by Farley Mowat
Shetland may not have possessed much loot worthy of a Viking, but Orkney was a different matter. The first Norse traders who ventured to that mainly low-lying, fertile, and well-peopled archipelago would have brought back mouth-watering accounts of a marvellously green land richly endowed with herds of fat cattle and inhabited by people whose massive monuments spoke eloquently of affluence. The traders would also have noted many temples to White Christ, and associated religious communities that, in those times before celibacy became the priestly rule, thronged with men, women, and children.
Orkney’s manifold temptations would have been irresistible. However, when Viking raiders drove south beyond Fair Isle, the Orcadians were forewarned and ready. They had repaired many of the old brochs; probably set up coastal watches; concentrated men and vessels; and were generally prepared for trouble. Doubtless they had also sent messengers to mainland Britain to warn the king of what was happening, and perhaps to ask for war galleys that could engage the knorrin.
With or without help, Orkney resisted. An island legend tells of a Viking raid met and repulsed by a phalanx of local spearmen. The story may be apocryphal but a twelfth-century Latin compendium called Historia Norwegiae carries the ring of truth. Distorted as it may be by its Norwegian author’s contempt for Viking victims, it nonetheless provides our only glimpse of the Islanders as the Norse doom fell upon them. What follows is the essence of the text, which is reproduced in full in the notes, together with my comments.2
Originally it was the “Peti” and the “Papae” who inhabited these [Northern] islands. The first of these people, I mean the Peti, were scarcely taller than pygmies. Morning and evening they busied themselves to an amazing degree with the building and fitting out of their towns. But at midday, thoroughly drained of all their strength, they lay low in their little underground houses under the pressure of their fears....
But in the days of Harold the Hairy . . . some pirates [Vikings] kin to the very powerful pirate Rognvald advanced with a large fleet across the Solundic Sea. They threw these people out of their long-standing habitations and utterly destroyed them; they then made the islands subject to themselves.
The Islanders had no “towns,” but did have brochs. This is a description of a people being harassed to exhaustion while trying to fortify themselves against an imminent and pervasive menace.
The note concludes with the brutally definitive statement: “the islanders were utterly destroyed.”
By 681 Vikings were already thrusting beyond Orkney to raid the Alban mainland. Although, as we have seen, King Brudei did take his forces across the Pentland Firth in a venture that “resulted in much devastation,” the relief was short-lived. After Brudei’s death in 693, and the subsequent internal disruption in the kingdom of Alba, the way was open for the Northmen to return. This they quickly did, literally with a vengeance. Orkney was laid completely at their mercy . . . and they had little mercy to bestow.
Internal turmoil persisted in Alba through the first twenty years of the eighth century. It was finally quelled by a man whose name the keepers of the Irish annals rendered in Gaelic as Oengus mac Fergus. His antecedents are unknown but he was clearly a hard-driving military leader and ruthless politician.
He set out to save the kingdom.
First he initiated a rebellion against the then king, Nechtan, in an unsuccessful attempt to force that vacillating monarch to rally Alba against its several enemies. The first rebellion failed, but by 729 Oengus had established control over what remained of the kingdom. He spent the next thirty-odd years battling for its survival and, in the process, became one of the very few individual Albans to leave a mark on the historical record.
Oengus’s first step seems to have been an ill-fated attempt to regain control of the Northern Islands. There is a tantalizingly brief entry in the Irish annals to the effect that in 729 a “Pictish” fleet of 150 vessels was lost off Ross Cuisini.
Ross Cuisini is Irish for Cape of the Picts, which would make it one of the prominent headlands facing west. A good candidate might be Cape Wrath (Cape Ross?) at the northwestern tip of Scotland.
I conclude that this formidable naval force, about which nothing else is known, was assembled in northern Alban waters for an attack on the Vikings in the archipelagos. Then disaster struck. Perhaps the fleet was shattered in battle, but it could have been destroyed by one of the fearsome storms for which the Pentland Firth is notorious. Whatever the cause of the calamity, the consequences were devastating.
Archibald Lewis writes in The Northern Seas:3
In the land of the Picts that naval power, so noticeable in the seventh century, disappears by the eighth. The complete decadence of maritime life is a most mysterious affair. . . . We hear nothing more of the Pictish fleet which had been active off the coasts of Scotland and about Orkney. . . . Now it was the mariners from Western Norway who began probing south, doing so with little opposition.
The loss of the fleet removed the last real hope of stemming a tide that would eventually overwhelm Ireland and much of Britain. It also signalled the absolute demise of Alba in the Northern Isles. Thereafter the islands would become, and remain, a Norse fiefdom for five hundred years.
The Norse seizure of the southern of the twin archipelagos was probably substantially different from what had happened in Shetland. Orkney was not nibbled to death but submerged by masses of men and ships pouring down on it from the north. Although preceded by raiders, the bulk of the incomers were bent on land taking and, in the absence of any effective naval defence, they swamped the islands.
By the middle of the eighth century, few if any of Orkney’s original inhabitants could have survived on the home islands as free men. Even their once impregnable brochs could not have protected them. When one of these, the Broch of Burgar, was excavated, it yielded a pathetic cache of women’s possessions of the Norse invasion period, including brooches and combs hidden, but never recovered, by their dispossessed owners.
Oengus was never again able to assemble the resources for an effective strike against his nemesis in the north. During the remainder of his reign, which lasted until 761, he was desperately engaged in land battles against Scotti in the west and Britons in the south. In 741 he smashed an invading Irish army, but the Scotti came again in 750 and defeated him. Although he had early victories against the Britons, they, too, counterattacked and, in 756, shattered the Alban forces.
With the loss of the fleet at Ross Cuisini, Alba north of the Great Glen no longer had the means to defend herself. The coastal regions of Caithness, Sutherland, and Ross were overrun by the Sons of Death, as were most of the inner islands in the Hebridean Sea. In their turn, the outer islands of Lewis, Harris, Uist, and Barra fell.
Before the century ended, Vikings were rampaging almost unchallenged through the west. The raid on “God’s Church” at Lindisfarne took place in 793. Irish annals for the following year lament “the devastation of all the islands of Britain by the heathens.”
By 798 Ireland herself was coming under sustained attack and the Annals of Ulster reported “great devastations between Erin and Alba.” Northmen were also ranging far to the south. In 789, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
King Beorhtric [of Wessex] took Eadburgh, King Offa’s daughter, to wife. And in those days first came three ships. And then his reeve rode thereto and would compel them to the King’s will, for he knew not what they were, and there they slew him. These were the first ships of Danish men that sought the land of the English race.
Later recensions of the Chronicle identify Dorchester as the site of the landing, and the raiders as Norse from Horthaland.
In 802, according to the Annals of Ulster, the famous monastery of Columba on the island of Iona, which had already been raided several times, was burned by the pagans. And by 836 the Northmen had made Dublin one of their main bases in the west.
The shrunken kingdom of Alba made its last stand in 838 at
a battle by the Heathens against the men
of Fortrui [Picts of south-central Scotland] and in it fell Eoganan, son of Oengus, and Bran, son of Oengus. . . . Many men of the Fortrui had fallen, almost without number.
The Chronicles of Huntingdon tells us that Alba never recovered.
When the Danish [Norwegian] pirates, with the greatest slaughter had destroyed the Picts [at Fortrui] who defended their land, Kenneth [mac Alpin, King of Dalriada] passed into and turned his arms against the remaining territory of the Picts and after slaying many drove the rest to flight. And so he was the first of the Scotti to obtain the monarchy of the whole of Albania.
If Kenneth and his Scotti were not actually in league with the Sons of Death they must have had an understanding with them. How else can one explain that Dalriada, which by then encompassed most of western Scotland south of Glen Albyn, miraculously escaped the devastation visited upon all the neighbouring regions?
Independent evidence strongly suggests such an unholy alliance between Irish and Norse. The Icelandic Landnámabók tells us that
Harald the Fairhaired subdued unto his power all the Hebrides but, when he returned to Norway, Vikings took themselves into those islands as well as Scots and Irish and harried and plundered wide about.
The Annals of Innisfallen for 798 recorded “the Hebrides and Ulster plundered by the Lochlachan,” who almost certainly were Dalriada Scotti.4 Then, too, there is the report of Olaf’s return to Dublin after raiding western Alba. He brought two hundred ships to harbour laden with “a great spoil of people, English, Britons, and Picts.” No Scotti, be it noted.
As the ninth century drew on, there was hardly a place on Britain’s coasts, and precious few inland, secure from the fury of the Northmen.
One haven alone remained ... far out in the northwestern reaches of Ocean.
PART TWO
WORLDS TO THE WEST
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
TILLI
Farfarer was reaching to the westward. A brisk breeze filled her sail. The high peaks of the Bird Islands had sunk into the sea astern, and the green sweep of the Western Ocean stretched to the horizon on every hand.
Eddies of fulmars and shearwaters swirled overhead. Gannets plunged into the sea like a rain of javelins. Great auks rafted in the vessel’s path in such dense formations the helmsman had to resist the impulse to alter course.
He did alter course to avoid the vast bulk of somnolent whales when the ship found herself amidst such a concourse of them that their spoutings misted the horizon.1
Almost always, even during storms, Farfarer was accompanied by throngs of dolphins and porpoises who seemed to view her as a large but disadvantaged member of their own kind needing encouragement, if not entertainment.
Life was even more profuse beneath the surface. An unbaited hook dangled over the side would be seized by a fish frequently too large for one man to haul aboard. Hundred-pound cod and five-hundred-pound halibut were a confounded nuisance to fishermen equipped only with light hand gear.
Such was the world of waters through which this Farfarer’s cutwater sliced. She may have been the tenth, or the twentieth, vessel to bear the name, yet in essence she was little different from her ancestors.
On this autumnal day in the seventh century A.D. she was returning to her new home port of Swan Fiord on Tilli’s eastern seaboard after voyaging to Orkney to exchange valuta for southern goods. Tilli was still below the horizon but there could be no doubt where the mid-ocean island to which Farfarer’s clan had emigrated from Fetlar a generation earlier lay. Seemingly endless skeins of ducks, geese, and swans were streaming southeastward from it along an invisible path known to generations of Northern Islanders as the Swan’s Way.
The breeze held steady, and in due course a lookout spotted the luminous reflection of Whiteskull in the sky just where it ought to be, a point or so to starboard. Before the gleaming brow of the great glacier hove clear of the horizon, Farfarer encountered a cluster of Tilli’s ancient residents. Hoary great heads with gleaming eyes, spiked whiskers, and scimitar-shaped tusks peered at the vessel. Two green hands from Orkney, making their first passage out, were awed by this meeting with the legendary orcas whose lives had been intimately intertwined with those of the Islanders since time out of memory.
Farfarer closed with the land near the promontory, called Horn, on the southeastern coast. Dusk was falling as, with her skipper’s hand on the tiller, she bore up through a narrow entrance into the broad lagoon of Easthaven-under-Horn, Tilli’s unofficial capital.
It had long been standard practice for westbound vessels to make their landfalls at Horn and for those bound east to take their departures from it. Within Easthaven’s capacious lagoon, vessels could lie safely at anchor in any kind of weather, or be hauled high and dry on sandy beaches if needs must.
Easthaven was the rendezvous for all who came this way. Through generations, valuta seekers had paused here to exchange news and to refresh themselves with the produce of crofters, some of whose forebears had settled along the east coast as early as the fourth century. Transients and residents alike worshipped at a chapel presided over by a priest from Ninian’s mission who lived with his wife and children on a croft adjacent to the chapel.
Farfarer came to anchor and her crew went ashore to stretch their legs amongst turf-and-stone booths built close to the beach. A tantalizing odour of roasting meat drifted from outdoor cooking fires. People from several ships wandered from hut to hut exchanging gossip and renewing friendships.
On this particular night, two topics dominated the talk.
One was the dwindling number of tuskers on Tilli’s beaches and in the great island’s fringing waters. Walrus had been slowly growing scarcer for generations; now they were so diminished, and so wary, as to be scarcely able to sustain the ivory trade.
“They’re going out, and no mistake,” grumbled an older man. “P’rhaps they’ve grown tired of Tilli and all gone west to Crona or beyond. What think ye, Skipper?”
The question was addressed to Farfarer’s master, a vigorous, rough-bearded man of middle age. He took his time replying.
Map of Greenland and Iceland.
“Indeed, there’s some orca to be found on Crona’s eastern shores,” he said cautiously. “As for the western coast . . . well, nobody’s yet sailed along it more than four or five days beyond South Cape. No telling how far north it runs. A man might not be too surprised to find lots of ivory in that direction if he sailed far enough.”
The other topic engrossing men’s thoughts related to the home islands. Farfarer’s crewmen had brought dire news.
Less than a week before departing Orkney, they had heard of a grim happening. Tiny Ninian’s Isle had been assaulted; the church and most other buildings sacked and destroyed; men, old folk, and young children slaughtered; and girls and women carried away.
“The bloody Northmen!” raged a valuta seeker from Bressay who had been a year away from home. “They say they come to trade in peace—then act like devils! Each year there’s more of them among the Islands . . . and more trouble. It’s hard for a man to fare away and leave his folk at home with that lot ranging round.”
“You should do what we’ve done, then,” said one of Farfarer’s men. “Shift out here, neck and heel. You can see for yourself, there’s good land. And we’re closer to the Crona grounds. Yes, and ’tis a damned sight safer for them as has to stay put and mind the home fires!”
Less than two decades had passed since Farfarer’s clan had abandoned their age-old home on Fetlar for the shores of the east-coast lagoon called Swan Fiord, half a day’s sail north of Horn. Although older folk still yearned for the familiar hills, the move had made things much easier for the valuta men, who could now reach their hunting grounds in half the former time.
The man from Bressay nodded thoughtfully as he chewed away at a steaming joint of seal. Tilli was looking better and better to a lot of Northern Islanders.
ICELAND IS A VAST PLUTONIC DOME BURSTING OUT OF THE North Atlantic roughly midway betwe
en Scotland and Greenland. It is larger than Ireland (about the size of Newfoundland or the state of Kentucky), and its northern coast touches the Arctic Circle but, because it is almost completely embraced by arms of the Gulf Stream it is blessed with a moderate oceanic climate.
That this has not always been the case is evidenced by four large and a dozen small glaciers which dominate its interior. Vatnajökull, the Whiteskull of the Albans, is almost a hundred miles long, fifty wide, and nearly a mile thick—a monstrous remnant of the last Ice Age.
Yet Iceland is also a land of boiling lava. New volcanoes continue to arise. In 1963 an undersea eruption not far from the Westman Islands threw up an entirely new island now called Surtsey. Ten years later the largest settlement on the Westmans was so threatened by another eruption it had to be evacuated.
These events do not compare with the catastrophe of 1783 when the Laki fissure south of Vatnajökull opened to spew out the greatest lava flow recorded anywhere on earth in modern times. Falls of ash and lava together with poisonous gases killed so many sheep and cattle islandwide that a fifth of the human population subsequently died of famine.
The glowing coals in Iceland’s belly continue to give notice of their presence through innumerable hot springs and geysers.
The interior of this land of ice and fire largely consists of uninhabitable lava deserts, but there are green lowlands along most of the coasts and in some inland regions, where farmers and pastoralists have successfully struck root during favourable climatic periods. At all times the shores have boasted a plethora of marine life upon which hunters could depend for a living.
