THE _Orkney Islands_ were probably visited by the northern pirates at a period much earlier than is generally supposed. If, from their barrenness and from their limited surface, they offered no inducement to permanent occupancy, they were useful as strongholds,—as ports where the northern ships might anchor in safety. From their position between Scandinavia and Ireland, which we know was hostilely visited in the year 795, they must have been frequently subject to the ravages of the strangers. The Pictish inhabitants, who were not warlike or numerous, had the mortification to witness the frequent seizure of their cattle, their fish, their corn, and such other stores as they had been able to collect or to produce. Their only advantage was in their poverty, which shortened the stay of these avaricious men. But after the battle of Hafursfiord (885), these islands became the perpetual abode of the sea-rovers, who were no longer tolerated in Norway[1]; here they fitted out expeditions to ravage every coast from the south of Ireland to the extremity of the Gulf of Finland. So frequent and so formidable were those ravages that in 888—three years after his glorious victory—Harald Harfagre, with a view of suppressing them, sailed with a powerful armament into these seas. The isles of Shetland, of Orkney, of the Hebrides, and Man, were subdued by him. But to conquer was little, unless some measure were adopted to secure the conquest. The monarch determined to place one of his most valiant and most respectable chiefs over the islands, and cast his eyes on Rognevald, jarl of Moria, who, in the present expedition, had lost one of his sons. But Rognevald, attached to his hereditary domains in Norway, induced his royal master to invest his brother Sigurd with the dignity. Sigurd, therefore, was the first jarl, or earl, of the Orkneys. [Sidenote: 889 to 892.]