Note (return) — Chapter III

The line of the so-called Norse earls, at the period at which we have arrived, 980 A.D., was represented by Sigurd Hlodverson, the hero of the Raven banner, which, as his Irish mother had predicted, was to bring victory to every host which followed it, but death to every man who bore it in battle.27 Sigurd claimed Caithness by the rules of Pictish succession, as grandson of Grelaud daughter of Duncan of Duncansby, Maormor of that district. This claim was disputed by two Celtic chiefs, Hundi (possibly Crinan, Abthane of Dunkeld) and Melsnati, or Maelsnechtan; and in a battle at Dungal's Noep, near Duncansby, at which Kari Solmundarson is said in the Saga of Burnt Njal28 to have been present, Sigurd defeated them, but with such loss to his own side that he had to retire to Orkney, leaving Hundi,29 the survivor of his two enemies, in possession of his lands in Caithness. Sigurd himself, on his voyage from Orkney, fell into the hands of the Norse king, Olaf Tryggvi's-son, who was returning from Dublin to Norway, in the bay of Osmundwall or Kirk Hope in Walls; and the king insisted on the jarl being baptized on the spot, under penalty, if he and all the inhabitants of his jarldom did not become and remain Christians, of losing his eldest son Hundi or Hvelpr, whom the Norse king seized and retained as a hostage. He also sent missionaries to evangelize the jarldom. Such was the conversion of Orkney and its jarl from the worship of Odin, at or about the end of the first millennium of the Christian era.