Argyll, forming the western seaboard of Scotland, and extending from Loch Long, opening off the Firth of Clyde, to the borders of Caithness, was brought under subjection, so that in the reign of this king the power of the crown was firmly established over the whole mainland of Scotland north of the Firths of Forth and Clyde. The islands, however, which surrounded it still belonged to the kingdom of Norway. The Orkney and Shetland Islands had been colonised by the Norwegians as early as the ninth century. They had been ruled by a line of Norwegian Jarls, who owed submission to the king of Norway alone, and though the succession to these Jarls opened in the reign of William the Lion to two families of Scottish descent, they were still considered as Jarls under the Norwegian crown, and the islands did not become connected with the Scottish kingdom till long after the period we are dealing with. The Western Isles, however, stood in a different position. Although the Norwegian Vikings had to a great extent taken possession of them at the same time that they colonised Orkney, and they had been the subject of frequent contest between the Norwegian Jarl and the Danish kings of Dublin, who had acquired possession of the island of Man, they were still claimed by the Scottish kings as belonging to their kingdom, till the reign of Edgar, when they were formally ceded to the king of Norway. They were at this time along with the Isle of Man under the rule of petty kings of Norwegian descent, and this line of Norwegian kings of the Isles retained the whole till the year 1154, when the kingdom of the Isles was divided, and the islands south of the Point of Ardnamurchan passed under the rule of the Celtic ruler of Argyll, whose claim was derived through a descent in the female line from one of the Norwegian kings of the Isles, but who still held them nominally under the king of Norway. The tie to Norway, however, was becoming weaker and the connection with Scotland stronger, when the unsuccessful attempt of Hakon, king of Norway, to firmly re-establish his power over the whole of the islands in the reign of Alexander the Third, and his defeat and death, led to the cession of Man and the Isles in the year 1266 to the Scottish monarch. And in 1284 we find them settled upon the Maid of Norway as a dependency of the Scottish kingdom. The Western Islands became from this time firmly united to the rest of Scotland, while the island of Man, after being in the following century alternately in the possession of the Scots and the English, finally passed over to the English crown. [Sidenote: Physical aspect of Scotland in the reign of Alexander the Third.]