Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time Part 3

(a) _Duncan_, afterwards Duncan I of Scotland, born about 1001;

(b) _Maldred_ of c.u.mbria, whose eldest son was Gospatrick, and whose second son was Dolfin; but with Maldred we are not concerned;

(c) _A daughter_, who became the mother of Moddan, whom Duncan I, after his accession in 1034, created Earl of Caithness or Cat, probably about 1040, his father being possibly of the family of Moldan of Duncansby, whose sons Gritgard and Snaekolf, if we may believe the _Njal Saga_, were slain by Helgi Njal's son and Kari Solmundarson, Moldan being said to be a kinsman of Malcolm the Scots king.

2. Malcolm's second daughter, _Donada_, he married to Finnleac or Finlay Mac Ruari, Maormor of North Moray, and a chief of the northern Picts, and they had a son, Macbeth, born about 1005, who succeeded Duncan I on his death in 1040 as King of Scotland, but left no issue.[3]

3. Malcolm's third daughter, said to have been called _Plantula_, he gave, about 1007, as his second wife to Sigurd Hlodverson, who, as we have seen, was killed in 1014 at the decisive battle of Clontarf, his wife having died probably before that event; and their only child was a son, born about 1008 and created Earl of Caithness and Sutherland, who became the great Earl and Jarl _Thorfinn_.

The three marriages were intended to secure to Malcolm the south, the middle, and the north of Pictland through the fathers of Duncan, Macbeth, and Thorfinn respectively; and we may note that from Thorfinn are descended all subsequent Jarls and Earls of Orkney and Shetland and Caithness of the so-called Norse line.

Duncan I, Macbeth, and Thorfinn Sigurd's son were thus first cousins, and, in spite of the fiction of Holinshed, Boece, and William Shakespeare, they were all about the same age, being born within seven years of each other; and none of them lived to old age.

By the victory of Carham in 1018 Malcolm II secured for ever the line of the Tweed as Scotland's southern frontier; and this success in the south, one of the most important events in Scottish history, left him free to extend his kingdom and sovereignty towards the north, his object being to unite into one realm the whole mainland at least of Scotland. To accomplish this, he would have to bring under the supremacy of the Scottish crown in addition to the Picts of Atholl, whom the Scots had absorbed, the Gallgaels of Argyll, the Picts of Moray and of Ross within and beyond the Grampians, and those of the province of Cat, with the Nors.e.m.e.n there as well. He could thus ultimately hope to oust Somarled, Brusi and Einar, Jarl Sigurd's sons by his first wife, and their overlords, the Norse kings, from Orkney and Shetland, and to add those islands to his dominions. Meantime, Somarled, Brusi and Einar took no share in Cat. Thorfinn had Cat, all for himself, as a fief of the Scottish king.

Although the history of the time of Thorfinn Sigurdson, the first Scottish Earl of Caithness and Sutherland,[4] would have been of great interest to inhabitants of those counties, the _Orkneyinga Saga_ contains but little information about his doings in them, because he bent all his efforts towards extending his dominion over the islands which formed his father Sigurd's jarldom, his policy, in his youth at least, being directed to this object by his grandfather, Malcolm II. Indeed during the life of that king, Thorfinn appears to have established himself at Duncansby in Caithness, on the sh.o.r.e of the Pentland Firth, and to have occupied himself in endeavouring to induce his three surviving half-brothers, Somarled, Brusi, and Einar, to part with as large a share as possible of Orkney and Shetland, and cede it to himself. In this he had much a.s.sistance from King Malcolm.

Thorfinn, whose mother probably died in his infancy if we are to credit his father's matrimonial stipulations as regards an Irish wife in 1014, succeeded to the earldom and lands in that year, as a boy of about six years of age, and was early in coming to his full growth, the "tallest and strongest of men; his hair was black, his features sharp, his brows scowling, and, as soon as he grew up, it was easy to see that he was forward and grasping." From the description given in the Saga at Chapter 22, he was no more a Norseman in appearance than he was by blood. He was, in fact, by race and descent, almost a pure Gael, and at Malcolm's court must have spoken only Gaelic.

Of his three half-brothers, Somarled and Brusi were not unwilling to give Thorfinn a share of the Orkney jarldom. For they were meek men, especially Brusi; and, when Somarled died, though Einar wanted two shares for himself, and fought to retain them, he only wearied out his followers and alienated them by his cruelty. They, therefore, went over to Thorfinn in Caithness. More important still, Thorkel Amundson, "the properest young man in Orkney," did likewise, and was thenceforward known as Thorkel Fostri, foster-father to Thorfinn, whom he aided at every crisis of his career.

When Thorfinn grew up, he claimed a third share of Orkney, and, not getting it, "called out a force from Caithness" where he mostly lived.[5] Brusi and Einar then pooled their share of the islands, Einar having the control of both; and Thorfinn got his trithing,[6]

managing it by his men, who collected his scatt and tolls under Thorkel Fostri, whom Einar plotted to kill. Einar next seized Eyvind Urarhorn, a Norse subject of distinction, who had caused his complete defeat in Ulfreksfirth in Ireland, but was sheltering from a storm in Orkney, and killed him, to the great anger of the Norse king.

Grasping at once the opportunity thus created, Thorfinn determined to turn it to his own advantage. He sent Thorkel to King Olaf in Norway to seek protection for himself against Einar, and Thorkel came back bearing an invitation to Thorfinn to visit the Norwegian court, from which the jarl returned as much in favour with the king as Einar was in disgrace. Brusi then tried to reconcile Thorfinn and Einar, and Thorkel was to be included in the settlement. Thorkel, however, after inviting Einar to a feast in his hall at Sandvik in Deerness, a promontory south-east of Kirkwall, discovered a plot by Einar to attack him by three several ambushes as they left the house. In a striking scene, the Saga tells how Thorkel, wounded, and Halvard, an Icelander, dispatched Einar at the hearth of the hall; how Einar's followers did not interfere; and how Thorkel fled to King Olaf in Norway, who was much gratified by the death of Einar, the slayer of his own friend Eyvind Urarhorn.[7]

On Einar's death, Brusi tried to get two-thirds of the isles, but Thorfinn now claimed a half share, and King Olaf, in spite of a visit by Thorfinn to him in Norway, ultimately awarded Brusi two-thirds, Thorfinn having the rest. Brusi, however, being unable to defend the isles from pirates, about the year 1028 gave up one of his trithings to Thorfinn on his undertaking the defence of the isles,[8] for which a powerful fleet would be essential, and Brusi died in 1031.

After this settlement of their claims, Malcolm II died in 1034 at the age of eighty; and his death wrecked his policy. For Duncan, his grandson, the Karl Hundason of the Saga, on his accession to the Scottish throne claimed tribute from his cousin Thorfinn for Caithness. Payment was at once refused, and six years of strife, interrupted by Duncan's unfortunate raids south of the Tweed, ended by his creating Mumtan or Moddan, his own sister's son, Earl of Caithness instead of Thorfinn. With a force collected in Sudrland, which thus appears to have been on the Scottish side, Moddan tried to make good his t.i.tle, but Thorfinn raised an army in Caithness, and Thorkel collected another for him in Orkney, and the Scots retired before superior numbers. "Then Earl Thorfinn fared after them, and laid under him Sudrland and Ross and harried far and wide over Scotland; thence he turned back to Caithness," and "sate at Duncansby, and had there five long-s.h.i.+ps ... and just enough force to man them well."[9]

After his retirement in Caithness, Moddan went to Duncan at North Berwick, and Duncan sent him back with another force by land to Caithness, proceeding thither himself by sea with eleven s.h.i.+ps. Duncan caught Thorfinn and his five s.h.i.+ps off the Mull of Deerness in the Mainland of Orkney, where, after a stiff hand-to-hand fight, the Scots fleet was defeated and chased southwards by Thorfinn to Moray, which he ravaged.[10]

Finding that Moddan and his army were in Thurso, Thorfinn sent Thorkel Fostri thither secretly with part of his forces, and he set fire to the house in which Moddan was, and killed him there as he tried to escape. Thorkel next raised levies in Caithness, Sutherland, and Ross, joined forces with Thorfinn in Moray, and harried the land, whereupon Duncan collected an army from the south of Scotland and Cantire and Ireland, and attacked his enemies in the north.

A great battle ensued near the Norse stronghold of Turfness,[11]

probably Burghead, where peat is found in abundance, though now submerged; and the battle was fought at Standing Stane in the parish of Duffus, three miles and a half E.S.E. of Burghead, on the 14th of August 1040.

The Saga gives the following description of the jarl and of the fighting:--

"Earl Thorfinn was at the head of his battle array; he had a gilded helmet on his head, and was girt with a sword, a great spear in his hand, and he fought with it, striking right and left.... He went thither first where the battle of those Irish was; so hot was he with his train, that they gave way at once before him, and never afterwards got into good order again. Then Karl let them bring forward his banner to meet Thorfinn; there was a hard fight, and the end of it was that Karl laid himself out to fly, but some men say that he has fallen."

"Earl Thorfinn drove the flight before him a long way up into Scotland, and after that he fared about far and wide over the land and laid it under him."[12]

Then followed Thorfinn's conquests in Fife, and after relating the failure of a Scottish force, which had surrendered, to kill him by surprise, the Saga gives a lurid picture of his burnings of farms and slayings of all the fighting men, "while the women and old men dragged themselves off to the woods and wastes with weeping and wailing," and it also tells of his journey north along Scotland to his s.h.i.+ps.[13]

"He fared then north to Caithness, and sate there that winter, but every summer thenceforth he had his levies out, and harried about the west lands, but sate most often still in the winters," feasting his men at his own expense, especially at Yuletide, in true Viking style.

Allowing for exaggeration, it is not too much to say that Thorfinn and his cousin Macbeth must, after the death of their cousin Duncan in 1040, between them have held all that is now Scotland save the Lothians, until about 1057, when Macbeth was slain. To us it is interesting to note[14] that Duncan died, not in old age, (as Shakespeare, following Boece and the English chronicler Holinshed would have us believe) but a young man of thirty-nine years, either in, or after, Thorfinn's battle, and that he fell a victim not of Groa, Macbeth's wife's cup of poison, but possibly of her husband's dagger at Bothgowanan or Pitgavenny, a smithy about two miles from Elgin. We should also note that Thorfinn's cruelty made it difficult for him ever to hope to obtain and keep the throne of Scotland, which thus fell to Macbeth.

Meantime Jarl Brusi had died about 1031, and though he left a son Ragnvald, this son was long abroad in Norway, where he was taught all the accomplishments suitable to his rank, and remained there at the time of his father's death.[15] Ragnvald Brusi-son was "one of the handsomest of men, his hair long and yellow as silk, and he was stout and tall and an able splendid man of great mind and polite manners."

He had saved King Olaf's brother Harald Sigurdson at the great battle of Stiklastad, after King Olaf, Ragnvald's own foster-father, was killed, and had fought with great distinction in Russia. Shortly after his father's death, Ragnvald returned, and, fortified by a grant from King Magnus of Norway, whom he had helped to gain the throne, claimed his father's two trithings of the Orkney jarldom. To this Thorfinn, who after 1034 had his hands full with his war with King Duncan, and had always wars with the Hebrides and the Irish, agreed, and the two joined forces, and sailed on Viking raids to the Hebrides and England.[16]

About 1044 Thorfinn married Ingibjorg,[17] Finn Arnason's daughter, and it is interesting to find that in the _Saga Book of the Viking Club_, Vol. IV, page 171, Mr. Collingwood suggests that the King of Catanesse, who fought for years to gain possession of Gratiana, the lost wife of William the Wanderer, was Thorfinn. If this story be founded on fact, as it probably is, this may account for his somewhat late marriage with Ingibjorg.

Thorfinn next claimed two trithings of Orkney from his nephew Ragnvald, who demurred to giving up what the Norse king had conferred on him, but, finding he could not cope with Thorfinn's Orkney, Caithness and Scottish forces, Ragnvald fled to King Magnus, who gave him a force of picked men, and bade Kalf Arnason also to help him, although Kalf was Thorfinn's friend, and near connection by marriage.

The two jarls met in battle in the Pentland Firth, off Rautharbiorg or Rattar Brough in Caithness, east of Dunnet Head, Kalf Arnason with his six s.h.i.+ps standing out of the fight. Thorfinn had sixty s.h.i.+ps, smaller, and, save Thorfinn's own, lower in the waist than those of his enemy, who thus easily boarded them, and then attacked Thorfinn.

Surrounded and boarded on both sides, Thorfinn cut his s.h.i.+p free and rowed to land. Arrived there, he removed his seventy dead, and all his wounded. Next he persuaded Kalf Arnason to join him with his six s.h.i.+ps, and renewed and won the fight, though Ragnvald himself escaped to Norway.[18]

Sailing thence in 1046 with one s.h.i.+p and a picked crew, Ragnvald surrounded Thorfinn,[19] who was wintering in Mainland of Orkney, and set fire to the Hall at Orphir in which he was, but the earl tore out a panel at the back, and, escaping through it with his young wife Ingibjorg in his arms, rowed in the dark over to Caithness, where he remained in hiding among his friends, all in Orkney believing him dead. Ragnvald then seized all the islands, and lived at Kirkwall.

But, while Ragnvald was in Little Papey--now Papa Stronsay--to fetch malt for Yuletide, Thorfinn returned, and surrounded the house in which Ragnvald was, by night; and, on his escaping by leaping through the besiegers in priestly disguise, Thorfinn's men followed him, and, led by his lapdog's barking, discovered him among the rocks by the sea, where Thorkel Fostri slew him, Thorfinn meanwhile annihilating his following, save one man. This man, who like the rest, was one of King Magnus' bodyguard, he bade go to his king and tell the tale, and he seized Kirkwall by stratagem. Jarl Ragnvald is said to have been a man of large stature and great strength, and to have been buried in Papa Westray, but a grave nearly eight feet long, that would fit him, has been found where he fell in Papa Stronsay.

All this left Thorfinn with his great aim achieved. He was now sole jarl of Orkney and Shetland, and sole earl of Caithness and Sutherland, and he also held Ross and the western islands and coast down to Galloway, and part of Ireland, as his _rikis_ or conquered tributary lands.

The fourth and last period of his career now begins with his dramatic visit to King Magnus in Norway; and, on the death of that king, he became the friend of his successor, Harald Hardrada, in 1047, and after visiting King Sweyn in Denmark, and Henry III, Emperor of Germany, rode south to Rome probably in 1050 along with, it is said, his cousin Macbeth, king, and a good king, of Scotland, returning thence to Orkney to his Hall at Birsay at the north-west corner of Mainland. Thorfinn went to the Pope not only for absolution, but to get Thorolf appointed bishop in Orkney, according to Adam of Bremen, c. 243.

We now come to the last years of the fourth period of his life, when "the earl sate down quietly and kept peace over all his realm. Then he left off warfare, and he turned his mind to ruling his people and land, and to law-giving. He sate almost always in Birsay, and let them build there Christchurch,[20] a splendid Minster. There first was set up a bishop's seat in the Orkneys."

The Annals of Tighernac record a great Norse expedition with the aid of the Galls of Orkney and Innse Gall and Dublin to subdue the Saxons in 1057, which failed. It is strange that we hear nothing of Thorfinn in this, and the question arises whether he had died before it took place. Had he been alive, such an expedition would hardly have been possible without him.[21] It is interesting to note that so accurate a chronicler as Sir Archibald Dunbar dates his widow Ingibjorg's marriage to Malcolm III in 1059. (See _Scottish Kings_, p. 27.)

Thorfinn's life forms the subject of no less than twenty-six chapters of the _Orkneyinga Saga_.[22] In his childhood, and later at all the main turning points of his life, he was blessed with the constant care and touching devotion, and with the able counsel and active a.s.sistance of his foster-father, Thorkel Fostri, the slayer of his three chief compet.i.tors--Jarl Einar and Earl Moddan and Jarl Ragnvald Brusi-son--the captain of his armies, the collector of his revenues and the guardian, in his absence on his Viking cruises and in his travels abroad, of his widespread dominions. There is a tradition[23]

that Thorkel founded the rock-castle of Borve, near Farr on the north coast of Sutherland, which was demolished by the Earl of Sutherland in 1556; but Thorkel is a common name among Vikings, and the story is otherwise unauthenticated.

According to the Saga, Thorfinn died of sickness "in the latter days of Harald Hardrada," (who was killed in September 1066), near the church which he founded, in his Hall at Birsay, north of Marwick Head in the north-west corner of Mainland of Orkney, within a few miles of the scene of Earl Kitchener's recent death at sea, so that the greatest of our jarls and of our earls rest near each other, the great Viking on the sh.o.r.e, and the great soldier in the ocean.

The chronology of Thorfinn and Ingibjorg his wife is extremely difficult, but on the whole we incline to think that he was born in 1008, and, as grandson of the king regnant, was created an earl at his birth, married Ingibjorg, then quite young, in 1044, and died in 1057 or 1058, after being an earl for his whole life of "fifty years,"

while his widow married Malcolm III in 1059. The phrase "in the latter days of Harald Hardrada" is after all an expression wide enough to cover the last seven years of a reign of twenty-one years, and it is unlikely that a marriage of policy would be postponed for more than the year or two after Malcolm's accession in 1057, during which he was engaged in defeating the claims of Lulach to his throne and settling his kingdom.

CHAPTER V.

_Paul and Erlend, Hakon and Magnus._

After Earl Thorfinn's death his sons Paul and Erlend jointly held the jarldom, but divided the lands. They were "big men both, and handsome, but wise and modest"[1] like their Norse mother Ingibjorg, known as Earls'-mother, first cousin of Thora, queen of Norway, mother of King Olaf Kyrre.

On Thorfinn's death, however, the rest of his territories, nine Scottish earldoms, it is said, "fell away, and went under those men who were territorially born to rule over them;" that is to say, they reverted to Scottish Maormors;[2] but Orkney and Shetland remained wholly Norse, and under Norse rule.

The date of the succession of Paul and Erlend to the Norse jarldom[3]

was, as we have seen, after 1057. Possibly in 1059, or certainly not later than 1064 or 1065, Ingibjorg, Thorfinn's widow, as by Norse law widows alone had the right to do, "gave herself away" to the Scot-King Malcolm III, known as Malcolm Canmore.[4]

As a matter of policy, the marriage was a wise step. For it would tend to strengthen not only the hold of Scotland on Caithness and Sutherland, but also its connection with Orkney and Shetland, because Ingibjorg's sons, the young jarls Paul and Erlend, would become stepsons of the Scottish king and earls of Caithness. Nor was the marriage unsuitable in point either of the age or of the rank of the contracting parties. Married to Thorfinn about 1044,[5] Ingibjorg, his widow, need not in 1064 have been more than forty. She may have been younger, and Malcolm was, in 1064, about thirty-three. If the marriage was in 1059, Ingibjorg would be only thirty-five and Malcolm twenty-eight. That Ingibjorg was not old is proved by the fact that she had by Malcolm one son and possibly three sons,[6] namely, Duncan II, and, it may be, also Malcolm and Donald. As regards rank, also, she was equal to Malcolm, being a cousin of the Queen of Norway, and widow of Thorfinn grandson of Malcolm II, the great jarl of Orkney who had then recently subdued all the north of Scotland and the Western Isles and Galloway to himself, while Malcolm III was in exile in England, whence he had been brought back with the greatest difficulty, not by a Scottish force but by the help of an English, or at least a Northumbrian army.

After his marriage with Ingibjorg it is clear that there was peace for thirty years in the north of Scotland, so far as the Norse jarls were concerned, a fact which of itself justified the marriage, which, however, may have afterwards been held to have been within the prohibited degrees, and therefore void, while its issue would be held to be illegitimate, and not ent.i.tled to succeed to the Scottish crown.

We may add that there is nothing in any Scottish record to prove this marriage or to disprove it.

The first important event in the lives of Paul and Erlend happened just before the Norman conquest of England. They joined King Harald Sigurdson (Hardrada) and his son Prince Olaf, who was their second cousin on their mother's side,[7] in an attack on England; and, after Harald's death, and his army's defeat by King Harold G.o.dwinson of England at Stamford Bridge, in September 1066, (three days before William the Conqueror landed at Pevensey) the two Orkney jarls were taken prisoner, but, along with Prince Olaf, they were released.