Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (21 page)

Another target for Scottish expansionism was Bernicia, the northern half of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria that had remained independent after the Danes seized York in 866. King Constantine II (r. 900 – 43) sought to bring Bernicia into the Scottish sphere of influence by lending support against Ragnald, the aggressive Norse-Irish king of Dublin who won control of York in 919. However, Bernicia was not just threatened by the Vikings and the Scots. As early as the 870s, Alfred the Great, the king of Wessex, had laid claim to the leadership of all the English in the struggle against the Danes. It is not known what the Northumbrians thought about this but there is no reason to assume that they welcomed it. The Wessex-based
Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle
describes the rulers of Bernicia as ‘ealdormen’ (earls), to imply subordination to Alfred and his successors, but they still considered themselves to be kings. As such, they may have preferred to be sub-kings under the Danes or the Scots than ealdormen under the Wessex dynasty. Bernicia’s future was decided in 927 when Alfred’s grandson Æthelstan captured York and expelled its Irish-Norse King Guthfrith, who took refuge with Constantine II.

Following his victory, Æthelstan summoned Constantine, together with the kings of the Welsh, and Ealdred, the king of Bernicia to a meeting at Eamont Bridge, near Penrith in Cumbria. The purpose of the meeting was twofold. Firstly, Æthelstan announced Ealdred’s deposition and the annexation of Bernicia. This is generally taken to mark the creation of the kingdom of England because, for the first time, it brought all the English under a single ruler. Secondly, the meeting was probably an occasion for the Scots and Welsh kings to acknowledge Æthelstan as high king or overlord of all Britain. Eamont Bridge is the location of three Neolithic henge monuments and numerous megalithic standing stones, marking it out as a place of ancient spiritual power. In later historical times one of these henges was associated with King Arthur, the legendary ruler of Britain. If the henge was already associated with Arthur in Æthelstan’s time, it would have been a powerfully symbolic location for the kings of Britain to recognise him as their overlord. Æthelstan had demanded, on pain of war, that Constantine bring Guthfrith with him and hand him over at the meeting. Constantine cannot have welcomed the unification of England: it would not have required great powers of prediction to see that it would make an uncomfortably powerful neighbour for Scotland. Constantine’s best opportunity to avert this threat was to help the Vikings regain control of York so, on the way to Eamont Bridge, he allowed Guthfrith to escape back to Dublin. This soured relations between Æthelstan and Constantine and may have played a part in Æthelstan’s decision to invade Scotland in 934. Though Æthelstan won no great victories, Constantine went with him when he returned to England at the end of the summer and was still in England the following year, probably not of his own free will.

Guthfrith died in 934, remarkably for a Viking leader, of natural causes. His claim to the throne of York was taken up by his son Olaf Guthfrithsson, who succeeded him as king of Dublin. Despite Olaf’s paganism, Constantine gave him one of his daughters as a wife. In 937 Olaf, Constantine and King Owen of Strathclyde became allies and invaded England with the intention of restoring the Viking kingdom of York. It was this grand alliance that Æthelstan crushed at the Battle of Brunanburh in 937. Subsequent attempts by Constantine and his successor Malcolm I (r. 943 – 54) to prop up Viking rule in York also ended in failure, and in 954 the kingdom came firmly under the control of the Wessex dynasty.

The Wessex dynasty had a difficult task in establishing its authority in the old kingdom of Northumbria. Even York was a long way from the main centres of English royal power, which at this time all lay south of the Thames, and this left Bernicia vulnerable to Scottish takeover. Sometime around 960, the Scottish king Indulf captured the Bernician border fortress of Edwin’s Burgh, better known now as Edinburgh. Recognising the difficulty of defending Bernicia, the English king Edgar (r. 957 – 85) divided the province in 973, ceding Lothian, the northern half lying between the River Tweed and the Firth of Forth, to Scotland’s King Kenneth II (r. 971 – 95) in return for his submission to English overlordship. However, Kenneth did not adhere to his submission and the English recovered control over Lothian in 1006. However, by this time England was suffering a new and devastating Viking onslaught. In 1016, the year that England was conquered by the Danes, Lothian passed permanently to the Scots after Malcolm II (r. 1005 – 34) won a major victory over the English at Carham in Northumberland. Despite years of warfare in the centuries to come, the Anglo-Scottish border established after Carham has remained little changed to this day.

The conquest of Lothian and the annexation of Strathclyde, which took place around the same time, created a kingdom that approximated to modern Scotland. There were however, regions of this kingdom where royal authority remained purely nominal. Galloway, in the south-west, remained effectively independent under its Norse-Gaelic lords, and Moray, in the far north, was ruled by its powerful
mormaers
(‘stewards’), who exercised virtually regal authority. The most famous of the
mormaers
, Macbeth (r. 1032 – 57) even became king of Scotland in 1040. The Hebrides, Caithness and the Northern Isles remained under Norse control and would do for centuries to come. This ensured that the Viking Age lasted longer in Scotland than it did anywhere else in Europe, including even Scandinavia.

The Earldom of Orkney

The political situation in the Norse settlements in the Hebrides and the Northern Isles is very obscure until the later ninth century. Most probably, the isles were divided between several chiefs or petty kings, each ruling independently over their own immediate followers, free of any overlord. A few, such as Ketil Flatnose and Thorstein the Red who ruled in the Hebrides, are known from saga traditions, but nothing is known about the extent of their territories. Though this pattern of political fragmentation still prevailed in the Hebrides, by around 900 the Orkney and Shetland islands had been united in the powerful semi-autonomous Earldom of Orkney. The earldom was essentially a pirate state because its rulers supplemented their income from their estates with annual summer Viking raids around the coasts of Britain and Ireland. The history of the earls of Orkney is vividly told in
Orkneyinga
Saga
(‘The Saga of the Orkney Islanders’), which was written by an unknown Icelandic author around 1200. The saga is based on a multiplicity of oral traditions, skaldic poems and written sources, and it is clear that the author was at pains to use only reputable (but not always reliable) sources. Like other historical sagas,
Orkneyinga
Saga
includes dialogue and speeches. These are not true records of conversations and should be read in the same way as speeches recorded in the works of Classical historians like Thucydides and Tacitus, who used them as a tool for analysing the character and motives of their subjects.

According to the saga, the Earldom of Orkney was created by the Norwegian king Harald Fairhair (r.
c.
880-
c.
930), who conquered the Northern Isles towards the end of the ninth century in order to stop them being used as bases by Vikings, who were raiding their former homeland. Harald ravaged his way south through the Hebrides to the Isle of Man and on his return to Orkney granted the Northern Isles to his ally jarl (‘earl’) Rognvald of Møre (d.
c.
895) as compensation for the death of his son Ivar during the campaign. Rögnvald wanted to concentrate on his Norwegian earldom and gave Orkney to his brother Sigurd the Mighty (d.
c.
892), who should be regarded as the true founder of the earldom. Harald is generally reckoned to have been the first king to rule all of Norway and it is quite credible that he tried to impose his authority over the Norse settlers in the Northern Isles as well. However, the saga account is unlikely to be true because older Irish annals say that it was Rognvald himself who won control over the islands at about the same time that the Danes conquered York (866), much too early for Harald to have had a hand in events.

Sigurd allied himself with the Hebridean Viking ruler Thorstein the Red and together they conquered Sutherland, Caithness and parts of Argyll and Moray. According to the
Orkneyinga
Saga
, Sigurd met his death in a most unusual way. Sigurd arranged a peace conference at an unspecified location with a Scottish jarl called Máel Brigte, who was probably the
mormaer
of Moray. Both parties agreed to attend the meeting with no more than forty men, but on the day of the meeting Sigurd decided that he didn’t trust the Scots and so he had eighty men mounted on forty horses. Máel Brigte, who had kept his word, spotted the deceit too late. Though he and his men fought bravely, they were overwhelmed and slaughtered. Gaels still practiced the ancient Celtic custom of head-hunting and never considered taking prisoners for ransom. Sigurd adopted this custom and strapped his enemies’ heads to the saddles of his horses to show off his triumph. Máel Brigte was nicknamed ‘the bucktoothed’. When Sigurd mounted his horse to begin the journey home, he cut his calf on one of the teeth sticking out of Máel Brigte’s mouth. This minor wound became infected and Sigurd died of septicaemia: Máel Brigte obviously did not practice good dental hygiene. Sigurd was buried in a barrow near the mouth of the River Oykel, probably at Cyderhall Farm, not far from Dornoch. In the thirteenth century this farm was known as
Syvardhoch
, which is derived from Old Norse
Sigurðar-haugr
(‘Sigurd’s barrow’), though no barrow is visible there today.

The blood eagle

A period of instability followed Sigurd’s death. Sigurd’s son Guttorm succeeded him as jarl but survived him for only a year and died childless. Rognvald sent his son Hallad to replace Guttorm, but he proved a weak ruler. Vikings happily preyed on other Vikings and the scattered Norse settlements in the Northern Isles were just as vulnerable to raiders as the Pictish settlements had been. Hallad soon tired of trying to defend the islands and he gave up the earldom and returned to Norway, a laughing stock. Rognvald’s youngest son, Einar, volunteered to become the next earl. Ugly, blind in one eye and born to a slave mother, Rognvald had low expectations of Einar, reputedly telling him ‘you’re not likely to make much of a ruler’. Soon after Einar became earl, Rognvald was killed in a dispute with Halfdan Highleg, one of the many sons of King Harald Fairhair. After the killing, Halfdan fled Norway to escape his father’s anger. Arriving in Orkney, Halfdan began to terrorise the islanders and set himself up as king. Einar fled to Scotland but within a year he came back and defeated and captured Halfdan in a sea battle. According to the
Orkneyinga Saga
, Einar made a blood eagle sacrifice of his father’s murderer as a victory offering to Odin. On hearing of his son’s gruesome death, Harald led an expedition to Orkney and forced Einar to pay him heavy compensation equivalent to sixty marks of gold (approximately 30 pounds (13.6 kg)). Einar turned this situation to his advantage. The Norse settlers held their lands by
óðal
right (freehold). Einar offered to pay the whole amount of compensation from his own funds without levying any taxes if the settlers agreed to surrender their
óðal
rights to him: most agreed and became his tenants. Einar was credited in Orkney tradition with introducing the practice of burning peat (‘turf’) for fuel in the treeless Northern Isles. For this he was given the nickname
Torf
-Einar.

Einar died peacefully in bed some time around 920 and was succeeded by three of his sons, Arnkel, Erlend and Thorfinn Skullsplitter who ruled jointly. The earls welcomed the exiled Norwegian king Erik Bloodaxe and allowed him to use Orkney as a base for raiding Scotland and for his ultimately unsuccessful attempts to win control of York. Arnkel and Erlend were killed alongside Erik Bloodaxe, fighting at Stainmore in England in 954, leaving Thorfinn to rule alone until his death in
c.
963. Despite his lurid nickname his rule appears to have been uneventful, a sign, probably, that he was an able ruler. If Thorfinn had a shortcoming, it was that he left too many sons who did not get on with one another. The
mormaers
of Moray took advantage of their political feuding to try to gain control of Caithness, but without success. Stability returned when Thorfinn’s grandson Sigurd the Stout became jarl in
c.
985. Sigurd resisted Scots pressure on the borders of Caithness and Sutherland, defeating Finnlaech, the
mormaer
of Moray, at the Battle of Skitten Mire in Caithness. According to saga traditions Sigurd fought under a magical raven banner woven for him by his mother Eithne, an Irish princess who was reputed to be a sorceress. The banner brought victory from Odin but also guaranteed death to whoever carried it. During the battle, Sigurd was said to have lost three standard bearers before he won the day. In 995 Sigurd was baptised, allowing him to make an advantageous second marriage to an un-named daughter of King Malcolm II of Scotland. Their son Thorfinn was sent to be brought up a Christian at Malcolm’s court in Scotland. Sigurd was probably an insincere convert as he met his end fighting under his enchanted raven banner at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014.

The earldom at its peak

Sigurd was succeed by his sons Brusi and Thorfinn, who shared the earldom uneasily between them. Brusi was a peaceable man but Thorfinn soon showed that he had the makings of a great warrior, leading his first Viking raid when he was fifteen – not an exceptionally young age for a Viking leader of high birth. Because he enjoyed the support of the king of Scotland, Thorfinn was in a stronger position than Brusi. When a dispute over the division of the earldom broke out, Brusi appealed to King Olaf II (St Olaf) of Norway to arbitrate between him and Thorfinn. This was a welcome opportunity for Olaf to re-assert Norwegian sovereignty over the earldom, which had been to all intents and purposes independent since the death of Harald Fairhair a century before. Olaf must have seen that if Thorfinn’s relationship to King Malcolm became any closer it might lead to Scotland claiming sovereignty, and he forestalled it by insisting that both he and Brusi swear allegiance to him before he gave judgement. This forced Thorfinn to declare where his allegiance really lay. The agreement stuck until Brusi’s death
c.
1035, after which Thorfinn took control of the whole earldom, ignoring the claims of Brusi’s son Rognvald, who was living in Norway.