Chapter III

The Early Norse Jarls.

It was in the reign of Constantine I, son of the great Pictish king, Angus MacFergus, that the new and disturbing influence mentioned above appeared in force in Alban. Favoured in their voyages to and fro by the prevailing winds, which then, as now, blew from the east in the spring and from the west later in the year, the Northmen, both Norsemen and Danes, neither being Christians, had, like their predecessors the Saxons and Angles and Frisians, for some time made trading voyages and desultory piratical attacks in summer-time on the coasts of Britain and Ireland, and probably many a short-lived settlement as well. But as these attacks and settlements are unrecorded in Cat, no account of them can be given.

The Northmen now began the systematic maritime invasions of our eastern and northern and western coasts and islands, which history has recorded. North Scotland was attacked almost exclusively by Norsemen, and Norsemen and Danes invaded Ireland. The Danes seized the south of Scotland, and the north of England, of which latter country, early in the eleventh century in the time of King Knut, they were destined to dominate two-thirds, while Old Norse became the lingua franca of his English kingdom, and enriched its language with hundreds of Norse words, and gave us many new place and personal names.

It is this process of consolidation in the north which it is proposed to describe so far as Sutherland and Caithness are concerned, using both Norse and Scottish records, and piecing them together as best we can, and, be it confessed, in many cases filling up great gaps by necessary guess-work when records fail.

A few other persons are referred to in the Sagas as connected with Caithness at this time. In the Landnamabok (1.6.5) we find Swart Kell, or Cathal Dhu, mentioned as having gone from Caithness and taken land in settlement in Mydalr in Iceland, and his son was Thorkel, the father of Glum, who took Christendom when he was already old.

To this period also belongs the romantic story of Barth or Bard, son of Helgi and Helga Ulfs-datter told in the Flatey Book, and translated at page 369 of the Appendix to Sir George Dasent's Rolls Edition of the Orkneyinga Saga, which is shortly as follows.

In the time of Sigurd Hlodverson, Ulf the Bad, of Sanday in Orkney, murdered Harald of North Ronaldsay, and seized his lands in the absence of Harald's son Helgi, a gentle Viking, on a cruise. On his return, Helgi, to revenge his father's death, slew Bard, Ulf's next of kin, in fight. Jarl Sigurd blames him for this and for not letting him settle the feud himself, and Helgi sells all he has, and goes to Ulf's house and takes his daughter, Helga, away. Ulf follows them up by sea with a superior force, defeats Helgi off Caithness, and he jumps overboard with Helga and swims to shore, where a poor farmer, Thorfinn, as Helgi had always been kind in his "vikings" to such as he was, has the wedding at his house, and shelters the pair there till on Ulf's death two years after they can return to Orkney with Bard or Barth, their infant son. At twelve years of age, Barth desires to fare away "to those peoples who believe in the God of Heaven Himself," and fares far away accordingly. Barth works for a farmer, and works so well that his flocks increase, and gets a cow for himself as a reward, but meets a beggar who begs the cow of him "for Peter's thanks." Each year a cow is the reward of Barth's work, and each year he is asked for the cow, and gives her up, until he has given three cows. Then St. Peter (for the beggar was no other than he) passes his hands over Barth, and gives him good luck, and sets a book upon his shoulders; and he saw far and wide over many lands, and over all Ireland, and he was baptized, and became a holy hermit and a bishop in Ireland. Such is the Norse story of Barth, to whom the first Cathedral in Dornoch was said to have been dedicated. It is far more prettily told in the Saga.

The battle of Clontarf, fought on Good Friday, the 23rd of April 1014, outside Dublin, between the young heathen king of Dublin, Sigtrigg Silkbeard, and the aged Christian king, Brian Borumha, was, notwithstanding Norse representations to the contrary, a decisive victory for the Irish over the Norse, and for Christianity against Odinism. Sigurd, Jarl of Orkney, though nominally a Christian, fought on the heathen side, and fell bearing his Raven banner, and the old king, Brian, was killed in the hour of his people's victory.

As translated it is as follows:—

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;

For this web of war.

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 shores of Assynt on the Skotlands-fiorthr or Minch.