Around AD 890 the king of Norway, Harold Fairhair, took over Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles. He appointed earls, or ‘jarls’, to rule the islands. Stories of these jarls and their feuds, battles, voyages and pilgrimages, came from their ‘skalds’ (Norse for storytellers) who handed down sagas from one generation to the next.
One of the earliest is ‘The Orkneyinga Saga’, written around AD 1200.
As blood beat on helms,
so did blades on breastplates:
the bow of Agder’s prince
was bravely bent.
On shields the arrow-storm
spattered; as men fell,
deftly the lord of Hordar
dealt the Earl’s death-blow.
The Orkneyinga Saga, trans. Hermann Pálsson and Paul Geoffrey Edwards (Penguin Classics 1981)
We learn of Earl Sigurd the Stout, who owned a magical banner embroidered with a raven, and fell at the Battle of Clontarf, outside Dublin. His son, Thorfinn the Mighty, whose mother was a daughter of the King of Alba, built a church at Birsay and established a bishop there. Earl Magnus, grandson of Thorfinn, was declared a saint, and Earl Rognvald built the cathedral at Kirkwall in dedication to him.
Rognvald also went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, via a Moorish castle in Spain, explored a treasure ship near Sardinia, and swam in the River Jordan with his companion Sigmund Fish-Hook.
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Listen to Nobilis Humilis, a hymn for St Magnus, played on the Pictish harp and gemshorn.
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