar cared little until at last King Harald himself sailed to the Orkneys. Then he fled at once to Caithness. The end, however, was that a reconciliation was brought about between Harald and Einar, and the king, who loved the good earl of Möre and his family, contented himself with demanding a fine of 60 marks of gold from the islands. Einar offered to pay the whole of this fine himself if the bönder would surrender their odel (freehold) rights to him, and this offer these peasant-proprietors of the land accepted. Einar thus became more than the king's appointed governor of Orkney; he became in addition




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the landlord, the owner, of the islands. This must have been somewhere about 940, shortly before Harald's death.
       The chief events of viking history in Alban in the very early tenth century were raids from Ireland upon the kingdom of the Scots, now ruled by Constantine III. Thus in 904 Ivar of Dublin, grandson of Ivar the Boneless, ravaged as far north as Dunkeld on the Tay, and in the next year lost his leg in a battle with the Scots near by in the Earn valley. Again, in 912, Ragnvald, likewise a grandson of the first Dublin Ivar and he who descended upon Waterford in 917, also attacked Fortrenn, pillaging Dunblane and the country around. In 918 this same viking, after his short visit to Ireland, crossed over to Britain and seized the lands of Ealdred, Earl of Bamborough, whereupon the Englishmen fled into Scotland to beg the help of Constantine. The Scots came south and fought Ragnvald at Corbridge on the English Tyne; the result of the battle was indecisive, but the Danish viking relinquished his hold upon Bernicia and, moving south in the following year, possessed himself of the kingdom of York.
       Yet the enmity of the Scots and the Irish vikings, and the alliance of the Scots and English of Bernicia, were not of long endurance. This was nearly the time of the great English supremacy under Edward the Elder, and soon, when the king of York was the helpless vassal of the king of England, when the Scots and the Welsh alike were forced to acknowledge his power, then the relationship between the Scots and the Dublin vikings changed from hostility into friendship. For it was plainly to the interest of the Scots, in the face of this English aggression, that Northumbria should be maintained as an independent Scandinavian principality, and when on the death of Sigtryg Gale in York, Æthelstan expelled his would-be successor, Godfred, king of Dublin, and also refused to tolerate the succession of Sigtryg's son, Olaf Cuaran, it was clear enough that the king of England now aimed at the full control of Northumbria. Olaf, therefore, when he fled to Scotland, was welcomed and given in marriage the daughter of Constantine, an alliance that Æthelstan could not help regarding as a direct challenge to the authority of England. And so in 934 came about the invasion of Scotland by the English, and in 937 that great battle, Brunanburh, when the king of England overthrew the united forces of Constantine, the viking leaders, and the Welsh.
       In the second half of the tenth century the earldom of Orkney




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once again assumed the importance that it had enjoyed under the first earl Sigurd. Caithness had been added for the second time to the island-dominion by the marriage of one of TurfEinar's sons with a native princess of the mainland, and the next earl in the succession had further increased the sphere of his influence by marrying the daughter of an Irish king. A period of still greater prosperity began with the accession of the son of this marriage, Sigurd the Stout, he who in part restored the odel rights of the Orkney landholders that had been bought from them by Turf-Einar This second Sigurd confirmed by victories in the field his title to Caithness, and harried far and wide in Scotland and Ireland, even winning a temporary possession of the kingdom of the Sudreys and Man, placing at Colonsay a tributary earl of his own choosing to rule them on his behalf. As his second wife he married a daughter of Malcolm, king of Scotland, and his power in the north at the beginning of the eleventh century was such that when the rebel kingdom of Dublin stood in deadly fear of the attack of Brian Boru, high-king of Ireland, it was the great Sigurd whose help the Irish vikings first sought. And to Dublin with his fleet he sailed, the price of his coming being nothing less than a promise of the Dublin throne, and there at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014 he fell.
       The son of Sigurd's second marriage was Thorfinn the Mighty, the grandest figure among all the viking chiefs of Scotland. He was a boy, living at the Scottish court, when his father died, but it was not long before King Malcolm made him earl of Caithness and Sutherland. Then there followed a long series of struggles with his three halfbrothers who had shared out the Nordreys among themselves, but by the late '20S of the eleventh century only one of these, Brusi, was left to dispute the island_realm with Thorfinn, and these two divided Orkney between themselves, this at the bidding of King Olaf the Saint who very naturally took the opportunity of re-affirming the position of the Norwegian king as overlord of the earldom.
       When Malcolm, his grandfather, died, Thorfinn lost a most important ally, and he was at once engaged in a war with the new king of the Scots, Malcolm MacKenneth, who sought to recover Caithness, but it needed only a single successful campaign for Thorfinn to re-establish his ascendency in northeast Alban. Then Brusi died and Thorfinn took all the Orkneys: but Brusi's son, Ragnvald, returned to the Nordreys in 1036 with a claim, endorsed by the new king of Norway, Magnus Olafsson, for




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two-thirds of the island-territory of the earldom. Thorfinn ceded this to Ragnvald without demur, and for eight years the two kinsmen lived at peace, fighting side by side on many viking enterprises in the Sudreys, the firths of western Scotland, Galloway, Ireland, and, in 1041, England. But in the end they quarrelled and a bitter and horrible war between them began. Ragnvald was defeated in a sea-fight and fled to Norway, but he came back and caught Thorfinn unawares, setting fire to the house wherein the earl slept. Thorfinn, unknown to all, escaped from the blazing homestead with his wife in his arms and fled to Caithness, but it was not long before he had his revenge. He crossed over to Orkney at Christmastide, surprised Ragnvald by night, burnt his house over his head, and slew him when he tried to escape. This left Thorfinn as sole earl of Orkney and from this time onward he advanced from power to power until he became lord of a mighty realm extending from the Orkneys over northern and western Scotland to Ireland and was a formidable rival of the Scottish king. He became possessed of nine earldoms in Scotland, these including Ross, a part of Moray, Galloway (where he frequently resided), and the Sudreys, and in addition he laid the Isle of Man under him and also owned estates in Ireland. This vast dominion he ruled with sympathy and patience, for after making peace with his own royal overlord in Norway and visiting Denmark, Saxony, and Rome, he settled down to the quiet government of his northern lands. It must have been in these closing years of his adventurous life that he built Christchurch minster, a building which, if it was not on the site of the present Birsay parish church in Mainland, Orkney, may perhaps be the ruined Brough chapel on an islet off the Birsay coast. This was the first bishop's seat in the Nordreys and it was within the walls of Christchurch, in the year 1064, that this great earl was laid to rest.
       Until the advent of Sigurd the Stout, the lordship of Man and the Isles had been a precarious holding, at first ruled by a Norwegian governor on behalf of the king of Norway, then passing into the hands of the Dublin kings, and later, that is in the tenth century, under the control of the Limerick Danes. Magnus Haraldsson is the first chieftain from the Limerick colony known to have been appointed king of the Isles, and it was his brother Godfred, his successor, who lost this unruly and difficult realm to Sigurd the Stout. The Orkney supremacy weakened, if it did not entirely cease, some years before Sigurd died, and Ragnvald, son of Godfred, is named as king of the