A History of the Vikings
Chapter 10
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SCOTLAND AND MAN
THERE was no great realm of Scotland in the eighth century, and North Britain, when the vikings first laid hold upon it, was a patchwork of kingdoms inhabited by peoples of different races. There were, first and foremost, the Picts, these occupying the largest part of the land, all the country north of the Firths of Forth and Clyde (except modern Argyllshire) and overflowing into the islands of the west and north, a confederacy of greater and lesser tribes, each with their own sub-king or chief, but having, when their history begins, a high-king at the head of all. Second, and like the Picts long-established, were the Strathclyde Welsh, Brythonic Celts as were their brothers in Wales itself, the whole body being the westward-crowded remnant of the Britons of pre-Roman days. But these Welsh of the north, or of the Cumbrian kingdom as it is sometimes called, were isolated from the Welsh of Wales and separately ruled, their territories being the lands from the Clyde to the Derwent in Cumberland, with Carlisle a chief town of theirs and Dumbarton (Alcluit) on the Clyde their capital; yet it may be that Galloway was not Welsh entirely, having a more Pictish than British population. Then, third, there were the Scots, newcomers, who were Goidelic Celts and colonists from Ireland: they had first established themselves about the year AD 500 in their new home, the district that came to be known as Dalriada and that comprised the whole of Argyllshire including the Kintyre peninsula and the islands of Islay, Jura, Arran, and Bute. Then, fourth, there were those other newcomers, Teutons, the Angles of Bernicia, whose kingdom, with Bamborough as its capital, extended first from the Forth to the Tees and later, when Deira was added, from the Forth to the Humber.
This Anglian kingdom was at first a powerful and dangerous neighbour, but the principal interest of eighth-century history in North Britain is the solid advance of Dalriada, the kingdom of the Scots, as a political force, and the decline of the Picts and the Welsh. Indeed, in the ninth century the four kingdoms
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were reduced to three by the union in 844 of the Picts and Scots under Kenneth MacAlpin, king of Dalriada. And in the tenth century this united kingdom came into possession of Cumbria, while, in the beginning of the eleventh century, Lothian, the northern part of Bernicia between the Forth and the Tweed, was also annexed. And thus was the great kingdom of Alban, Scotland that is, formed.
Now threefold was the viking menace against her. From the south where the Danes were colonizing Northumbria, from the Irish colonies in the west, and in the north from Scandinavia; but although Lothian suffered an invasion of the Northumbrian Danes in 875 and the Scots were later embroiled in the wars of the succession to the throne of York, it was most of all as coming from the north and west that Alban knew the vikings, and it was from Scandinavia and Ireland that they came. The settlements were first of all established in the islands. The Orkneys and Shetlands, or Nordreys as the vikings called them, were occupied at the beginning of the ninth century, and so too were the Sudreys, or Hebrides; but these island-settlements were followed in the late ninth and in the tenth century by minor extensions of the little colonies on to the adjacent mainland coast, especially into Caithness in the north. And it will be seen that the history of the vikings in Scotland, apart from occasional raids and battles, is not much more than the history of the northern and the western island-groups, namely that of the earldom of Orkney (this including the Shetlands) and that of the kingdom of the Sudreys and Man. But there were nevertheless other notable settlements, for from Ireland the vikings established themselves around the Solway Firth, both on the north shore far into Galloway and in the south down the Cumbrian coast, while at an early date Norsemen colonized the coastal fringe of Argyll in the Dalriadic kingdom and the Kintyre peninsula; in fact the mixed Skotar-viking inhabitants of these districts later came to be known as the Gall-gael (Foreign Scots), the name Galloway itself (in the Norse tongue Gaddgeddlar) being derived from this.
As to the first settlement of the vikings history is silent, but Dr. A. W. Brøgger, whose happy lot it is to illumine with welcome and unexpected light even the darkest passages in his country's story, has sought to make up for the lack of written record by a study of place-name and linguistic evidence, together with that of the less trustworthy and admittedly scanty archaeological material. (1) Therefrom he argues that in the earliest flood of Nors
1. Ancient Emigrants, Oxford, 1929.
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emigrants to Scotland (here dated 780-850) there were two tides, the first being the outpouring of a harmless peasant folk from the Möre--Tröndelag and Jaeder--West Agder districts into the almost empty islands of the Orkneys and Shetlands, (1) and the second being the separate movement of a band of prouder spirits, nobles in search of wealth and adventure, who took up their abode in the Hebrides in the first decades of the ninth century, viking chieftains of the story-book type, contemporaries and fellows of the great Turgeis who conquered northern Ireland in the '30s. The new world of Norse aristocrats thus formed in this western archipelago was therefore a congenial home for the spirited malcontents whom the harsh rule of Harald Fairhair drove from Norway; but others also, as Snorri tells in the Heimskringla, descended upon the quiet Norse inhabitants of the Orkneys and Shetlands, and from their winter-quarters in these islands they harried their own country until the fearful time when Harald, in his wrath, came west-over-sea to butcher these pests and burn their pirate-homes.
Iona, most beloved and hallowed isle of Columcille, was plundered in 795, and this was the first warning to the Christian world that the vikings had fallen upon Scotland and the Isles. It may have been the Danes who committed this outrage, inasmuch as it is said to have been 'Black Pagans' who in the same year attacked Lambey and Skye, and, indeed, they may even have reached the Hebrides a year before; yet, beyond a doubt, it was most of all the Norsemen that perhaps before this time and thereafter harried the Scottish islands and, in the north and west, the mainland of Scotland itself.
There is but little early history of the vikings here, for in these sparsely populated and remote districts, the Norse might rob, and even settle, if so they would, without attracting the notice of the Christian chroniclers. Thus, except for the raid on Skye and four cruel attacks upon Iona, there is nothing heard in the Celtic records of vikings in Scottish waters until the late '30S of the ninth century when a fleet of the pirates, sailing from Dublin, attacked Dalriadic Scotland, and subsequently Pictland. This was just after the great land-winning of Turgeis in Ireland and five years before the triumph of Dalriada over Pictland when Kenneth MacAlpin, the founder of the
1. I say nothing of the theory that the Orkneys and Shetlands were occupied by the Norse at a much earlier date (about 700) as this has not passed the recent test of Dr. Brøgger's examination (op. cit.). It depends on linguistic rather than archaeological evidence, see A. Bugge, Vesterlandenes Indflydelse . . . i Vikingetiden, Oslo, 1905.
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Scottish kingdom, added the realm of the Picts to his dominion. Perhaps Turgeis, as Norse king in Ireland, aimed at a recognition of his authority from the vikings of Scotland, if not from the Scottish and Pictish chieftains themselves, as most assuredly did the Norse Olaf when, fourteen years later, he had made himself king of Dublin. (1)
For Olaf had three wives. One was Aud the Deepminded, daughter of a viking called Ketil Flatneb (to be spoken of below); another was daughter of Aed Finnliath, high-king of Ireland; and the third, whom he married four years before the Irish princess, was a daughter of Kenneth MacAlpin himself, the king of Scotland, this alliance in itself proving that the Norse king of Dublin in his viking days had played some part in the affairs of Alban, perhaps even to the extent of assisting Kenneth against other vikings or against the common enemy, the Picts. At any rate the Scottish marriage must have given him some fancied heritage in Alban, for in 866, some years after Kenneth was dead, Olaf, with Audgisl his brother, invaded Fortrenn, that is the valley of the upper Forth in Pictland, while in 870 Olaf and Ivar the Boneless, son of Ragnar Lodbrok and also from Dublin, attacked the great natural fortress of Dumbarton (Alcluit) on the Clyde, the last stronghold and capital of the Strathclyde Welsh. This, after a four months' siege, they took, and they subsequently returned to Dublin with a huge booty and a large number of prisoners, Welsh, Scottish, and Saxon. Clearly Olaf believed, rightly or wrongly, that most of western Scotland should properly submit to the authority of the Dublin king.
Ketil Flatneb, Olaf's father-in-law by his first marriage, was a famous viking of the western waters. He came from Romsdal in Norway, and in his early days, that is in the '40s and '50S of the ninth century, he went off regularly on summer viking expeditions, plundering most of all west-oversea in the Hebrides. His rise to a position of considerable power came late in life, (2) ten years or more before the great expedition (about 894) of Harald Fairhair to crush the turbulent vikings of the Scottish islands, for it was old Ketil who had been chosen by Harald to rule the Hebrides
1. I repeat (see p. 279 , n. 1) that the identification of Olaf the White with Olaf the Dublin king is not a matter of certainty.
2. For the involved and difficult story of Ketil in the Hebrides, see D. W. H. Marshall, Sudreys in Viking Times, Glasgow, 1929, p. 32, but note that the chronology employed in this work is based on the old date for Hafrsfjord.
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on his behalf. This duty he performed with the zeal and thoroughness that was expected of him, subduing all the still restless vikings of the Sudreys and making himself their acknowledged ruler; but he very soon incurred the king's displeasure by neglecting to pay the tribute that Harald demanded of him. At once his lands in Norway were seized, and Ketil, then at home, was forced to fly from the country and remain for the short rest of his life an outlaw chieftain in the islands that he knew so well. After his death, the members of his family who were sharing his exile made their way sooner or later to Iceland, and so were the Western Isles left for the time with no lord but far-away Harald.
Another notable viking of the Hebrides in these early days was Onund Tree-foot (for he had a wooden leg). On one occasion, before he lost his leg fighting against Harald at Hafrsfjord, he arrived off Barra with a little fleet of five ships and found there the Irish king, Cearbhall of Ossory (he who was also king of Dublin), also with five boats. There was a battle in which the vikings defeated the Irish, so that Cearbhall was forced to escape in his one surviving ship. Onund remained for three years in the Hebrides after this, pillaging shamelessly both in Ireland and Scotland. He went back to Norway for the great Hafrsfjord battle, and then returned to the Sudreys and settled there with his company in contented exile, harrying overseas regularly each summer and becoming just one of those lawless and unprofitable scoundrels whom Harald so much detested. He had a ferocious battle with two other Sudrey vikings of his own kidney who, after a long absence plundering in Ireland, came back unexpectedly with thirteen ships to their old home, and by winning this he must have made himself for a time master of the Hebrides. Yet his authority was recognized neither in Norway nor in Ireland, and eventually he migrated to Iceland, no doubt before Harald's punitive expedition to the Scottish waters.
The appearance of Cearbhall in the Sudreys is to be explained on the grounds that this energetic and far-seeing king had laid plans whereby he might become overlord of the Western Isles and other viking dominions. To this end he had given his daughter in marriage to yet another notable viking of the period, Eyvind the Eastman (for his father came from Sweden), and created Eyvind, henceforth his friend and ally, warden of the Irish coasts, a position that seemingly carried with it a considerable authority over the Hebrides, for when Eyvind met Onund Tree-foot he reproached him bitterly
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