Note (return) — Chapter V

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.