The Orkneyinga Saga

by Anonymous

III. Arrival of the Northmen, and Establishment of the Earldom of Orkney and Caithness.

The earliest notice we have of the visits of the Northmen to the shores of Britain occurs in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the date A.D. 787:—

“In this year King Beorhtric took Eadburh, King Offa’s daughter, to wife. And in his days first came three ships of Northmen from Hæretha-land; and then the reeve rode thereto, and would drive them to the king’s vill, for he knew not what they were, and they there slew him. These were the first ships of Danish men that sought the land of the English race.”

As they came from Hæretha-land, now Hördaland, on the west coast of Norway, they were Norwegians, not Danes.

The Irish Annals and the Welsh Chronicles agree in representing the first inroads of the Norsemen on the Irish coasts as having commenced in the year 795. In 798 they plundered Inispatrick of Man and the Hebrides; in 802, and again in 806, they ravaged Iona, slaying in the latter year sixty-eight of the monastic family there. In 807 they established themselves on the mainland of Ireland; and a few years afterwards we find a Norseman making Armagh the capital of his kingdom.

In 852, Olaf the White, a chieftain descended from the same family as Harald Harfagri, conquered Dublin, and founded the most powerful and permanent of the Norse kingdoms in Ireland.

By the victory of Hafursfiord in 872, Harald Harfagri made himself sole monarch of Norway. Large numbers of the wealthy and powerful odallers, whom he had dispossessed of their territorial possessions, fled to the islands of Orkney and Shetland, which, for a full century previous to this time, had been well known to the Norsemen as the viking station of the western haf—the rendezvous of the Northern rovers, who swept the coasts of the Hebrides and swarmed in the Irish Seas. Being fugitives from their country, and outlaws of the new kingdom which Harald had succeeded in establishing in Norway, they settled themselves permanently in the islands. Then they turned their haven of refuge into a base of operations for retaliatory warfare, harrying the coasts of Norway during the summer months, and living at leisure in the islands during winter on the plunder. At length King Harald, irritated by their incessant ravages, collected a powerful fleet, and visiting Shetland, Orkney, and the Hebrides, in succession, he swept their coasts clear of the plunderers, subduing the whole of the Northern and Western islands as far south as Man.

In this expedition Ivar, a son of Rögnvald, Earl of Moeri, was killed.[^[10]] In order to recompense Rögnvald for the loss of his son, King Harald bestowed on him the territory of the subjugated isles of Orkney and Shetland, with the title of Earl of the Orkneys. Harald seems to have dealt similarly with the Hebrides, but his conquest of the vikings in these remote isles was not so complete as in the Orkneys. Ketil Flatnef (Flat nose), who, according to the Laxdæla Saga, had emigrated to the Hebrides because he could not resist King Harald in Norway, had married his daughter Aud to Olaf the White, the powerful king of Dublin, and had established himself in a kind of independent sovereignty in the Hebrides; and though he seems to have migrated from them to Iceland in consequence of King Harald’s expedition, the continued hostility to King Harald’s rule is evinced by the fact that the second earl whom he sent to the Hebrides, AsBjörn Skerablesi, was slain by two relatives of Ketil Flatnef, his wife and daughter taken captive, and the latter sold as a slave. Rögnvald, however, returned to his own Earldom in Norway, and made over his newly-acquired possessions to his brother Sigurd, the “first earl” of the Saga.