In this expedition Ivar, a son of Rögnvald, Earl of Moeri, was
killed.[10] In order to recompense Rögnvald for the loss of his son,
King Harald bestowed on him the territory of the subjugated isles of
Orkney and Shetland, with the title of Earl of the Orkneys. Harald seems
to have dealt similarly with the Hebrides, but his conquest of the
vikings in these remote isles was not so complete as in the Orkneys.
Ketil Flatnef (Flat nose), who, according to the Laxdæla Saga, had
emigrated to the Hebrides because he could not resist King Harald in
Norway, had married his daughter Aud to Olaf the White, the powerful
king of Dublin, and had established himself in a kind of independent
sovereignty in the Hebrides; and though he seems to have migrated from
them to Iceland in consequence of King Harald’s expedition, the
continued hostility to King Harald’s rule is evinced by the fact that
the second earl whom he sent to the Hebrides, AsBjörn Skerablesi, was
slain by two relatives of Ketil Flatnef, his wife and daughter taken
captive, and the latter sold as a slave. Rögnvald, however, returned to
his own Earldom in Norway, and made over his newly-acquired possessions
to his brother Sigurd, the “first earl” of the Saga.
IV. THE EARLDOM IN THE NORSE LINE, 872-1231.
Thorstein the Red, son of Olaf the White, king of Dublin, came then to
the north, and allying himself with Earl Sigurd, they crossed over to
the mainland of Scotland, and subdued Caithness and Sutherland as far as
Ekkialsbakki, and afterwards carried their conquests into Ross and
Moray. In this invasion Earl Sigurd killed Maelbrigd the buck-toothed
(Melbrigda tönn), a Scottish maormor of Ross or Moray; and having tied
his head to his saddle-bow, “the tooth,” which was very prominent,
inflicted a wound on his leg, and the wound inflaming caused the death
of the earl, who was hoy-laid (buried in a mound or cairn) on
Ekkialsbakki.[11] After his death, Thorstein the Red reigned as king
over the conquered districts of Scotland, which at that time, says the
Landnamabók,[12] comprehended “Caithness and Sutherland, Ross and Moray,
and more than the half of Scotland.” The Laxdæla Saga[13] says that in
his engagements with the Scots Thorstein was always successful, “until
at length he became reconciled with the King of the Scots, and obtained
possession of the half of Scotland, over which he became king.” But he
was shortly afterwards slain in Caithness by the treachery of the Scots;
and after his death Aud, his mother, migrated to Iceland. Previous to
her departure she had given Groa, the daughter of Thorstein, in marriage
to Duncan, earl or maormor of Duncansby in Caithness. Thus the Norse
earldom of Caithness passed for a time into the family of one of its
native chiefs. But by the subsequent marriage of Grelauga, the daughter
of Duncan and Groa, with Thorfinn Hausakliuf, son of Torf-Einar, Earl of
Orkney, the Scottish earldom was again added to the earldom of the
Isles.
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