On the death of Malcolm the Second in the year 1034 the dynasty of Scottish kings, which had been established on the Pictish throne nearly three centuries previously, came to an end. There appears to have been no male descendant left who could claim the crown, and the succession opened to his grandson by his eldest daughter. So far as the districts south of the Firths of Forth and Clyde were concerned, his claim was not opposed to the law of succession which previously prevailed there, and though inconsistent with the law of tanistry which regulated the succession to the crown among the Scots, it had been so far modified that the right of the heir-female to succeed in default of heirs-male appears to have been recognised in such an emergency, but the change was too recent to have acquired a firm and permanent place in the law of the country; and here the right of Duncan, the son of the eldest daughter, was contested by Thorfinn, the most powerful of the Norwegian Jarls of Orkney, whose mother was likewise a daughter of Malcolm II.; and a war of succession followed, which was terminated by the death of King Duncan in 1040. According to a contemporary writer, he was slain by the commander of his own army, Macbethad, son of Findlaech, who succeeded him.[59] This was Macbeth, the Ri or Mormaer of Moray, who appears to have treacherously joined the Norwegian Jarl and slain his king, in hopes of obtaining, with the assistance of the former, the Scottish crown. We are told by the Orkneyinga Saga that Thorfinn then followed the routed army, and subjected the land to himself as far south as Fifi or Fife; that he drove those who resisted him to the deserts and the woods, and subdued the country wherever he went; and that till the day of his death he possessed nine jarldoms in Scotland and the whole of the Sudreys or Western Isles.[60] These jarldoms were no doubt the districts ruled by the native Mormaers, and, if his conquest embraced merely the low country as far south as Fife, the districts which he had not subjected consisted merely of the province composed of Gowry, Fife, and Fothreve, the province of Athol, and that consisting of Stratherne and Menteath. Over these, within which Scone, the capital of the kingdom, was situated, Macbeth appears to have ruled as king, while the districts of Lothian and Cumbria recognised the son of Duncan as their legitimate monarch, with the exception of the Gaelic territory of Galloway, which was under Norwegian rule.