In the following pages an attempt is made to fit together facts derived, on the one hand, from those portions of the Orkneyinga, St. Magnus and Hakonar Sagas which relate to the extreme north end of the mainland of Scotland, and, on the other hand, from such scanty English and Scottish records, bearing on its history, as have survived, so as to form a connected account, from the Scottish point of view, of the Norse occupation of most of the more fertile parts of Sutherland and Caithness from its beginning about 870 until its close, when these counties were freed from Norse influence, and Man and the Hebrides were incorporated in the kingdom of Scotland by treaty with Norway in 1266.

References to the authorities mentioned above and to later works bearing on the subject have been inserted in the hope that others, more leisured and more competent, may supplement them by further research, and convert those portions of the narrative which are at present largely conjectural from story into history.

What manner of men the prehistoric races which in early ages successively inhabited the northern end of the Scottish mainland may have been, we can now hardly imagine. Dr. Joseph Anderson’s classical volumes on Scotland in Pagan Times tell us something, indeed all that can now be known, of some of them, and in the Royal Commission’s Reports and Inventories of the Early Monuments of Sutherland and of Caithness respectively, Mr. Curle has classified their visible remains, and may, let us hope, with the aid of legislation, save those relics from the roadmaker or dykebuilder. Lastly, such superstitions, or survivals of beliefs, as remain in the north of Scotland from early days have been collected, arranged, and explained by the late Mr. George Henderson in an able book on that subject. Enquiries such as these, however, belong to the provinces of archaeology and folk-psychology, and not to that of history, still less to that of contemporary history, which began in the north, as elsewhere, with oral tradition, handed down at first by men of recording memories, and then committed to writing, and afterwards to print; and both in Norway and Iceland on the one hand, and in the Highlands on the other such men were by no means rare, and were deservedly held in the highest honour.

Writing arrived in Sutherland and Caithness very late, and was not even then a common indigenous product. Clerks, or scholars who could read and write, were at first very few, and in the north of Scotland hardly any such were known before the twelfth century of our era, save perhaps in the Pictish and Columban settlements of hermits and missionaries. Of their writings, if they ever existed, little or nothing of historical value is extant at the present time. But the Orkneyinga, St. Magnus, and Hakon’s Sagas, when they take up their story, present us with a graphic and human and consecutive account of much which would otherwise have remained unknown, and their story, though tinged here and there with romance through the writers’ desire for dramatic effect, is, so far as the main facts go, singularly faithful and accurate, when it can be tested by contemporary chronicles.

Until the twelfth or the thirteenth century, save for these Sagas, we learn hardly anything of Sutherland, or, indeed, of the extreme north of Scotland from any record written either by anyone living there or by anyone with local knowledge, and for facts before those given in the Orkneyinga Saga we have to cast about among historians of the Roman Empire and amongst early Greek geographers, or later ecclesiastical writers, to find nothing save a few names of places and some scattered references to vanished races, tongues and Churches. For information about the Picts we have at first to rely on the researches of some of our trustworthy archaeologists, and at a later date on the annals, largely Irish, collected by the late Mr. Skene in his Chronicles of the Picts and Scots, and in the works of Mr. Ritson, into which it is no part of our purpose to enter in detail. All the authorities for early Scottish history have been ably dealt with by Sir Herbert Maxwell in his book on the Early Chronicles Relating to Scotland, reproducing the Rhind lectures delivered by him in 1912. At the end of our period reliable references to charters from the twelfth century onwards will be found in Origines Parochiales Scotiae, and especially in the second part of the second volume of that valuable work of monumental research, produced, under the late Mr. Cosmo Innes, by Mr. James Brichan, and presented to the Bannatyne Club by the second Duke of Sutherland and the late Sir David Dundas. There are also the reprints, often with elaborate notes, of Scottish Charters by Sir Archibald C. Lawrie, The Bannatyne Club, The Spalding Club, The Viking Society, Mr. Alan O. Anderson, and others. The first volume of the Orkney and Shetland Records published by the Viking Society is prefaced by an able introduction of great interest.

By way of introduction to Norse times, we may attempt to state very shortly some of the leading events in Caledonia in Roman, Pictish, and Scottish times from near the end of the first century to the beginning of the tenth, so far as they bear on the agencies at work there in Norse times.

The first four of the nine centuries above referred to had seen the Romans under Agricola in 80 to 84 A.D. attempt, and fail, to conquer the Caledonians or men of the woods, whose home, as their name implies, was the great woodland region of the Mounth or Grampians. Those centuries had also seen the building of the wall of Hadrian between the Tyne and Solway in the year 120, the campaigns of Lollius Urbicus in 140 A.D. and the erection between the Firths of Forth and Clyde of the earthen rampart of Antonine on stone foundations, which was held by Rome for about fifty years. Seventy years later, in the year 210, fifty thousand Roman legionaries had perished in the Caledonian campaigns of the Roman Emperor Severus, and over a century and a half later, in 368, there had followed the second conquest of the Roman province of Valentia which comprised the Lothians and Galloway in the south, by Theodosius. Lastly, the final retirement of the Romans from Scotland, and indeed from Britain, took place, on the destruction of the Roman Empire in spite of Stilicho’s noble defence, by Alaric and the Visigoths, in 410.

From the Roman wars and occupation two main results followed. The various Caledonian tribes inhabiting the land had then probably for the first time joined forces to fight a common foe, and in fighting him had become for that purpose temporarily united. Again, possibly as part of the high Roman policy of Stilicho, St. Ninian had in the beginning of the fifth century introduced into Galloway and also into the regions north of the Wall of Antonine the first teachers of Christianity, a religion which, however, was for some time longer to remain unknown to the Picts generally in the north. But, as Professor Hume Brown also tells us in the first of the three entrancing volumes of his History, “In Scotland, if we may judge from the meagre accounts that have come down to us, the Roman dominion hardly passed the stage of a military occupation, held by an intermittent and precarious tenure.” What concerns dwellers in the extreme north is that although the Romans went into Perthshire and may have temporarily penetrated even into Moray, they certainly never occupied any part of Sutherland or Caithness, though their tablets of brass, probably as part of the currency used in trade, have been found in a Sutherland Pictish tower or broch, a fact which goes far to prove that the brochs, with which we shall deal later on, existed in Roman times.

As the Romans never occupied Sutherland or Caithness or even came near their borders, their inhabitants were never disarmed or prevented from the practice of war, and thus enfeebled like the more southerly Britons.

After the departure, in 410, of the Romans, St. Ninian sent his missionaries over Pictland, but darkness broods over its history thenceforward for a hundred and fifty years. Picts, Scots of Ireland, Angles and Saxons swarmed southwards, eastwards, and westwards respectively into England, and ruined Romano-British civilisation, which the Britons, unskilled in arms, were powerless to defend, as the lamentations of Gildas abundantly attest.

In 563 Columba, the Irish soldier prince and missionary, whose Life by Adamnan still survives, landed in Argyll from Ulster, introduced another form of Christian worship, also, like the Pictish, “without reference to the Church of Rome,” and from his base in Iona not only preached and sent preachers to the north-western and northern Picts, but in some measure brought among them the higher civilisation then prevailing in Ireland. About the same time Kentigern, or St. Mungo, a Briton of Wales, carried on missionary work in Strathclyde and in Pictland, and even, it is said, sent preachers to Orkney.

In the beginning of the seventh century King Aethelfrith of Northumbria had cut the people of the Britons, who held the whole of west Britain from Devon to the Clyde, into two, the northern portion becoming the Britons of Strathclyde; and the same king defeated Aidan, king of the Scots of Argyll, at Degsastan near Jedburgh, though Aidan survived, and, with the help of Columba, re-established the power of the Scots in Argyll.

About the year 664, the wars in the south with Northumbria resulted in the introduction by its king Oswy into south Pictland of the Catholic instead of the Columban Church, a change which Nechtan, king of the Southern Picts, afterwards confirmed, and which long afterwards led to the abandonment throughout Scotland of the Pictish and Columban systems, and to the adoption in their place of the wider and broader culture, and the politically superior organisation and stricter discipline of the Catholic Church, as new bishoprics were gradually founded throughout Scotland by its successive kings.

Meantime, during the centuries which elapsed before the Catholic Church reached the extreme north of Scotland, the Pictish and Columban churches held the field, as rivals, there, and probably never wholly perished in Norse times even in Caithness and Sutherland.

During these centuries there were constant wars among the Picts themselves, and later between them and the Scots, resulting, generally, in the Picts being driven eastward and northward from the south centre of Alban, which the Scots seized, into the Grampian hills.

After this very brief statement of previous history we may now attempt to give some description of the land and the people of Caithness and Sutherland as the Northmen found them in the ninth century.