Northmen, The Viking Saga 793-1241 AD

Chapter 4: Iona, Dunkeld and Orkney. Vikings in Scotland 795–1064

Scotland’s Viking Age began, like England’s, with attacks on exposed monasteries, but the raiders were very quickly followed by settlers who put down deep roots: the Viking influence lasted longer here than anywhere else in the British Isles. No part of Scotland was immune to Viking attacks, but it was the northern and western isles that bore the brunt of the early raids and then, after their colonisation by Scandinavian settlers, became bases from which raids could be launched further south. While the Viking armies that ravaged England and Frankia were dominated by Danes, Scotland, with Ireland, was always in the Norwegian sphere of interest.

At the beginning of the Viking Age, Scotland in the modern sense did not exist. The greater part of the modern country, from the Firth of Forth north to the Shetland Islands was occupied by the kingdom of the Picts, descendents of ancient Britons who had held out in the north against Rome. The south-east of the country was part of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, while in the south-west was the Welsh kingdom of Strathclyde. In the west, the district of Argyll and the Hebridean islands were occupied by the Scots, a Gaelic-speaking people who had immigrated from northern Ireland under the Dál Riata dynasty at around the same time that the Anglo-Saxons were arriving in Britain from northern Germany. Despite frequent wars, a stable balance of power existed between the four kingdoms: this would be shattered by the arrival of the Vikings.

No historical annals that were actually written in Scotland have survived from before the late tenth century. Most of the contemporary records of Scotland’s Viking Age were written in Irish monasteries and they have a strong bias towards events on the Gaelic-speaking west coast and to the sufferings of their brother monks. The first recorded attack on Scotland came in 795 when Vikings plundered St Columba’s monastery on the small Hebridean island of Iona before going on to raid in Ireland. Thereafter, raids in the Hebrides became almost annual events, with monasteries bearing the brunt of the attacks. Vikings returned to Iona in 802 and this time they burned the monastery after they had plundered it. There is no mention of killing during these raids, but in the course of a third raid in 806, sixty-eight monks were slaughtered. Just a year later, Iona was sacked for a fourth time.

St Columba’s was, arguably, the most famous and influential monastery in the whole of Britain and Ireland. Born in 521, its founder Columba was an energetic, powerfully-built, hot-tempered Irishman from a noble family from Ulster. Joining the church at an early age, Columba soon earned a reputation for piety and learning. However, his temper almost destroyed his career. In 561 a dispute over a sacred manuscript that Columba had illicitly copied escalated out of control, leading to a battle in which a great many people were killed. A synod called to judge Columba considered excommunicating him but in the end sentenced him to exile. In 563 Columba left Ireland and sailed to Scotland with twelve companions, resolving to atone for his errors by winning as many souls for Christ as had been lost in the battle. Columba was welcomed by his kinsman King Conall of Dál Riata, who gave him Iona as a base from which to evangelise the pagan northern Picts. As well as piety, Conall probably had some very worldly motives. In medieval Europe, political power often followed the church. Bringing the Picts under the influence of the Irish church could open the way to bring it under the political influence of Dál Riata.

Columba’s voyage to Scotland was an expression of one of the most important traditions of the Celtic church, peregrinatio, a penitential journey in which the monks placed their fate into the hands of God. Irish monks became skilled seafarers, usually sailing in curachs, small but seaworthy sailing boats made of greased leather stretched over a wicker frame. Using these boats, Irish monks searched for ultimate solitude to contemplate the glories of God, founding spartan monasteries – often no more than a few dry-stone ‘beehive’ huts – on remote islands all along the coasts of Ireland and Scotland. Some went further, discovering the Faeroe Islands and Iceland some 200 years before the Vikings. The Vikings often encountered Irish monks (and not usually to the monks’ advantage) during their voyages and place-names derived from papar, as the Vikings called them, are widespread in the Hebrides, Northern Isles and even Iceland. The largest group of papar place-names are islands. Four islands in the Outer Hebrides are called Pabbay (from papar and ø), meaning ‘island of the papar’, as is another off the Isle of Skye. There are also islands named for the papar in the Orkney and Shetland Islands and off Iceland.

Like Lindisfarne, Iona seems a remote place today, but the sea lanes were the main roads of the early Middle Ages and seen from this point of view it was an excellent choice for an active evangelist like Columba. Ireland lay only 70 miles away to the south, an easy day’s sail in fair weather. Even more important for Columba’s ambitions, Iona was within easy reach of the Great Glen, the main west–east overland route through the northern Highlands, which led directly to the main power centres of the northern Picts around the Moray Firth. In modern terms, Iona was about as inaccessible as a shopping mall at a motorway intersection. The narrow sound that separates Iona from the much larger neighbouring island of Mull provided sheltered anchorages and landing places, which the Vikings no doubt also appreciated. Though mostly covered with rock, heather moor and bog, Iona has large areas of fertile machair, pasture formed on raised beaches with light soils of lime-rich shell-sand, so the community could be self-supporting.

Columba’s personality made him a force to be reckoned with and by the time of his death in 597 his abbey was the dominant church not only of Dal Riata and Pictland but also of much of northern Ireland, where even bishops were subordinated to his authority. Columba’s death only enhanced Iona’s influence by making it a place of pilgrimage. When King Oswald of Northumbria wanted to make his kingdom Christian, it was to Iona, rather than Rome, that he turned to ask for missionaries. The abbot sent Aidan, the founder of St Cuthbert’s monastery on Lindisfarne. Iona became a centre for crafts, including glass, metalwork, sculpture and book production. The Book of Kells, one of the finest illuminated gospel books of the early Middle Ages, was made at Iona. Iona’s greatest treasure was, however, the magnificent jewelled reliquary that held Columba’s remains, the priceless source of the monastery’s power.

After the second raid on Iona, abbot Cellach bought land at Kells, well inland in Ireland, for use as a refuge for the monks in the event of further attacks. After the massacre in 806, Cellach left to oversee the construction of a new monastery on the land the community had bought at Kells. When work was completed in 814, most of the community moved to Kells, which became the seat of the abbot. Iona was not abandoned completely, however. Cellach resigned his abbacy and returned to Iona with a small group of monks who were willing to accept the risk of death at pagan hands: Irish monks saw their calling as a manly one, requiring courage and fortitude. The all-important relics of St Columba also stayed on Iona. In 824 an Irish monk called Blathmac became head of the community on Iona. Blathmac was not afraid of the Vikings. His biographer, a German monk called Walafrid Strabo (d. 849), says that he was actively seeking martyrdom at pagan hands because he ‘wished to endure Christ’s wounds’. Blathmac did not have to wait long to achieve his ambition: the Vikings returned to Iona in 825. When warning of Viking raiders reached the abbey, Blathmac allowed those monks who did not think they could endure martyrdom to leave: he remained with a hardcore of willing martyrs. The raiders arrived while Blathmac was celebrating morning mass. Bursting into the church, the Vikings immediately killed Blathmac’s companions. The Vikings were after the precious reliquary that contained Columba’s relics, but the monks had removed it from its pedestal in the church and hidden it under a stack of peat. No amount of torture could persuade Blathmac to reveal its hiding place and in the end the enraged Vikings hacked him to pieces and left empty handed.

Amazingly, this savage attack was not the end of monasticism on Iona. The monks who had fled returned, buried Blathmac and restored St Columba’s reliquary to its place. Columba’s relics remained at Iona until 849, when they were divided, half going to Kells, the other half being sent to the cathedral of Dunkeld, north of Perth in Scotland. Politics was more important in this decision than security, however (see below), as Iona had not been raided again after Blathmac’s killing. Even then, Iona’s glorious history ensured that some sort of monastic community continued throughout the Viking Age as at least three Scots kings were buried there in the later ninth century; Iona was just too prestigious to be abandoned completely. In this respect, Iona was more fortunate than most other Scottish monasteries, almost all of which were abandoned after repeated Viking attacks. A Pictish monastery at Portmahomack in Easter Ross on Scotland’s east coast is one of the few monasteries of this period that has been systematically excavated. This community thrived in the seventh and eighth centuries as a centre for book production, metalworking, glassworking and sculpture. Overlying all the occupation layers was a layer of soot and charcoal dated to around 800, showing that the monastery was abandoned after suffering a catastrophic fire, almost certainly, given the dating, the result of a Viking attack.

Because of its fame, Viking raids on Iona were recorded in Irish annals but it is more than likely that Vikings were active in Scotland before 795. Almost certainly, the first places in Scotland to be raided by Vikings were in the Northern Isles (the Shetland and Orkney Islands) as they are the natural first landfall for ships sailing west across the North Sea from Norway. Shetland is 250 miles west of Norway, less than two days’ sail in good conditions, and from there it is only 60 miles south to Orkney, from where Viking raiders could choose to sail south down Britain’s east coast, or head west and south to the Hebrides and Ireland. The Vikings who raided Lindisfarne in 793 and Iona in 795 would have sailed via Shetland and Orkney. These routes were probably already well-known to the Norwegians. There is strong archaeological evidence for trade between the Northern Isles and Norway before the Viking Age – combs made of Scandinavian reindeer antler have been found in the high-status Pictish settlement at Birsay in Orkney, for example – so the first Viking raiders knew where they were going.

Within a very short time of their earliest recorded raids in Scotland, Vikings began to seize land in Scotland for settlement. This settlement went unrecorded in contemporary chronicles, no doubt because Viking raids on Scottish monasteries had dispersed or killed the monks who might have written them. In the absence of written sources, the most important source of evidence about its geographical extent are place-names of Scandinavian origin. Scandinavian place-names are most common in the Northern Isles, and Caithness in the far north-east of the Scottish mainland. Almost all place-names here are of Scandinavian origin. Scandinavian place-names are also common throughout the Hebrides and along Scotland’s deeply indented west coast, showing that this area too saw substantial settlement. Scandinavian place-names in all of these areas are overwhelmingly of Norwegian origin, pointing to the origins of most of the Viking settlers. Norwegian place-name elements such as –staðir, as found in Grimista (‘Grim’s place’), and –bolstaðr, as in Isbister (‘eastern farm’), are especially common in the Northern Isles. Other common elements found in the Northern Isles, the Hebrides and along the west coast include fjall, as in Askival (‘ash mountain’); fjord, as in Laxford (‘salmon fjord’); sker, as in skerry (i.e. a reef); dalr (‘dale’); vik, as in Lerwick (‘muddy bay’); and ø, an island, as in Sanday (‘sandy island’). Dating these settlements is not easy. It is thought that the Northern Isles were settled very early, possibly as early as 800, while the Hebrides – the Sudreys or ‘South Isles’ to the Vikings – were settled around 825. There were certainly well-established Norse communities in these areas by the second half of the ninth century. Place-names of both Norwegian and Danish origin also show that there was Scandinavian settlement in the Isle of Man and in Galloway and Dumfries in south-west Scotland. The settlements in Dumfries are probably best considered as an extension of the Scandinavian settlements in north-west England, which took place in the early tenth century.

As might be expected, given their proximity to Norway, the Viking impact was strongest in the Northern Isles. The islands must have looked to Norwegians like attractive places to settle. The environment is similar to western Norway’s so settlers could easily transplant their traditional pastoral-farming way of life. The Shetland Islands are predominantly covered with peat moors and rough pasture, but the Orkney Islands, though windswept and treeless, have large areas of good arable land, which was in short supply in Norway. The islands also had the advantages of good communications, being located not too far from the support of family and also providing good bases for Viking raids further south. The isolated Pictish communities there stood no chance of organising a co-ordinated defence against Viking raiders and they would have been overwhelmed quickly and easily. At least some of the native Picts had something more than land to seize as a major hoard of eighth-century silver jewellery, sword fittings and drinking bowls found buried near a ruined Pictish monastery on St Ninian’s Isle in Shetland shows. The date of this hoard makes it likely that it was buried to hide it from Viking raiders. That such a valuable hoard was not recovered suggests its owner came to a bad end.

The Northern Isles were unique in the history of Scandinavian settlement in the Viking Age. In all areas which Scandinavians settled in this period that already had an indigenous population, the fate of the settlers was, ultimately, to be assimilated into the local population in around three generations. This is what happened in England and Normandy. However, the Northern Isles developed into an enduring extension of the Scandinavian world, becoming completely Norse in culture and language. Until recently it was thought that this was because the Vikings had actually slaughtered or expelled most of the Pictish population. The Viking settlement certainly seems to mark a clear break in the islands’ history. No Pictish place-names survive (a few Norse place-names may have Pictish roots, but this is disputed), no Pictish settlements show evidence of continuing occupation after c. 800, though some, as at the Brough of Birsay, were later built over by Norse settlements. Very few Pictish artefacts have ever been found in Norse settlements, indicating that there was little interaction between settlers and locals. It might appear that the Picts disappeared without trace. Thanks to the new science of DNA profiling, the genes of the modern population of the Northern Isles tell a subtler story. Analysis of the male population’s Y chromosomes, which are passed only through the male line from father to son, showed that 44 per cent of men in Shetland and 33 per cent of men in Orkney carry a distinctive genetic marker called the M17 haplotype, which is also carried by a majority of Norwegian and Swedish (but not Danish) men. Factoring out post-medieval immigration, this indicates that more than half the male population of the isles in the Viking Age was of Scandinavian origin. Studies of mitochondrial DNA, passed only through the female line, found that the same proportion of women in Shetland and Orkney have Scandinavian ancestry. This indicates that the settlers came as family groups, a sign that they felt secure and unthreatened by native resistance. What happened to the Picts? The process of conquest must have thinned their numbers in various ways, some were killed in battle, others took their boats and fled, and many more would have been rounded up for the slave trade and sold off the islands. The outnumbered survivors, reduced to a servile condition, were soon assimilated by the Norse.

The nature of the Scandinavian settlement in the Hebrides was strikingly different in nature. Genetic profiling shows that around 25 per cent of the modern male population of the islands can trace their origins back to Norway, but only 10 per cent of the female population can. Even allowing for modern immigration, Scandinavian settlers must always have been a minority among the native Gaelic-speaking population. It is also clear that the majority of the Scandinavians were single men who found wives locally. Settlement here was, therefore, probably seen as a riskier proposition than going to the Northern Isles, not a place that a man would feel comfortable bringing his wife and children. Icelandic saga traditions seem to bear this out as many of the earliest settlers of Iceland, like Aud the Deep-Minded and Helgi Magri, were Hebridean Norse who were finding it hard to maintain their positions. Place-names in the Hebrides point to the eventual fate of the settlers: Scandinavian place-names are common but often difficult to recognise for what they are because they survive in Gaelicised forms, such as Roineabhal (‘rough-ground fell’), or as hybrids incorporating Norse and Gaelic elements, such as Skerryvore (‘the great skerry’) from the Old Norse sker and Gaelic mhor (‘big’). The settlers were eventually assimilated by the native Gaels but it took centuries, not the two or three generations that it took for the Danish settlers in England and Normandy to become assimilated to their host populations. Partial assimilation of the Norse settlers began early. Because so many of the settlers had taken local wives, their children grew up bilingual, speaking both Old Norse and Gaelic. This hybrid Gaelic-Norse population became known to the Irish as the Gall-Gaedhil, the ‘foreign Gaels’, and the Hebrides became the Innse Gall, the ‘islands of the foreigners’. The same process of partial assimilation took place in Galloway, which gets its name from the Gall-Gaedhil. True Gaels probably saw the Gall-Gaedhil as being more Norse than Gaelic as the Irish bard Urard mac Coise (d. 990) described their stumbling attempts to speak the Gaelic language as gioc-goc, meaning gibberish. This assimilation is also visible in material culture, especially jewellery styles, which blend Celtic forms with Norse ornament. The popular Celtic penannular brooch, a type of fastening for cloaks and dresses, was adapted to the Norse taste by becoming plainer in style but much larger.

Perhaps because so many of them had taken Christian wives, the Scandinavians who settled in the Hebrides were among the earliest to accept Christianity. However, several Viking pagan burials have been discovered in the area too, including a tenth-century boat burial at Port an Eilean Mhóir, in Ardnamurchan on the west coast of the mainland. According to Irish sources, some of the native Gaels even renounced Christianity and adopted the paganism of their new rulers. After the violence of the initial Norse conquest, pagans and Christians probably lived peacefully side by side as they did in other areas settled by Scandinavians. One Hebridean Viking, Helgi the Lean, managed to believe in both Christ and Thor at the same time, and this kind of syncretism may have been very common. This could explain why, after 825, Iona was not raided again for 160 years. When Vikings eventually returned, in 986, the attackers were outsiders, Danes making a rare foray into the western seas. The abbot and fifteen monks were killed in this attack: a hoard of tenth-century silver coins found on Iona may have been buried by one of the victims. The survival of so many papar place-names may be evidence that Iona was not the only monastic community to survive the Viking raids: some must have survived long enough at least for the papar place-names to ‘stick’ in common usage.

The process of assimilation and co-existence between Scandinavian and native Gael is also clearly seen in the Isle of Man. The evidence of pagan burials, containing weapons and sometimes human sacrifices and boats, indicates substantial pagan Scandinavian settlement in the mid-ninth century. This is borne out by genetic studies, which indicate that around 40 per cent of the modern population have Norse ancestry. The native Christian Gaelic-speaking population was not exterminated but the distribution of typical Scandinavian place-names shows that the settlers appropriated the better, lower-lying land for themselves and left the rougher hill areas to the Gaels. Possibly they were relegated to servile tasks, such as tending the conquerors’ sheep and cattle on the upland pastures. The settlers used Christian cemeteries for pagan burials as a symbolic way of demonstrating their power over the natives. After they adopted Christianity in the mid-tenth century, the settlers erected a series of fine carved stone memorial crosses that incorporated Irish, English and Scandinavian decorative styles, and both pagan and Christian imagery. Inscriptions on these crosses are always in runes but several commemorate people with Gaelic names, a sign of intermarriage between the two populations. One bilingual inscription, in Old Norse and Gaelic (written in the ancient Irish ogham alphabet), is also known.

The Gall-Gaedhil retained their distinctive identity until the thirteenth century. The reason for this is partly political – the Hebrides were remote from any major centres of centralised political power that could impose authority on either the Norse settlers or indigenous Gaelic leaders. Norse dominance of the sea lanes also meant that the settlers were in constant contact with other Norse colonies in the Northern Isles and Ireland and also with Norway, so they could constantly reinforce the Norse element in their cultural identity. Only when these links with Norway were broken after the Scots won control of the Hebrides and Man in 1266, were the Gall-Gaedhil thoroughly and finally Gaelicised.

The arrival of the Vikings in Scotland had the effect of destabilising the established power structures. Northumbria lost almost half its territory to the Danish kingdom of York and ceased to be a major influence in northern Britain. Strathclyde too entered a permanent decline after the sack of its capital in 871. The Viking intervention impacted most seriously on the Picts, indirectly leading them into complete extinction. The Scots of Dál Riata also lost considerable territories to the Vikings, yet they ultimately became the great winners of Viking Age Scotland, turning the situation to their advantage, conquering the Picts, the Welsh of Strathclyde, and the northern Northumbrian district of Lothian to create the kingdom of Scotland.

Dál Riata began as a colony of the minor Dál Riata dynasty, which ruled Antrim in Northern Ireland. Traditionally, King Fergus Mór mac Eirc (d. 501) was considered to be the conqueror of Argyll, but as its coast lies barely a dozen miles east of Antrim, the area may have been under Irish influence long before his time. Scottish Dál Riata was ruled as part of Irish Dál Riata until the reign of Domnall Brecc (r. c. 629 – 42), when the kingdom split after suffering a succession of military disasters. From then until the beginning of the Viking Age, Dál Riata led a precarious existence, first as a dependency of Northumbria and then, from c. 736, as a dependency of the kingdom of the Picts. The Scots regained their independence in 768 after the Picts had been weakened by a disastrous attempt to conquer Strathclyde, but the arrival of the Vikings in the 790s brought further setbacks. The Scots lost control not only of the Hebrides but of the mainland district of Kintyre and, probably, of Morvern and Ardnamurchan too. The Scots’ capital and inauguration place of the Dál Riata kings at Dunadd, only 2 miles inland from the west coast, was dangerously exposed despite its strong fortifications and it seems to have been abandoned around this time. It is not even clear who was king of Dál Riata in the decade after the first attack on Iona, so great was the turmoil. The Scots had a long tradition of naval warfare and a well-organised fleet levy system for which each district had to raise a specified number of men and ships. This system was really only suited to launching raids, however, and it would have been little use in combating the Vikings. By the time the fleet had been gathered from the kingdom’s scattered territories, Viking raiders would be long gone. Under pressure by the Vikings from the west, the Scots turned east to the rich Pictish lands of Fortriu in southern Pictland. Although some earlier kings of Dál Riata may have won temporary control of Fortriu, it was King Kenneth mac Alpin (d. 858) who completed the conquest of the region in 842/3, taking the title king of the Picts. The rest of Pictland fell to Kenneth soon after. In 848 or 849, Kenneth transferred half of St Columba’s relics from Iona to the Pictish royal monastery at Dunkeld in Perthshire. It was a gesture of thanks by the king to the saint for the support of his church and it also served notice to the Picts that their conquest by the Scots was spiritual as well as political. St Columba came to Dunkeld not as a refugee from the Vikings, as is often assumed, but as a conqueror.

Quite how Kenneth achieved his coup is unclear, but he was certainly a direct beneficiary of a Viking victory over the Picts in 839. This was a very severe defeat for the Picts, involving heavy casualties. The death of their king Eóganán and his brother Bran in the battle left them leaderless. As there was no obvious successor, a three-sided succession dispute broke out, leaving the weakened kingdom even more vulnerable. However, it was not only the Picts who were left leaderless by the battle. One of those killed fighting alongside the Pictish kings was Aed mac Boanta, the king of Dál Riata. The sources do not explain why Aed was fighting with the Picts but it would seem that on this occasion the Scots had allied with them against a common enemy. Following Aed’s death, Kenneth became king of Dál Riata. Kenneth’s origins are obscure and it is not even absolutely certain that he was a member of the Dál Riata royal family: he was certainly not close kin to Aed. Had the Vikings not killed Aed, Kenneth might never have had the opportunity to claim the throne. Once he had secured his position as king of Dál Riata, Kenneth seized the second opportunity the Vikings had created for him and invaded Pictland. The divided kingdom was in no state to resist and it fell quickly to the Scots. Kenneth and his immediate successors continued to use the titles ‘king of the Picts’ and ‘king of Dál Riata’, but his grandson Donald II (r. 889 – 900) abandoned this practice and adopted the single title ‘king of Scotland’ (rex Scotia in Latin, or rí Alban in Gaelic).

The Picts did not long survive their subjugation. Though the Scots adopted many of the trappings of Pictish kingship, including its inauguration place at Scone in Perthshire, there was no merging of Gaelic and Pictish culture. The Picts had probably long been exposed to Gaelic culture through the activities of the Columban church, but the Scottish conquest resulted in the complete and rapid annihilation of their identity: the last contemporary reference to the Picts dates to 904. The Picts’ culture died out completely, their distinctive art styles became extinct and whatever Pictish literature that survived Viking attacks on their monasteries was not preserved: the Pictish view of their own history is unknown. The Pictish language also died out, replaced by Gaelic, and only a few words survive as place names. The sparse contemporary records make it clear that there was great violence involved during the Scottish conquest and later Scottish folk traditions held that the Picts had been exterminated. The Scots remembered the Picts as a race of blue pygmies who lived underground rather than as real people. It is unlikely that the Picts were literally wiped out, but it is likely that during the conquest and its aftermath their aristocracy were killed or exiled leaving the rest of the population without political or cultural leadership and so vulnerable to rapid assimilation by the Scots. The destruction of the Pictish aristocracy may be the subject of Sueno’s Stone, a 23-foot (7 m) high sculpted monolith that stands on the outskirts of Forres in Moray. Carved in the later ninth century by a Pictish sculptor, the stone shows scenes of battle and mass executions. The stone is the latest known work of Pictish sculpture, so it may have been commissioned by Kenneth or one of his immediate successors to celebrate the Scottish victory and send a bleak message to the Picts who survived. This is speculation, of course, as the stone lacks any inscriptions to make its true purpose clear.

Saint Columba’s residence at Dunkeld turned out to be a brief one. Fortriu’s wealth made it attractive to the Vikings and it was repeatedly raided. King Constantine I killed Olaf, king of the Dublin Vikings, in 874 – 5, but was himself killed fighting Vikings in Fife in 877. In 878, Dunkeld suffered Iona’s fate and was sacked by Viking raiders. Columba’s relics survived, presumably hidden by the monks, but afterwards they took the decision to reunite them with rest of the saint’s remains at Kells. This time he really was a refugee from the Vikings: as an Irish annalist put it, his relics ‘were taken in flight to escape the foreigners’. It was a wise decision, as Dunkeld was sacked again in 903 and 904. Without Columba’s relics, Dunkeld’s importance quickly declined and it was superseded in 906 as Scotland’s prime religious centre by St Andrews in Fife, which possessed its own potent relics.

Kenneth’s successors were quick to exploit other opportunities for territorial expansion created by the Vikings. In 870 the Dublin Vikings under their King Olaf laid siege to Strathclyde’s strongly fortified capital on Dumbarton Rock, which towers over the mouth of the River Clyde. Recognising that their mobility was their main strength, Vikings were normally reluctant to get bogged down with sieges, but in this case they persevered for four months until the Welsh were forced to surrender when their well ran dry. Olaf’s men took a vast number of captives and a great amount of treasure back to Dublin with them. One of the captives was Strathclyde’s King Artgal. Artgal might have expected to be ransomed – ransoming high-status prisoners was a profitable sideline for Viking raiders – but Constantine I (Kenneth’s son and successor) saw an opportunity to weaken Strathclyde still further and persuaded Olaf to kill him instead. Presumably, Constantine paid Olaf the equivalent of the king’s ransom so that he did not lose out by killing such a valuable captive. With Artgal out of the way, Constantine installed the king’s brother Run as client king of Strathclyde. Constantine married Run to his sister, so establishing a Scottish claim to the throne of Strathclyde. The kingship of Strathclyde remained in the gift of the kings of the Scots as they slowly tightened their control over the kingdom. It is thought that in the tenth century, Strathclyde became a sub-kingdom that was ruled by the tanist (the heir-apparent to the Scottish throne) until he succeeded to the kingship of Scotland. The last known king of Strathclyde was Owen the Bald, who died c. 1015, and soon after that Strathclyde was annexed to Scotland.

Another target for Scottish expansionism was Bernicia, the northern half of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria that had remained independent after the Danes seized York in 866. King Constantine II (r. 900 – 43) sought to bring Bernicia into the Scottish sphere of influence by lending support against Ragnald, the aggressive Norse-Irish king of Dublin who won control of York in 919. However, Bernicia was not just threatened by the Vikings and the Scots. As early as the 870s, Alfred the Great, the king of Wessex, had laid claim to the leadership of all the English in the struggle against the Danes. It is not known what the Northumbrians thought about this but there is no reason to assume that they welcomed it. The Wessex-based Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes the rulers of Bernicia as ‘ealdormen’ (earls), to imply subordination to Alfred and his successors, but they still considered themselves to be kings. As such, they may have preferred to be sub-kings under the Danes or the Scots than ealdormen under the Wessex dynasty. Bernicia’s future was decided in 927 when Alfred’s grandson Æthelstan captured York and expelled its Irish-Norse King Guthfrith, who took refuge with Constantine II.

Following his victory, Æthelstan summoned Constantine, together with the kings of the Welsh, and Ealdred, the king of Bernicia to a meeting at Eamont Bridge, near Penrith in Cumbria. The purpose of the meeting was twofold. Firstly, Æthelstan announced Ealdred’s deposition and the annexation of Bernicia. This is generally taken to mark the creation of the kingdom of England because, for the first time, it brought all the English under a single ruler. Secondly, the meeting was probably an occasion for the Scots and Welsh kings to acknowledge Æthelstan as high king or overlord of all Britain. Eamont Bridge is the location of three Neolithic henge monuments and numerous megalithic standing stones, marking it out as a place of ancient spiritual power. In later historical times one of these henges was associated with King Arthur, the legendary ruler of Britain. If the henge was already associated with Arthur in Æthelstan’s time, it would have been a powerfully symbolic location for the kings of Britain to recognise him as their overlord. Æthelstan had demanded, on pain of war, that Constantine bring Guthfrith with him and hand him over at the meeting. Constantine cannot have welcomed the unification of England: it would not have required great powers of prediction to see that it would make an uncomfortably powerful neighbour for Scotland. Constantine’s best opportunity to avert this threat was to help the Vikings regain control of York so, on the way to Eamont Bridge, he allowed Guthfrith to escape back to Dublin. This soured relations between Æthelstan and Constantine and may have played a part in Æthelstan’s decision to invade Scotland in 934. Though Æthelstan won no great victories, Constantine went with him when he returned to England at the end of the summer and was still in England the following year, probably not of his own free will.

Guthfrith died in 934, remarkably for a Viking leader, of natural causes. His claim to the throne of York was taken up by his son Olaf Guthfrithsson, who succeeded him as king of Dublin. Despite Olaf’s paganism, Constantine gave him one of his daughters as a wife. In 937 Olaf, Constantine and King Owen of Strathclyde became allies and invaded England with the intention of restoring the Viking kingdom of York. It was this grand alliance that Æthelstan crushed at the Battle of Brunanburh in 937. Subsequent attempts by Constantine and his successor Malcolm I (r. 943 – 54) to prop up Viking rule in York also ended in failure, and in 954 the kingdom came firmly under the control of the Wessex dynasty.

The Wessex dynasty had a difficult task in establishing its authority in the old kingdom of Northumbria. Even York was a long way from the main centres of English royal power, which at this time all lay south of the Thames, and this left Bernicia vulnerable to Scottish takeover. Sometime around 960, the Scottish king Indulf captured the Bernician border fortress of Edwin’s Burgh, better known now as Edinburgh. Recognising the difficulty of defending Bernicia, the English king Edgar (r. 957 – 85) divided the province in 973, ceding Lothian, the northern half lying between the River Tweed and the Firth of Forth, to Scotland’s King Kenneth II (r. 971 – 95) in return for his submission to English overlordship. However, Kenneth did not adhere to his submission and the English recovered control over Lothian in 1006. However, by this time England was suffering a new and devastating Viking onslaught. In 1016, the year that England was conquered by the Danes, Lothian passed permanently to the Scots after Malcolm II (r. 1005 – 34) won a major victory over the English at Carham in Northumberland. Despite years of warfare in the centuries to come, the Anglo-Scottish border established after Carham has remained little changed to this day.

The conquest of Lothian and the annexation of Strathclyde, which took place around the same time, created a kingdom that approximated to modern Scotland. There were however, regions of this kingdom where royal authority remained purely nominal. Galloway, in the south-west, remained effectively independent under its Norse-Gaelic lords, and Moray, in the far north, was ruled by its powerful mormaers (‘stewards’), who exercised virtually regal authority. The most famous of the mormaers, Macbeth (r. 1032 – 57) even became king of Scotland in 1040. The Hebrides, Caithness and the Northern Isles remained under Norse control and would do for centuries to come. This ensured that the Viking Age lasted longer in Scotland than it did anywhere else in Europe, including even Scandinavia.

The political situation in the Norse settlements in the Hebrides and the Northern Isles is very obscure until the later ninth century. Most probably, the isles were divided between several chiefs or petty kings, each ruling independently over their own immediate followers, free of any overlord. A few, such as Ketil Flatnose and Thorstein the Red who ruled in the Hebrides, are known from saga traditions, but nothing is known about the extent of their territories. Though this pattern of political fragmentation still prevailed in the Hebrides, by around 900 the Orkney and Shetland islands had been united in the powerful semi-autonomous Earldom of Orkney. The earldom was essentially a pirate state because its rulers supplemented their income from their estates with annual summer Viking raids around the coasts of Britain and Ireland. The history of the earls of Orkney is vividly told in Orkneyinga Saga (‘The Saga of the Orkney Islanders’), which was written by an unknown Icelandic author around 1200. The saga is based on a multiplicity of oral traditions, skaldic poems and written sources, and it is clear that the author was at pains to use only reputable (but not always reliable) sources. Like other historical sagas, Orkneyinga Saga includes dialogue and speeches. These are not true records of conversations and should be read in the same way as speeches recorded in the works of Classical historians like Thucydides and Tacitus, who used them as a tool for analysing the character and motives of their subjects.

According to the saga, the Earldom of Orkney was created by the Norwegian king Harald Fairhair (r. c. 880-c. 930), who conquered the Northern Isles towards the end of the ninth century in order to stop them being used as bases by Vikings, who were raiding their former homeland. Harald ravaged his way south through the Hebrides to the Isle of Man and on his return to Orkney granted the Northern Isles to his ally jarl (‘earl’) Rognvald of Møre (d. c. 895) as compensation for the death of his son Ivar during the campaign. Rögnvald wanted to concentrate on his Norwegian earldom and gave Orkney to his brother Sigurd the Mighty (d. c. 892), who should be regarded as the true founder of the earldom. Harald is generally reckoned to have been the first king to rule all of Norway and it is quite credible that he tried to impose his authority over the Norse settlers in the Northern Isles as well. However, the saga account is unlikely to be true because older Irish annals say that it was Rognvald himself who won control over the islands at about the same time that the Danes conquered York (866), much too early for Harald to have had a hand in events.

Sigurd allied himself with the Hebridean Viking ruler Thorstein the Red and together they conquered Sutherland, Caithness and parts of Argyll and Moray. According to the Orkneyinga Saga, Sigurd met his death in a most unusual way. Sigurd arranged a peace conference at an unspecified location with a Scottish jarl called Máel Brigte, who was probably the mormaer of Moray. Both parties agreed to attend the meeting with no more than forty men, but on the day of the meeting Sigurd decided that he didn’t trust the Scots and so he had eighty men mounted on forty horses. Máel Brigte, who had kept his word, spotted the deceit too late. Though he and his men fought bravely, they were overwhelmed and slaughtered. Gaels still practiced the ancient Celtic custom of head-hunting and never considered taking prisoners for ransom. Sigurd adopted this custom and strapped his enemies’ heads to the saddles of his horses to show off his triumph. Máel Brigte was nicknamed ‘the bucktoothed’. When Sigurd mounted his horse to begin the journey home, he cut his calf on one of the teeth sticking out of Máel Brigte’s mouth. This minor wound became infected and Sigurd died of septicaemia: Máel Brigte obviously did not practice good dental hygiene. Sigurd was buried in a barrow near the mouth of the River Oykel, probably at Cyderhall Farm, not far from Dornoch. In the thirteenth century this farm was known as Syvardhoch, which is derived from Old Norse Sigurðar-haugr (‘Sigurd’s barrow’), though no barrow is visible there today.

A period of instability followed Sigurd’s death. Sigurd’s son Guttorm succeeded him as jarl but survived him for only a year and died childless. Rognvald sent his son Hallad to replace Guttorm, but he proved a weak ruler. Vikings happily preyed on other Vikings and the scattered Norse settlements in the Northern Isles were just as vulnerable to raiders as the Pictish settlements had been. Hallad soon tired of trying to defend the islands and he gave up the earldom and returned to Norway, a laughing stock. Rognvald’s youngest son, Einar, volunteered to become the next earl. Ugly, blind in one eye and born to a slave mother, Rognvald had low expectations of Einar, reputedly telling him ‘you’re not likely to make much of a ruler’. Soon after Einar became earl, Rognvald was killed in a dispute with Halfdan Highleg, one of the many sons of King Harald Fairhair. After the killing, Halfdan fled Norway to escape his father’s anger. Arriving in Orkney, Halfdan began to terrorise the islanders and set himself up as king. Einar fled to Scotland but within a year he came back and defeated and captured Halfdan in a sea battle. According to the Orkneyinga Saga, Einar made a blood eagle sacrifice of his father’s murderer as a victory offering to Odin. On hearing of his son’s gruesome death, Harald led an expedition to Orkney and forced Einar to pay him heavy compensation equivalent to sixty marks of gold (approximately 30 pounds (13.6 kg)). Einar turned this situation to his advantage. The Norse settlers held their lands by óðal right (freehold). Einar offered to pay the whole amount of compensation from his own funds without levying any taxes if the settlers agreed to surrender their óðal rights to him: most agreed and became his tenants. Einar was credited in Orkney tradition with introducing the practice of burning peat (‘turf’) for fuel in the treeless Northern Isles. For this he was given the nickname Torf-Einar.

Einar died peacefully in bed some time around 920 and was succeeded by three of his sons, Arnkel, Erlend and Thorfinn Skullsplitter who ruled jointly. The earls welcomed the exiled Norwegian king Erik Bloodaxe and allowed him to use Orkney as a base for raiding Scotland and for his ultimately unsuccessful attempts to win control of York. Arnkel and Erlend were killed alongside Erik Bloodaxe, fighting at Stainmore in England in 954, leaving Thorfinn to rule alone until his death in c. 963. Despite his lurid nickname his rule appears to have been uneventful, a sign, probably, that he was an able ruler. If Thorfinn had a shortcoming, it was that he left too many sons who did not get on with one another. The mormaers of Moray took advantage of their political feuding to try to gain control of Caithness, but without success. Stability returned when Thorfinn’s grandson Sigurd the Stout became jarl in c. 985. Sigurd resisted Scots pressure on the borders of Caithness and Sutherland, defeating Finnlaech, the mormaer of Moray, at the Battle of Skitten Mire in Caithness. According to saga traditions Sigurd fought under a magical raven banner woven for him by his mother Eithne, an Irish princess who was reputed to be a sorceress. The banner brought victory from Odin but also guaranteed death to whoever carried it. During the battle, Sigurd was said to have lost three standard bearers before he won the day. In 995 Sigurd was baptised, allowing him to make an advantageous second marriage to an un-named daughter of King Malcolm II of Scotland. Their son Thorfinn was sent to be brought up a Christian at Malcolm’s court in Scotland. Sigurd was probably an insincere convert as he met his end fighting under his enchanted raven banner at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014.

Sigurd was succeed by his sons Brusi and Thorfinn, who shared the earldom uneasily between them. Brusi was a peaceable man but Thorfinn soon showed that he had the makings of a great warrior, leading his first Viking raid when he was fifteen – not an exceptionally young age for a Viking leader of high birth. Because he enjoyed the support of the king of Scotland, Thorfinn was in a stronger position than Brusi. When a dispute over the division of the earldom broke out, Brusi appealed to King Olaf II (St Olaf) of Norway to arbitrate between him and Thorfinn. This was a welcome opportunity for Olaf to re-assert Norwegian sovereignty over the earldom, which had been to all intents and purposes independent since the death of Harald Fairhair a century before. Olaf must have seen that if Thorfinn’s relationship to King Malcolm became any closer it might lead to Scotland claiming sovereignty, and he forestalled it by insisting that both he and Brusi swear allegiance to him before he gave judgement. This forced Thorfinn to declare where his allegiance really lay. The agreement stuck until Brusi’s death c. 1035, after which Thorfinn took control of the whole earldom, ignoring the claims of Brusi’s son Rognvald, who was living in Norway.

Thorfinn’s close relationship with Scotland did not survive Malcolm’s death in 1034. According to the saga tradition, the new Scottish king Karl Hundason occupied Caithness in 1035 and then invaded Orkney with a fleet of eleven longships. No such king as Karl Hundason ever ruled Scotland. The king’s name means ‘churl son of a dog’, so it must have originated as an insulting nickname, but for whom? Malcolm’s successor as king of Scotland was his grandson Duncan, Thorfinn’s cousin, and he certainly never invaded Orkney. Given that there was already a long history of conflict between the earldom and Moray, it is most likely that Karl was the mormaer of Moray, who at this time would have been Macbeth. Thorfinn defeated Karl’s invasion fleet in a hard-fought sea battle off Deerness on Orkney’s east coast and quickly retaliated by invading Moray. At Tarbat Ness, on the north side of the Moray Firth, Thorfinn won a resounding victory over Karl’s army, and afterwards annexed Ross to the earldom, bringing it to its territorial peak.

In 1037 – 8, Norway’s King Magnus the Good gave Rognvald Brusason ships and sent him home to claim his father’s share of the earldom. Thorfinn and his nephew shared the earldom amicably enough for eight years, often going raiding together. Eventually, however, they quarrelled about their shares of the earldom. Rognvald maintained that only the king had the right to decide how the earldom should be divided. Thorfinn would not hear of this, as he still resented having submitted to Magnus’s father, King Olaf. Rognvald was popular with the common people but, recognising that Thorfinn had more warriors, he went to Norway to seek King Magnus’s support. Magnus supplied Rognvald with ships and men but when he returned to Orkney, Thorfinn defeated him in a sea battle in the Pentland Firth. Rognvald escaped back to Norway and returned secretly to Orkney with a single ship just as winter was setting in. Vikings rarely made long sea voyages after the autumn equinox for fear of storms, so Rognvald was able to take Thorfinn by surprise while he was drinking with his men in his hall one night. Rognvald’s men covered all the entrances to the hall and set the thatched roof on fire. Trapped inside, Thorfinn’s men could do nothing to resist. Rognvald allowed the women and slaves to leave but left Thorfinn and his men to burn. Thorfinn managed to break through the hall’s side wall and escape under cover of the smoke. Finding a small boat he crossed the Pentland Firth by night and stayed secretly with trusted friends in Caithness, allowing Rognvald to believe that he had perished in the flames. Surprise was now on Thorfinn’s side and just before Christmas he ambushed Rognvald on the small island of Papa Stronsay and killed him. Thirty of King Magnus’s men who had come to Orkney with Rognvald were later captured. Thorfinn executed all but one of them, who was sent to take the news to King Magnus. This amounted to a declaration of independence. Already at war with the Danes, Magnus had to accept Thorfinn’s coup with as much grace as he could muster. Magnus died soon after and his successor Harald Hardrada was preoccupied with fighting the Danes and let Thorfinn be.

Now unchallenged, Thorfinn was a figure of European stature and he began to behave like any other western European Christian ruler rather than as a Viking chief. Not long after King Magnus’s death in 1047, Thorfinn set out on a pilgrimage to Rome, travelling via Norway, Denmark and Germany. On the way he was feasted by King Svein Estrithson in Denmark, and in Germany by the Holy Roman Emperor Henry III, the most powerful ruler in Europe. On his return to Orkney, Thorfinn laid up his longships and devoted his time to providing his earldom with a unifying administrative and ecclesiastical structure. At his hall at Birsay, on the north coast of Mainland, he built a church as a seat for Henry of Lund, the first bishop of Orkney. Earl Rognvald was also a Christian and shortly after he returned to Orkney in 1037 – 8, he built a church dedicated to Saint Olaf at Kirkwall. This, the church from which the town gets its name (Kirkjuvágr = ‘church creek’), survives only as a single romanesque arch, now removed from its original site and re-used in a later building down a minor backstreet.

Thorfinn died of old age in 1065. Because of his achievements, Thorfinn became known as ‘the Mighty’, but he was never a popular ruler and many of his subjects found his rule oppressive, probably because he was more efficient at gathering taxes and tribute than his less administratively capable predecessors. It often happened in medieval Europe that a reaction followed the death of a strong ruler as his subjects tried to claw back some of their lost autonomy. Thorfinn needed a strong successor to hold on to the gains he made but he didn’t have one. Thorfinn’s sons Paul and Erlend succeeded jointly to the earldom. Neither son was a forceful character and Erlend was positively indolent. The brothers remained on friendly terms and were well liked by their subjects, but they were not warriors and, ultimately, they would fail to preserve the earldom’s independence.

The decline of the Earldom of Orkney created the space for the rise of a second Norse state in the region, the Kingdom of Man and the Isles, which was ruled from the Isle of Man. Very little is known about the political situation in the Isle of Man for a century or more after its settlement by the Norse, but it is likely that for much of the time it was within the sphere of influence of the Dublin Vikings or of Irish kings. The island has a strategic position in the middle of the Irish Sea, close enough to England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland for them all to be visible in clear weather. The many Viking Age silver hoards that have been found on the island suggest that it prospered as a result, whether by trade or because it was a very convenient base for launching Viking raids. The origins of the Kingdom of Man are very obscure. The earliest known king is generally thought to have been Maccus Haraldsson, a Viking who was active around the Irish Sea between 971 and 984. Maccus was described as the ‘king of many islands’, but whether the Isle of Man was one of them is uncertain. Maccus had a brother, Godfred Haraldsson, who was also active in the same area and was described in Irish sources as rí Innse Gall, ‘king of the Islands of the Foreigners’, but again the Isle of Man is not specifically mentioned as part of his domain. Godfred was particularly active in Wales, his greatest success being a raid on Anglesey in 987, in which he took 2,000 captives for the slave markets of Dublin. Godfred seems to have outlived his brother by a few years and was killed fighting in Argyll c. 989.

The earliest king of Man who can be identified with certainty was Godred Sihtricsson, who died in 1070 and was succeeded by his son Fingal. Fingal’s death is not recorded and he may still have been king in 1079 when Godred Crovan, a Norse-Gaelic Viking from Islay, conquered Man and united it as a single kingdom with the Hebrides. Godred first arrived in Man late in 1066 as a refugee, a survivor of the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada’s crushing defeat by the English at the Battle of Stamford Bridge near York. Godred Sihtricsson welcomed him, but after his death Godred Crovan returned to the Hebrides and in 1079 raised a fleet and army and invaded Man. Twice the Manxmen defeated Godred and forced him to withdraw. Godred raised a third army and landed at the harbour of Ramsey under cover of night. He prepared an ambush for the Manx, hiding 300 men in a wood on the side of Sky Hill, about a mile from his landing place. The Manx attacked Godred at dawn the next day. When the battle was at its peak, the men concealed in the wood emerged and attacked the Manx from the rear, throwing them into disorder. If Fingal was still king, he was likely killed in the battle. After his victory, Godred allowed his men to plunder the island, then he divided it into northern and southern halves. The south he gave to the surviving Manxmen and the north to the men who had come with him from the Hebrides. No one, Manx or Hebridean, held land as freeholders: Godred claimed all the land by right of conquest so everyone was a tenant of the king. Godred ruled Man and the Hebrides as a single kingdom and later in his reign he gathered tribute from Galloway, and was also accepted as king of Dublin between 1091 and 1094. Godred divided Man and the Isles into five administrative districts, which together sent thirty-two representatives to the annual thing, held at Tynwald on the Isle of Man. The modern Manx parliament still meets here annually, in the open air, to promulgate the laws passed during the preceding year, making it probably the oldest continuously functioning legislature in the world.

Godred died on Islay in 1095, leaving three sons, Lagmann, who inherited the throne, Harald and Olaf, who was still a child. Harald soon rebelled against Lagmann but was captured and blinded and castrated. Regretting his actions, Lagmann abdicated and set out on a penitential pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and died on the way, leaving the kingdom without a ruler. The chieftains of the kingdom appealed to Muirchertach Ua Briain, the powerful king of Munster, to provide a regent to govern until Olaf Godredsson came of age. The regent Muirchertach sent turned out to be a tyrant and after three years he was expelled. Shortly afterwards a dispute between the native Manx and the Hebridean settlers on the Isle of Man led to a battle at Santwat (traditionally identified as St Patrick’s Island) in which many of the leading men of the island were killed.

In 1097 King Magnus Barefoot (r. 1093 – 1103) of Norway sent an agent called Ingemund to the Hebrides to assert his claim to sovereignty. When Ingemund was murdered Magnus decided to take the islands by force. In 1098 Magnus raised a fleet of sixty or 160 ships (the sources differ) and sailed to Orkney, where he deposed earls Paul and Erlend and sent them into exile in Norway where they later died. In their place, he appointed his eight-year-old son Sigurd as earl, ending the earldom’s independence. Magnus moved on, laying waste to the Hebrides. Along the way he paused to make a thoroughly respectful visit to Iona before getting back to the real business of burning, killing and plundering. Christianity did not greatly change the ethics of Viking warfare. When Magnus finally landed on the Isle of Man he met no resistance. While he was there, Magnus visited Santwat and found it still littered with the remains of the men who had fallen in the recent battle. Whether it happened now, or perhaps during the earlier conflicts, young Olaf Godredsson went into exile, finding a refuge at the English court.

In the course of his expedition, Magnus gained Scottish recognition of Norwegian sovereignty over ‘all the islands off the west coast which were separated by water navigable by any ship with the rudder set’. According to the saga tradition, Magnus tricked the Scots’ king Edgar into ceding the Kintyre peninsula by having his ship dragged overland at the narrow isthmus at Tarbert while he sat at the helm. Magnus used the Isle of Man as a base to gather tribute in Galloway and Anglesey, off the north Welsh coast. The Normans were also trying to win control of Anglesey and Magnus defeated two earls, Hugh the Fat of Chester and Hugh of Shrewsbury, in a battle by the Menai Straits. During the battle, Magnus personally killed Hugh of Shrewsbury, hitting him in the face with an arrow.

In 1099, Magnus returned home to deal with a dispute with Sweden but returned to the Isle of Man in 1101 or 1102, and spent a year or two raiding in Ireland in alliance with King Muirchertach. During his time in Ireland, Magnus began wearing the Gaelic kilt instead of the Norse trousers, earning him his nickname ‘barefoot’ or ‘barelegs’. Muirchertach needed Magnus’s support against his rival for the high kingship, Domnall king of Ailech, and in return ceded Dublin to him. Magnus was on the brink of achieving the complete domination of the Irish Sea, but his career came to an abrupt end in August 1103 when he was ambushed and killed by the Irish while foraging for supplies in the north of Ireland: he was aged just thirty. Magnus was the last Scandinavian king to be killed on a Viking raid. Many of Magnus’s closest advisers thought he was reckless in battle, but he always had an answer, ‘a king is for glory, not for long life’: it was a fitting epitaph for a Viking Age kingship. The Norse colonies in the Northern Isles and the Hebrides had finally lost their independence, not to the nearby Scots but to the king of Norway. However, the islands were at the far reach of Norwegian royal power and time would quickly tell if Magnus’s successors could hold on to his conquests.