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Updated: June 24, 2025
And once he said that he would that you were a Dane, and his comrade as you had been Halfden's." Then I told Osritha of how Halfden had let me go from him rather than have me fight against my own land. I had said nothing of this to the jarls, for there was no reason. And this was the first time that I had had private speech with Osritha. "That is Halfden's way," she said, "he is ever generous."
The fight lasted but three or four minutes, for the Danes, scattered through the house, and in many cases still stupid from the effects of the previous night's debauch, were unable to gather and make any collective resistance. The two jarls fought in a manner worthy of their renown, but the Saxon spears proved more than a match for their swords, and they died fighting bravely till the last.
And now that the jarls knew that Lodbrok was dead, the hardest was to tell them how he died, and why I was here thus. "Well loved I Lodbrok the Jarl, and well do I love Halfden his son," I said. "Have patience with me while I tell all from the first." "Go on," said Ingvar, knitting his brows.
Whether it was the Orkney jarls or their superiors, the kings of Norway, who owned them in the meantime, the odal lands were finally sold back to those entitled to them by descent by Jarl Ragnvald Kol's son about 1137, in order to raise money for the completion of Kirkwall Cathedral.
The fiercest of the Norwegian jarls took his place, and from Wessex the war extended over Mercia and East-Anglia. In 1012 Canterbury was taken and sacked, Æltheah the Archbishop dragged to Greenwich, and there in default of ransom brutally slain.
This new jarl, the second founder of the line of Orkney jarls, conquered Caithness and Sutherland as far south as Ekkjals-bakki, which is believed by some to be in Moray, and by others, with more truth, to be the ranges of hills in Sutherland and Ross lying to the north and to the south of the River Oykel and its estuary, the Dornoch Firth; and the second part of the name still happens to survive in the place-name of Backies in Dunrobin Glen and elsewhere in Cat where the Norse settled.
"And," the Saga adds, "it is the common saying of Sweyn that he was the most masterful man in the western lands, both of yore and now-a-days, among those men who had no higher rank than himself." Sweyn was, in fact the greatest man of his time. For he robbed whom he pleased, made and undid jarls and earls as he chose, and was the friend or tool of more than one Scottish king.
A.W. Johnston, in his "Orkney and Shetland Folk 850 to 1350," has worked out the quarterings of the Norse jarls, of whom only the first three were pure Norsemen, and he has thus shown conclusively how very Celtic they had become long before their male line failed.
"My thrall does not fail in what he tries to do!" said Edith, and the jarls all laughed, save Sigurd, who shook his head with smiling reproof, saying, "The thrall waits till after the freeman, and that is well. Now, some one call him." Then Ulf the Silent stepped forward from behind the throng, and laid before the jarls a package that was carefully wrapped in deerskin.
Yet as late as the twelfth century itself, even the true reindeer, the Arctic monarch of the Glacial Epoch, was still hunted by Norwegian jarls of Orkney on the mainland of Caithness and Sutherlandshire.
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