The history of the Norse settlements in the Orkneys is well and fully told in the _Orkneyingasaga_[10]. The first Orkney-earl was the above-named Sigurd. He entered into an alliance with Thorstein the Red, son to Olaf the White, and together they conquered Caithness and Sutherland, as far south as the river Oikel on the borders of Ross and Cromarty. Sigurd's son Einar, known as Turf-Einar because he first taught the islanders to cut peat for fuel, founded a long line of earls of the Orkneys. He had a quarrel with Harold Fairhair and when that king imposed a fine on the islanders for the murder of his son and the farmers could not pay it, Einar paid it himself on condition that the peasants surrendered their _óðal_ rights, i.e. their rights of possession in the lands they cultivated. Turf-Einar's son Sigurd the Stout was the most famous of all the Orkney-earls, renowned both as warrior and poet. He conquered Sutherland, Caithness, Ross, Moray, Argyle, the Hebrides and Man, securing the support of the men of Orkney by giving them back their _óðal_. He married a daughter of Malcolm king of Scotland, and met his end, as we have already seen, fighting on the side of the heathen Norsemen in the battle of Clontarf in 1014. After this the power of the Orkney-earls declined. The Norse line of earls was replaced by one of Scottish descent in 1231, but the islands did not pass definitely to the Scottish crown until the 15th century[11]. Of the Norse settlements in the Hebrides we have no such definite or continuous record. Mention is made in Irish annals of the middle of the 9th century of a king in the Hebrides--one Guðröðr son of Fergus--whose very name shows him to have been one of the Gaill-Gaedhil. Ketill Finn (_v. supra_, p. 56) was another such. In the latter half of the 9th century Ketill Flatnose was the chief Norse leader in the Hebrides until his power was destroyed by Harold Fairhair. Many of the settlers then betook themselves to Iceland, the most famous of them being Auðr the deep-thoughted, widow of Olaf the White and daughter of Ketill. Norse rule was all powerful during the 10th and 11th centuries. There was a line of kings but we find ruling side by side with them certain officers known as 'lawmen' (_v. infra_, p. 103), while in the late 10th and for the greater part of the 11th century, the Hebrides were under the sovereignty of the Orkney-earls. Norse rule in the Hebrides did not finally come to an end until 1266 when Magnus Hákonsson, king of Norway, renounced all claims to the islands.