All this left Thorfinn with his great aim achieved. He was now sole jarl of Orkney and Shetland, and sole earl of Caithness and Sutherland, and he also held Ross and the western islands and coast down to Galloway, and part of Ireland, as his rikis or conquered tributary lands.
The fourth and last period of his career now begins with his dramatic visit to King Magnus in Norway; and, on the death of that king, he became the friend of his successor, Harald Hardrada, in 1047, and after visiting King Sweyn in Denmark, and Henry III, Emperor of Germany, rode south to Rome probably in 1050 along with, it is said, his cousin Macbeth, king, and a good king, of Scotland, returning thence to Orkney to his Hall at Birsay at the north-west corner of Mainland. Thorfinn went to the Pope not only for absolution, but to get Thorolf appointed bishop in Orkney, according to Adam of Bremen, c. 243.
We now come to the last years of the fourth period of his life, when "the earl sate down quietly and kept peace over all his realm. Then he left off warfare, and he turned his mind to ruling his people and land, and to law-giving. He sate almost always in Birsay, and let them build there Christchurch,20 a splendid Minster. There first was set up a bishop's seat in the Orkneys."
The Annals of Tighernac record a great Norse expedition with the aid of the Galls of Orkney and Innse Gall and Dublin to subdue the Saxons in 1057, which failed. It is strange that we hear nothing of Thorfinn in this, and the question arises whether he had died before it took place. Had he been alive, such an expedition would hardly have been possible without him.21 It is interesting to note that so accurate a chronicler as Sir Archibald Dunbar dates his widow Ingibjorg's marriage to Malcolm III in 1059. (See Scottish Kings, p. 27.)
Thorfinn's life forms the subject of no less than twenty-six chapters of the Orkneyinga Saga.22 In his childhood, and later at all the main turning points of his life, he was blessed with the constant care and touching devotion, and with the able counsel and active assistance of his foster-father, Thorkel Fostri, the slayer of his three chief competitors—Jarl Einar and Earl Moddan and Jarl Ragnvald Brusi-son—the captain of his armies, the collector of his revenues and the guardian, in his absence on his Viking cruises and in his travels abroad, of his widespread dominions. There is a tradition23 that Thorkel founded the rock-castle of Borve, near Farr on the north coast of Sutherland, which was demolished by the Earl of Sutherland in 1556; but Thorkel is a common name among Vikings, and the story is otherwise unauthenticated.
According to the Saga, Thorfinn died of sickness "in the latter days of Harald Hardrada," (who was killed in September 1066), near the church which he founded, in his Hall at Birsay, north of Marwick Head in the north-west corner of Mainland of Orkney, within a few miles of the scene of Earl Kitchener's recent death at sea, so that the greatest of our jarls and of our earls rest near each other, the great Viking on the shore, and the great soldier in the ocean.
The chronology of Thorfinn and Ingibjorg his wife is extremely difficult, but on the whole we incline to think that he was born in 1008, and, as grandson of the king regnant, was created an earl at his birth, married Ingibjorg, then quite young, in 1044, and died in 1057 or 1058, after being an earl for his whole life of "fifty years," while his widow married Malcolm III in 1059. The phrase "in the latter days of Harald Hardrada" is after all an expression wide enough to cover the last seven years of a reign of twenty-one years, and it is unlikely that a marriage of policy would be postponed for more than the year or two after Malcolm's accession in 1057, during which he was engaged in defeating the claims of Lulach to his throne and settling his kingdom.
CHAPTER V.
Paul and Erlend, Hakon and Magnus.
After Earl Thorfinn's death his sons Paul and Erlend jointly held the jarldom, but divided the lands. They were "big men both, and handsome, but wise and modest"1 like their Norse mother Ingibjorg, known as Earls'-mother, first cousin of Thora, queen of Norway, mother of King Olaf Kyrre.
On Thorfinn's death, however, the rest of his territories, nine Scottish earldoms, it is said, "fell away, and went under those men who were territorially born to rule over them;" that is to say, they reverted to Scottish Maormors;2 but Orkney and Shetland remained wholly Norse, and under Norse rule.
The date of the succession of Paul and Erlend to the Norse jarldom3 was, as we have seen, after 1057. Possibly in 1059, or certainly not later than 1064 or 1065, Ingibjorg, Thorfinn's widow, as by Norse law widows alone had the right to do, "gave herself away" to the Scot-King Malcolm III, known as Malcolm Canmore.4
As a matter of policy, the marriage was a wise step. For it would tend to strengthen not only the hold of Scotland on Caithness and Sutherland, but also its connection with Orkney and Shetland, because Ingibjorg's sons, the young jarls Paul and Erlend, would become stepsons of the Scottish king and earls of Caithness. Nor was the marriage unsuitable in point either of the age or of the rank of the contracting parties. Married to Thorfinn about 1044,5 Ingibjorg, his widow, need not in 1064 have been more than forty. She may have been younger, and Malcolm was, in 1064, about thirty-three. If the marriage was in 1059, Ingibjorg would be only thirty-five and Malcolm twenty-eight. That Ingibjorg was not old is proved by the fact that she had by Malcolm one son and possibly three sons,6 namely, Duncan II, and, it may be, also Malcolm and Donald. As regards rank, also, she was equal to Malcolm, being a cousin of the Queen of Norway, and widow of Thorfinn grandson of Malcolm II, the great jarl of Orkney who had then recently subdued all the north of Scotland and the Western Isles and Galloway to himself, while Malcolm III was in exile in England, whence he had been brought back with the greatest difficulty, not by a Scottish force but by the help of an English, or at least a Northumbrian army.
After his marriage with Ingibjorg it is clear that there was peace for thirty years in the north of Scotland, so far as the Norse jarls were concerned, a fact which of itself justified the marriage, which, however, may have afterwards been held to have been within the prohibited degrees, and therefore void, while its issue would be held to be illegitimate, and not entitled to succeed to the Scottish crown.
We may add that there is nothing in any Scottish record to prove this marriage or to disprove it.
The first important event in the lives of Paul and Erlend happened just before the Norman conquest of England. They joined King Harald Sigurdson (Hardrada) and his son Prince Olaf, who was their second cousin on their mother's side,7 in an attack on England; and, after Harald's death, and his army's defeat by King Harold Godwinson of England at Stamford Bridge, in September 1066, (three days before William the Conqueror landed at Pevensey) the two Orkney jarls were taken prisoner, but, along with Prince Olaf, they were released. On their return to Orkney, Paul asked the Archbishop of York to consecrate a cleric of Orkney as Bishop in Orkney, and the two brothers ruled harmoniously there until their sons Hakon on the one hand and Magnus and Erling on the other, who had been engaged in Viking cruises together as boys, grew up and quarrelled, and, as is usual, drew their fathers into the strife. This strife was provoked by Hakon, and apparently lasted for many years,8 Erlend supporting his own sons, and driving Hakon abroad to Norway about the year 1090. Neither Paul nor Erlend seems to have been much in Sutherland or Caithness, in which the representatives of the