Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time Part 2

The legend is given in the _Niala_[36] as follows:--"On Friday it happened in Caithness that a man called Dorruthr went out of his house and saw that twelve men together rode to a certain bower, where they all disappeared. He went to the bower, and looked in through a window, and saw that within there were women, who had set up a web. They sang the poem, calling on the listener, Dorruthr, to learn the song, and to tell it to others. When the song was over, they tore down the web, each one retaining what she held in her hand of it. And now Dorruthr went away from the window and returned home, while they mounted their horses, riding six to the north and six to the south. A similar vision appeared to Brand, the son of Gneisti, in the Faroes. At Swinefell in Iceland blood fell on the cope of a priest on Good Friday, so that he had to take it off. At Thvatta a priest saw on Good Friday deep sea before the altar and many terrible wonders therein, and for long he was unable to sing the Hours."[37]

This strange legend of early telepathy may be explained by the fact that Thorstein, son of the Icelander Hall o' Side, fought for Sigurd at Clontarf, and afterwards returned to Iceland and told the story of the battle, which the Saga preserved; and the English poet, Thomas Gray, used it as the theme of his well-known poem int.i.tuled _The Fatal Sisters_. The old Norse ballad referred to Sigurd's death at Clontarf in 1014. It is known as _Darratha-Liod_ or _The Javelin-Song_, and is translated by the late Eirikr Magnusson and printed in the _Miscellany of the Viking Society_ with the Old Norse original[38] and the translator's scholarly notes and explanations. It is said that it was often sung in Old Norse in North Ronaldsay until the middle of the eighteenth century.

As translated it is as follows:--

DARRATHA-LIOD.

I.

Widely's warped To warn of slaughter The back-beam's rug-- Lo, blood is raining!

Now grey with spears Is framed the web Of human kind, With red woof filled By maiden friends Of Randver's slayer.

II.

That web is warped With human entrails, And is hard weighted With heads of people; Bloodstained darts Do for treadles, The forebeam's ironbound The reed's of arrows; Swords be sleys[39]

For this web of war.

III.

Hild goes to weave And Hiorthrimol Sangrid and Svipol With swords unsheathed.

Shafts will crack And s.h.i.+elds will burst, The dog of helms Will drop on byrnies.

IV.

Wind we, wind we Web of javelins Such as the young king Has waged before.

Forward we go And rush to the fray, Where our friends Engage in fighting.

V.

Wind we, wind we Web of javelins Where forward rush The fighters' standards.

VI.

Wind we, wind we Web of javelins, And faithfully The king we follow.

Nor shall we leave His life to perish; Among the doomed Our choice is ample.

VII.

There Gunn and Gondul Who guarded the king Saw borne by men b.l.o.o.d.y targets.

VIII.

That race will now Rule the country Which erstwhile held But outer nesses.

The mighty king, Meweens, is doomed.

Now pierced by points The Earl hath fallen.

IX.

Such bale will now Betide the Irish As ne'er grows old To minding men.

The web's now woven The wold made red, Afar will travel The tale of woe.

X: An awful sight The eye beholdeth As blood-red clouds Are borne through heaven; The skies take hue Of human blood, Whene'er fight-maidens Fall to singing.

XI. Willing we chant Of the youthful king A lay of victory-- Luck to our singing!

But he who listens Must learn by heart This spear-maid's song And spread it further.

XII.

On bare-backed steeds We start out swiftly With swords unsheathed From hence away.

The nine centuries, above referred to, of Roman invasion, intestine war, and ecclesiastical rivalry between the Pictish, Columban and Catholic Churches had now, under Malcolm II, produced a kingdom of Scotland, throughout which the Catholic was in a fair way to become the predominant Church, and in which the authority of the Scottish Crown was for the time being, nominally, but in the north merely nominally, supreme on the mainland from the Tweed to the Pentland Firth. The Isles of Orkney and Shetland and the whole of the Sudreyar or Hebrides, however, owed allegiance, whether their jarls admitted it or not, to the Crown of Norway, and the Scottish kings had no authority over them.[40] Moreover, the Northmen--Danes and Nors.e.m.e.n and Gallgaels--held the western seas from the b.u.t.t of Lewis to the Isle of Man, and they had severed the connection between the Scots of Ulster and the Scots of Argyll. The latter had thus been forced to move eastwards, in order to avoid constant raids by the Irish Danes and Nors.e.m.e.n and the Gallgaels, who thus possessed themselves of all the coast of Scotland then known as Airergaithel or Argyll, which extended up to Ross and a.s.synt, west of the Drumalban watershed.

Of the next nine centuries from 1000 to the present time it is proposed to deal with the first two hundred and seventy years only, which, with the preceding century and a half, form a chapter of Scottish history complete in itself. The narrative, as already stated, will be based largely upon the great Stories or Tales known as the _Orkneyinga, St. Magnus'_, and _Hakonar Sagas_, and also upon Scottish and English chronicles and records so far as they throw their fitful light upon the northern counties of Scotland, and especially upon Caithness and Sutherland, during the dark periods between these Sagas.

Attention will have to be paid to the Pictish family of Moldan of Duncansby, of Moddan, created Earl of Caithness by his uncle Duncan I, and of Moddan "in Dale," each of whom in turn succeeded to much of the estates of the ancient Maormors of Duncansby, but whose people had been driven back from most of the best low-lying lands into the upper valleys and the hills by the foreign invaders of Cat. For, when the Norse Vikings first attacked Cat and succeeded in conquering the Picts there, they conquered by no means the whole of that province. They subdued and held only that part of Ness or modern Caithness which lies next its north and east coasts, and the rest of the sea-board of Ness, Strathnavern and Sudrland, forcing their way up the lower parts of the valleys of these districts, as their place-names still live on to prove; but they never conquered, so as to occupy and hold them, the upper parts of these river basins or the hills above them, which remained in possession of Picts and Gaels throughout the whole period of the Norse occupation. Further, the Picts and Gaels extended the area which they retained, until Norse rule was expelled from the mainland altogether.

In Strathnavern and in the upper valleys of its rivers, and also in Caithness in the uplands of the river Thurso, and in a large part of Sudrland the Pictish family and clan of Moddan in its various branches subsisted all through the Norse occupation, and it is hoped to show good reason for believing that the family of Moddan, with the Pictish or Scottish family of Freskyn de Moravia in later times, was the mainstay of Scottish rule in the extreme north until the shadowy claims of Norse suzerains over every part of the mainland were completely repelled, and avowedly abandoned.

Meantime to Norway Orkney and Cat were essential. For their fertile lands yielded the supplies of grain which Norway required; and when the Norse were driven from the arable lands of the Moray seaboard, Orkney and Cat became still more necessary to them and their folk at home. Cat the Scots could not then reach, for the Norse held the sea, while on land Pictish Moray, a jealous power, hostile to its southern neighbours, lay in its mountain fastnesses between the territory of the Scots in the south and the land of Cat in the extreme north, and formed a barrier which stretched across Alban from the North Sea to the sh.o.r.es of a.s.synt on the Skotlands-fiorthr or Minch.

CHAPTER IV.

_Thorfinn--Earl and Jarl._

Malcolm II, with whom Scottish contemporary records may be said to begin, ascended the Scottish throne in 1005, and defeated the Norse at Mortlach in Moray in 1010, and drove them from its fertile seaboard, probably with the help of Sigurd Hlodverson, Jarl of Orkney. The men of Moray, however, and their Pictish Maormors remained ungrateful, and irreconcilably opposed to Scottish rule; and Moray, then stretching across almost from ocean to ocean,[1] barred the way of the Scots to the north.

What he could not achieve by arms, Malcolm, both before and after his accession, decided to secure by a series of matrimonial alliances.

He had no son; but he had three available daughters,[2] of whom the eldest was Bethoc, and the two others are said to have been called Donada or Doada and Plantula.

1. _Bethoc_ he married to the most powerful Pictish leader of the time, Crinan, Abthane of Dunkeld, the capital of the southern Picts, and they had issue