We may add that there is nothing in any Scottish record to prove this marriage or to disprove it.
The first important event in the lives of Paul and Erlend happened just before the Norman conquest of England. They joined King Harald Sigurdson (Hardrada) and his son Prince Olaf, who was their second cousin on their mother's side,[7] in an attack on England; and, after Harald's death, and his army's defeat by King Harold Godwinson of England at Stamford Bridge, in September 1066, (three days before William the Conqueror landed at Pevensey) the two Orkney jarls were taken prisoner, but, along with Prince Olaf, they were released. On their return to Orkney, Paul asked the Archbishop of York to consecrate a cleric of Orkney as Bishop in Orkney, and the two brothers ruled harmoniously there until their sons Hakon on the one hand and Magnus and Erling on the other, who had been engaged in Viking cruises together as boys, grew up and quarrelled, and, as is usual, drew their fathers into the strife. This strife was provoked by Hakon, and apparently lasted for many years,[8] Erlend supporting his own sons, and driving Hakon abroad to Norway about the year 1090. Neither Paul nor Erlend seems to have been much in Sutherland or Caithness, in which the representatives of the Gaelic Maormors or Chiefs probably regained power, especially the family of Moddan, and extended their territories.
Meantime King Magnus Barelegs[9] of Norway, instigated by Hakon, and taking advantage of the contentions between 1093 and 1098 of the various claimants of the Scottish crown, Donald Bane (whom he supported), Duncan II, and Edgar, had made his several expeditions, in the closing years of the eleventh century, against the western islands and coasts of Scotland and Wales. In the battle of the Menai Straits in 1098 we find that he had with him young Hakon Paulson, and also Erling and Magnus, Jarl Erlend's sons, though Magnus, who had repented of his early Viking ways, after declining to take part in the fight against an enemy with whom he had no quarrel, escaped to the Scottish court.[10] In 1098 King Magnus had deposed and carried off Jarls Paul and Erlend to Norway, where they died soon after; and in the meantime he had appointed his own son, Sigurd, to be ruler of Orkney and Shetland in their place.[11] But on King Magnus' death, during his later expedition to Ireland, where Erling Erlendson probably also fell, Prince Sigurd had to quit Orkney in order to ascend the Norwegian throne, leaving the jarldom vacant for the two cousins, Hakon Paulson and Magnus Erlendson. The latter appears to have stayed for some years at the Scottish Court and afterwards with a bishop in Wales, and again in Scotland, but on hearing of his father's death, went to Caithness, where he was well received and was chosen and honoured with the title of "earl" about 1103. A winter or two after King Magnus' death, or about 1105, Hakon came back from Norway with the title of Jarl, seized Orkney, and slew the king of Norway's steward, who was protecting Magnus' share, which after a time Magnus claimed, only to find that Hakon had prepared a force to dispute his rights. Hakon agreed, however, to give up his claims to Magnus' half share if Magnus should obtain a grant of it from the Norwegian king.[12] King Eystein about 1106 gave him this moiety and the title of Jarl; and the two cousins lived in amity for "many winters," joining their forces and fighting and killing Dufnjal,[13] who was one degree further off than their first cousin, and killing Thorbjorn at Burrafirth in Unst in Shetland "for good cause." Magnus then married, probably about 1107, "a high-born lady, and the purest maid of the noblest stock of Scotland's chiefs, living with her ten winters" as a maiden. After "some winters" evil-minded men set about spoiling the friendship of the jarls, and Hakon again seized Magnus' share; whereupon the latter went to the court of Henry I of England, where he appears to have charmed everyone, and to have spent a year, probably 1111, in which Hakon seized all Orkney, and also Caithness, which then included Sutherland, and laid them under his rule with robbery and wantonness. Leaving Caithness, Hakon at once went to attack Magnus in Orkney where he had landed; but the "good men" intervened, and an equal division of Orkney and Shetland and Caithness was made between the jarls. After some winters, however, they met in battle array in Mainland, and the fight was again stopped by the principal men on either side in their own interest, the final settlement being postponed until a meeting, which was to take place in Egilsay in the next spring, Magnus arrived first at the meeting-place with the small following of two ships agreed upon, but Hakon came later in seven or eight ships with a great force, and, after those present had refused to let both come away alive, Magnus was treacherously murdered under Hakon's orders by Hakon's cook on the 16th of April 1116. The dead jarl's mother, Thora, had prepared a feast in Paplay to celebrate the reconciliation of the two cousins, which, notwithstanding the murder, Hakon attended. After the banquet the bereaved mother begged her son's corpse for burial in holy ground, and obtained it from the drunken earl after some difficulty and buried it in Christ's Kirk at Birsay. Twenty-one years after, on the 13th December 1137, Jarl Magnus' relics were brought[14] to St. Magnus' Cathedral at Kirkwall.
After making due allowance for the legends which generally cluster round a saint or jarl, and grow with time, and for the desire for dramatic contrast and effect, we must give credit to the writer of the Orkneyinga Saga, probably the Orkney Bishop Bjarni,[15] for the vividness and simplicity of his account of St. Magnus' life and of the two most striking episodes in it—his moral courage as a non-combatant in the battle of Menai Straits, and his saintly forgiveness of his murderers in his death-scene on Egilsay; and we must hold him worthy alike of his aureole and of the noble Norman cathedral afterwards erected in his memory by his nephew, St. Ragnvald Jarl, at Kirkwall, which took the place of Thorfinn's church at Birsay as the seat of the Orkney bishopric. Magnus, it seems, was all through assisted by the Scottish king, and favoured by the Caithness folk,[16] yet the Saga jealously claims him as "the Isle-earl,"[17] and adds the following description of him:—
"He was the most peerless of men, tall of growth, manly, and lively of look, virtuous in his ways, fortunate in fight, a sage in wit, ready-tongued and lordly-minded, lavish of money and high spirited, quick of counsel, and more beloved of his friends than any man; blithe and of kind speech to wise and good men, but hard and unsparing against robbers and sea-rovers; he let many men be slain who harried the freemen and land folk; he made murderers and thieves be taken, and visited as well on the powerful as on the weak robberies and thieveries and all ill-deeds. He was no favourer of his friends in his judgments, for he valued more godly justice than the distinctions of rank. He was open-handed to chiefs and powerful men, but still he ever showed most care for poor men. In all things he kept straitly God's commandments."
As for Hakon, his cousin Magnus' death without issue left him sole Jarl, "and he made all men take an oath to him who had before served Earl Magnus. But some winters after, Hakon ... fared south to Rome, and to Jerusalem, whence he sought the halidoms, and bathed in the river Jordan, as is palmer's wont.[18] And on his return he became a good ruler, and kept his realm well at peace." He probably then built the round church at Orphir in Mainland of Orkney, the only Templar Church in Scotland.
By Helga, Moddan's daughter, whom he never married, Hakon had a son Harald Slettmali (smooth-talker, or glib of speech), and two daughters, Ingibiorg and Margret. Ingibiorg afterwards married Olaf Bitling, king of the Sudreys; and Ragnvald Gudrodson, the great Viking, was of her line, and, as we shall see, in 1200 or thereabouts, had the Caithness earldom conferred upon him for a short time. To Margret we shall return later. By a lawful wife Hakon had another son, Paul the Silent, and it seems certain that Paul was not by the same mother as Margret or Harald Slettmali, and that Paul's mother was not of Moddan's family.
Moddan, Earl of Caithness, was killed in 1040. His mother, daughter of Bethoc, must have been born after 1002. If she was married at seventeen, her son Earl Moddan could not have been more than twenty when killed in 1040, and any son of his must have been born by 1041 at latest. This son may have been Moddan in Dale. Dale was the valley of the upper Thurso River, the only great valley of Caithness, and the Saga states as follows:—
Moddan[19] "then dwelt in Dale in Caithness, a man of rank and very wealthy," and "his son Ottar was jarl in Thurso." Frakark, a daughter of Moddan in Dale, was the wife of Liot Nidingr, or the Dastard, a Sudrland chief, and during the half century after Thorfinn's death Moddan's family seems to have owned much of Caithness and Sutherland, where the Norse steadily lost their hold. We may be sure also that the Celt always kept his land, if he could, or, if he lost it, regained it as soon as he could. Amongst its members this family probably held all the hills and upper parts of the valleys of Strathnavern, Sutherland and Ness at this time, and, from a centre on the low-lying land at the head waters of the Naver, Helmsdale and Thurso rivers, kept on pressing their more Norse neighbours steadily outwards and eastwards.