Scandinavian Scotland
Scandinavian Scotland names a stretch of history running from the 8th to the 15th centuries, during which Vikings and Norse settlers transformed the outer edges of what is now Scotland. The question worth sitting with is this: how did a wave of raiders from across the North Sea end up reshaping the language, politics, and culture of an entire region for seven hundred years? The Northern Isles of Orkney and Shetland fell first. The Hebrides and the islands of the Firth of Clyde followed. At its broadest reach, the Norse presence covered territory amounting to somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the land area of modern Scotland. Yet despite that scale, the story has no single common name in the way England has "the Danelaw." The sources are fragmentary. The Orkneyinga Saga, written in the early 13th century by an unknown Icelander, is the principal Norse text. Irish and English annals fill some gaps but may carry a southern bias. From 849 on, when the relics of the monk Columba were removed from Iona in the face of Viking incursions, written evidence from local sources all but vanished for three hundred years. What archaeologists are uncovering, and what place names preserve, raises a question the chronicles cannot answer: did the Norse simply conquer this land, or did they build something entirely new within it?
Shetland sits some 300 kilometres due west of Norway, close enough that in favourable conditions a Viking longship sailing from Hordaland could reach it within 24 hours. Orkney lies 80 kilometres further to the south-west, and just 16 kilometres beyond Orkney is the Scottish mainland. Geography made the Northern Isles the natural first landfall and the last territory Norway would relinquish. The Norse called them the Norðreyjar. To the south lay the Suðreyjar, the "Southern Isles," a term that covered the Outer Hebrides, the Inner Hebrides including Skye, Islay, Jura, Mull, and Iona, the islands of the Firth of Clyde, and the Isle of Man. From the southern tip of the Isle of Man to the Butt of Lewis at the northern extremity of the Outer Hebrides is approximately 515 kilometres. Norse language likely became as dominant throughout the Inner Hebrides as it did on Lewis during the 10th and 11th centuries. Significant Norse influence also reached southward into Galloway in south-west Scotland. The 1266 Treaty of Perth, which formally ended Norwegian claims over the western islands, marked the boundary of this long arc of influence.
Barrett, writing in 2008, identified four competing scholarly theories about how the Norse came to dominate these islands, and he regarded none of them as proven. The traditional earldom hypothesis follows the Norse sagas: a period of expansion into the Northern Isles produced an aristocratic dynasty that exerted influence in western Scotland and the Isle of Man into the 11th century. Critics argue it overstates Orcadian reach into the western islands. The genocide hypothesis holds that the aboriginal populations of the Northern and Western Isles were eradicated wholesale and replaced by settlers of Scandinavian stock. The near-total replacement of pre-existing place names with Norse ones across much of the region lends this view force, but the place name evidence comes from a relatively late date, and the transition remains controversial. Genetic studies of Shetlanders show almost identical proportions of Scandinavian matrilineal and patrilineal ancestry, suggesting the islands were settled by men and women in roughly equal measure. A third theory, the pagan reaction hypothesis proposed by Bjørn Myhre, links Norse expansion to ethnic tensions arising from the spread of Christian missions, noting Irish missionary activity in Iceland and the Faroe Islands in the 8th century. The fourth, the Laithlind or Lochlann hypothesis advanced by Donnchadh Ó Corráin, proposes that the Vikings conquered the Northern and Western Isles and large areas of the coastal mainland in the first quarter of the 9th century and established a kingdom there before the middle of that century. Ó Corráin himself admits that "when and how the Vikings conquered and occupied the Isles is unknown, perhaps unknowable."
Excavations at Norwick on the island of Unst in Shetland point to Scandinavian settlers arriving perhaps as early as the mid-7th century, before the Viking Age's formal opening. From 793 onwards, repeated raids on the British Isles appear in the written record. "All the islands of Britain" were devastated in 794, and Iona was sacked in 802 and again in 806. Various named Viking leaders who were probably based in Scotland appear in the Irish annals: Soxulfr in 837, Turges in 845, and Hákon in 847. A decisive moment came in 839 when the king of Fortriu, Eógan mac Óengusa, and the king of Dál Riata, Áed mac Boanta, were both killed in a major defeat at Viking hands. The Frankish Annales Bertiniani may record the conquest of the Inner Hebrides by Vikings in 847. Amlaíb Conung, who died in 874 and is described as the "son of the king of Lochlainn," is taken by the Fragmentary Annals of Ireland as evidence for an early organised kingdom of Viking Scotland. In 870, Amlaíb Conung and Ímar, described in the annals as "the two kings of the Northmen," besieged Dumbarton, the capital of the Kingdom of Strathclyde, returning to Dublin the following year with numerous captives. That assault may have brought the whole of mainland Scotland under temporary Uí Ímair control. The Isle of Man may have been taken by the Norse as early as 877 and was certainly in their hands by 900.
Torf-Einarr, the son of Rognvald Eysteinsson by a slave, founded the dynasty that would control the Northern Isles for centuries. His line succeeded where that of Sigurd the Mighty, the first earl, had barely lasted beyond Sigurd's death. During the period when Torf-Einarr's son Thorfinn Torf-Einarsson held authority, the deposed Norwegian king Eric Bloodaxe used Orkney as a raiding base before being killed in 954. The unbroken line of Norse earls traced back to Rognvald Eysteinsson finally ended with the murder of Jon Haraldsson in Thurso in 1231. Haakon IV of Norway confirmed Magnus, second son of the Earl of Angus, as Earl of Orkney in 1236. In 1379 the earldom passed to the Sinclair family, barons of Roslin near Edinburgh, though Orkney and Shetland remained Norwegian territory for a century more. In the western islands the political picture was considerably more tangled. The Uí Ímair dominated from the late 9th to the early 11th centuries, with rulers such as Amlaíb Cuarán and Gofraid mac Arailt claiming kingship of the Isles. Records in the Annals of Innisfallen even hint that the Western Isles may not have been organised into a kingdom or earldom at certain points, but were instead governed by assemblies of freeholders who elected lawmen to manage public affairs. Godred Crovan became ruler of Dublin and Mann from 1079, and the Crovan dynasty ruled as Kings of Mann and the Isles for the following half century, until Somerled broke the kingdom apart. The Hebrides and islands of the Clyde remained essentially under rulers of Scandinavian origin from at least the late 10th century until Scotland's 13th-century expansion into the west.
At Jarlshof in Shetland, the most extensive visible remains of a Viking site anywhere in Britain, the Norse are believed to have inhabited the site continuously from the 9th to the 14th centuries. Among the finds there are slate drawings of dragon-prowed ships and a bronze-gilt harness mounting made in Ireland in the 8th or 9th century. Celtic-derived place names in Orkney are few. Norn, a local form of Old Norse, was widely spoken by inhabitants well into recorded history, and evidence for Pictish elements in Shetland place names is virtually non-existent, with only three island names, Fetlar, Unst, and Yell, as exceptions. In the Hebrides the obliteration of pre-Norse names in the Outer Hebrides and in Coll, Tiree, and Islay was nearly total. Norse may have survived as a spoken language in the Outer Hebrides until the 16th century. Yet the contact between Norse settlers and Gaelic speakers did not simply produce erasure. It generated a distinct Norse-Gael culture with wide influence in Argyll, Galloway, and beyond. The term Gallgáedil, meaning "foreign Gaels," appears in sources from the 9th century to describe individuals of mixed Scandinavian-Celtic descent who became dominant in west and south-west Scotland and parts of northern England. This alliance may have helped save the Gaels of Dál Riata from the fate met by the Picts. The Port an Eilean Mhòir ship burial in Ardnamurchan is the first boat-burial site discovered on the British mainland, a marker of how deeply Norse practice penetrated even coastal territory that the sagas barely mention.
According to the sagas, Olav Tryggvasson Christianised the Northern Isles in 995 when he stopped at South Walls on his way from Ireland to Norway. He summoned the jarl Sigurd the Stout and said: "I order you and all your subjects to be baptised. If you refuse, I'll have you killed on the spot and I swear I will ravage every island with fire and steel." Sigurd agreed, and the islands became Christian at a stroke, receiving their own bishop, Henry of Lund, appointed sometime before 1035. The conversion of Scandinavian Scotland marked a significant shift. The Norse were no longer simply raiders; they became, in the assessment recorded in the sources, "enlightened practitioners of maritime commercial principles." The Þing, an open-air governmental assembly open to virtually all free men, was the vehicle for this civic life. Laws were passed, complaints adjudicated, and decisions made in the presence of the jarl. Named examples include Tingwall and Law Ting Holm in Shetland, Dingwall in Easter Ross, and Tynwald on the Isle of Man. Trade left its own evidence. Coins found at Bornais and Cille Pheadair in the Outer Hebrides were produced in Norway, Westphalia, and England, with none from Scotland. Ivory from Greenland was found at the same sites. Data from the Outer Hebrides suggests that herring fishing became a significant commercial activity and that trade with Dublin and Bristol was important. St. Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall stands today as the principal surviving example of Norse-era construction in Scotland, and the Lewis chessmen remain the best-known treasure trove from this world.
Thorfinn Sigurdsson's 11th-century rule, which at its widest stretch reached from Shetland to Man, represents what may have been the zenith of Scandinavian influence in Scotland. The Suðreyjar have a combined land area of approximately 8,374 square kilometres; Caithness and Sutherland together cover around 7,051 square kilometres. At that height, the permanent Scandinavian holdings in Scotland amounted to between a fifth and a quarter of the land area of the modern country. Yet the Norse presence also, indirectly, helped shape the Scottish kingdom itself. Viking raids initially weakened Pictland, Strathclyde, and Dál Riata, but those harassed remnants eventually united. Norse aggression played a significant role in the emergence of the kingdom of Alba, the nucleus from which the Scottish kingdom would grow. In 1468, Christian I of Norway pledged Orkney as security against the dowry owed on the marriage of his daughter Margaret to James III of Scotland. As the money was never paid, Scotland's connection to those islands became permanent. Today in Shetland the Scandinavian connection is still marked by the Lerwick fire-festival Up Helly Aa. When Norway regained independence in 1905, the Shetland authorities wrote to King Haakon VII that "today no 'foreign' flag is more familiar or more welcome in our voes and havens than that of Norway." At the 2013 Viking Congress held in Shetland, the Scottish Government announced plans to strengthen Scotland's historic links with Scandinavia.
Common questions
What territories did the Norse control during Scandinavian Scotland?
Norse-controlled territories in Scotland included the Northern Isles of Orkney and Shetland, the Hebrides, the islands of the Firth of Clyde, and associated mainland areas including Caithness and Sutherland. At the height of Thorfinn Sigurdsson's rule in the 11th century, permanent Scandinavian holdings amounted to between a fifth and a quarter of the land area of modern Scotland.
When did Scandinavian Scotland begin and end?
Scandinavian Scotland spanned from the 8th to the 15th centuries. Viking influence began in the late 8th century, and the period formally closed in the mid-15th century when Orkney and Shetland were transferred to Scottish rule; Orkney was pledged to Scotland in 1468 when Christian I of Norway used it as security for an unpaid dowry.
What is the Orkneyinga Saga and why does it matter for Scandinavian Scotland?
The Orkneyinga Saga is the principal Norse source for the history of Scandinavian Scotland. It was written in the early 13th century by an unknown Icelander and provides much of what is known about the earls of Orkney and Norse activity in the region, though it is sometimes contradictory when compared with Irish and English annals.
How did Norse settlement affect the languages of Scotland?
Norse settlement produced a near-total replacement of pre-existing place names with Norse ones across much of the Northern and Western Isles. Norn, a local form of Old Norse, was widely spoken in Orkney and Shetland well into recorded history, and Norse may have survived as a spoken language in the Outer Hebrides until the 16th century. Pictish place name evidence in Shetland is virtually non-existent, with only three island names, Fetlar, Unst, and Yell, as exceptions.
What role did the Norse play in the formation of the Scottish kingdom?
Norse raids initially weakened Pictland, Strathclyde, and Dál Riata, but those harassed kingdoms eventually united into the kingdom of Alba, the nucleus of modern Scotland. Norse aggression thus played a significant role in pushing the Gaelic and Pictish populations toward political unification, just as Viking pressure in the south helped Wessex expand into the kingdom of England.
What ended Norwegian control over the Western Isles of Scotland?
Norwegian control over the Western Isles ended with the 1266 Treaty of Perth, following Haakon Haakonarson's ill-fated invasion and the stalemate of the Battle of Largs. Under that treaty, the Hebrides, Mann, and all rights the Norwegian crown "had of old therein" were yielded to the Kingdom of Scotland.
All sources
18 references cited across the entry
- 11webPeople Over the Sea: Nordic and Scottish PerspectivesUniversity of St Andrews
- 18newsScotland to strengthen links with ScandinaviaFrank Urquhart — 7 August 2013