Orkney and Shetland Folk 872-1350

By A. W. JOHNSTON
LONDON Printed for the Viking Society for Northern Research University of London 1914

Note.—Unless where otherwise stated this paper is founded on Orkneyinga Saga (Rolls Series, text and translation). Page references are to Orkney and Shetland Records , Vol. I. Fb., Flateyjarbók . Hkr., Heimskringla . J.J., Jacob Jakobsen’s works. S.S., Sturlunga Saga .
This paper is an attempt to describe the mixed races which inhabited Orkney and Shetland from the foundation of the Norse earldom, in 872, until the end of the rule of the Gaelic earls, circa 1350, and it is a first instalment of the evidence on which a paragraph on “person-names” was founded, in the Introduction to Orkney and Shetland Records , vol. I.
The earliest inhabitants, of whom we have any record, were the Picts, and the Irish papas and Columban missionaries, who must have brought some Irish settlers with them.
It has already been suggested that the Norse must have settled in Orkney and Shetland, circa 664, among the aboriginal race, the Picts, who would have become their thralls, and with whom the settlers would have intermarried.
The first Norsemen who came to Orkney and Shetland would have been adventurers, and not settlers with wives, families and thralls, such as later went to Iceland and Orkney. Consequently such adventurers who settled in the islands would naturally have intermarried with the aborigines. This kind of male settlement may have gone on for some time, before the actual bona fide colonisation took place.
It has already been pointed out that Shetland was not so fully colonised as Orkney, at the commencement of the Norse migration, which appears to account for the older Norse dialect forms in Orkney, and for the survival of more Keltic island-names in Shetland.
A stronger Pictish strain is thus, on that account, to be looked for in Shetland. The Norse would select the easiest landing-places, while the Kelts would occupy the inland and inaccessible places, as they did in the Isle of Man. The two inland districts of Hara and Stennes in Orkney are especially rich in the remains of the pre-Norse inhabitants—stone circles, brochs, etc.; and Ireland, the only sea-board of Stennes, is particularly inhospitable for shipping.