The Orkneyinga Saga and Laxdaela Saga: Translated From the Icelandic

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The Orkneyinga Saga is the history of the Orkneymen, Earls and Odallers of Norwegian extraction, who established an Earldom of Norway in the Northern Scottish Isles a thousand years ago, and whose descendants for several centuries held sway over the Hebrides and Northern Mainland of Scotland. Commencing with the conquest of the Isles by Harald Harfagri, the Saga relates the subsequent history of the Earldom of Orkney under the long line of its Norse Jarls, and is, for a period of three centuries and a half, the principal authority for the history of Northern Scotland. The narrative is mainly personal, and therefore picturesque, pourtraying the men in person and character, impartially recording their deeds, and mentioning what was thought of them and their actions at the time. Occasionally the Saga-writer is enabled to do this in the words of a contemporary Skald. The skaldic songs, so often quoted, were the materials from which the Sagas were subsequently elaborated. In estimating their value as historical materials, it must be borne in mind that all history has begun in song. When great events and mighty deeds were preserved for posterity by oral recitation alone, it was necessary that the memory should be enabled to retain its hold of the elements of the story by some extraneous artistic aid, and therefore they were welded by the word-smith’s rhymes into a compact and homogeneous “lay.” Thus, worked into a poetical setting (as the jeweller mounts his gems to enhance their value and ensure their preservation), they passed as heirlooms from generation to generation, floating on the oral tradition of the people. Snorri Sturluson tells us that the songs of the skalds who were with Harald Harfagri in his wars were known and recited in his day, after an interval of nearly four centuries. “These songs,” he says, “which were sung in the presence of kings and chiefs, or of their sons, are the materials of our history; what they tell of their deeds and battles we take for truth; for though the skalds did no doubt praise those in whose presence they stood, yet no one would dare to relate to a chief what he and those who heard it knew to be wholly imaginary or false, as that would not be praise but mockery.” Our earliest Scottish chroniclers did not disdain to make use of the lay-smith’s craft, as a help to history, long after the Iceland skald had been succeeded by the Saga-writer, and the flowery recitative of an unclerkly age superseded by the terser narrative of the parchment scribe. The art is as old as Odin and the gods, if indeed it be not older, and these its creations. But its golden age had passed ere Paganism began to give way before Christianity, and the specimens we have in this Saga are mostly of the period of its decadence and by inferior skalds. Yet it is significant of the esteem in which the art continued to be held by the settlers in the Orkneys, that we find Earl Sigurd honouring Gunnlaug Ormstunga with princely gifts, Arnor Jarlaskald enjoying the special favour and friendship of Earl Thorfinn, and Earl Rögnvald, the founder of the cathedral, courting for himself the reputation of an accomplished skald.

The historical notices of the Orkneys previous to the Norse occupation are few in number, and exceedingly obscure. We learn little more from the allusions of the Roman writers than that scarcely anything was known to them with certainty of these remote localities. It may be inferred, however, that the first wave of Celtic population that overspread the northern mainland of Britain must have gradually extended northward to the outlying Isles. The correspondence of the early remains found in the Islands with those of northern Scotland is of itself a striking testimony to the connection of their early population with the Celtic stock of the northern mainland of Scotland. We gather from these remains that the earliest population of the Islands, of which we have any reliable evidence, lived in the same manner as the natives of the northern mainland, fought with the same varieties of weapons of stone and bronze, erected the same forms of defensive structures, practised the same funereal rites, and constructed similar forms of sepulchral chambers, over which they piled the great mounds which are among the most striking features of an Orkney landscape. The number and magnitude of these monuments and structural remains bear witness in a most remarkable manner to the activity, intelligence, and social organisation of the times that have no other record.

It is not until the middle of the 5th century of the Christian era that the early chronicles begin to cast occasionally a feeble and uncertain light upon the history of the northern isles. It is stated in the “Historia Britonum” of Nennius that the Saxon chiefs Ochtha and Ebissa, who came over with “forty keels” in the year 449, laid waste the Orkney Islands, and seized a great many regions beyond the Frisic Sea. At that time, and for a long period previously (according to Nennius), the Picts had been in possession of the Orkneys. Whatever value may be attached to these statements as referring to events which took place 400 years before the author’s own time, there can be no reason for discrediting his testimony when he says that the Picts continued in possession of the Orkneys in his day.

Adamnan, in his Life of St. Columba, mentions that the saint being on a visit to Bruide Mac Meilcon, king of the Northern Picts, at his stronghold on the river Ness, requested the king to recommend to the reguli of the Orkneys (one of whom was then present, and whose hostages were then in the king’s hands) that Cormac and the clerics who had accompanied him on a missionary voyage to the Orkneys should receive no harm; and it is added that this was the means of saving them from a violent death. But if the authority and influence of the king of the Northern Picts extended to these islands in the reign of Bruide, it does not seem to have been effectual in protecting them from foreign invasion. Bruide Mac Meilcon died in 584, and some time before his death the new and rising power of the Dalriadic kings had made itself felt as far as the Orkneys. In the Annals of Ulster there is a notice under the year 580 of an expedition against the Orkneys by Aedan, son of Gabran, seventh king of the Dalriad Scots, who, coming over from Ireland (then called Scotia) about the year 503, had established themselves in Argyle and the Western Highlands, and founded the kingdom of Dalriada. From the date of Aedan’s expedition in 580 we have no mention of the islands in the native chronicles for a whole century, and the next entry, which occurs under the year 682, gives colour to the supposition that they may have been under Dalriadic rule in the interval. The record in 682 is simply, that the Orkneys were wasted by Bruide Mac Bile, the king of the Northern Picts, and apparently brought once more under the rule of the Northern Pictish kings.

But though we can thus trace to some extent the authorship of the unwritten materials from which the Saga was framed, there is nothing to show where or by whom it was written. There is proof, however, that it was known in Iceland in the first half of the thirteenth century. Its earlier chapters, down to the division of the Earldom between Thorfinn and Brúsi, are incorporated into the Olaf Saga of Snorri Sturluson, and are there cited as from the “Jarla Saga,” or Saga of the Earls. It must therefore have been in existence as a completed work before 1241, the date of Snorri’s death. The compiler of the Fagrskinna, which is shown by internal evidence to have been written between 1222 and 1225, also quotes from it, by the title of “Jarla Sagan.” The closing chapters of the Orkneyinga Saga, in its present form, recording the burning of Bishop Adam, could not have been written before 1222; but, as it is stated in the last chapter that the terrible retribution exacted by the Scottish King for the murder of the Bishop was still in fresh memory, it may very well have been completed before 1225. No manuscript of the Jarla Saga is known to exist, and the original form of what is now called “The Orkneyinga Saga” is thus matter of conjecture. We know it only as the substance of its earlier chapters was given by Snorri previous to 1241, and in the expanded version of the Flateyjarbók, where it is pieced into the Sagas of Olaf Tryggvi’s son and Olaf the Holy. The Flateyjarbók, however, is nearly a century and a half later than Snorri’s work, having been written between the years 1387 and 1394.

The object of the present issue being simply to provide a plain, readable, and unadorned translation of the Orkneyinga Saga (which has been hitherto inaccessible to the English reader), it has been deemed advisable to adhere to the form of the Saga adopted by its first editor Jonæus, though not to Jonæus’s text, which is by no means free from corruptions. The Christiania edition of the Flateyjarbók, printed literally from the manuscript, has afforded the means of rectifying the text where necessary; and the expanded version of the earlier chapters given in the Flateyjarbók has also been translated and inserted as an appendix, for the sake of the fuller details which it supplies of the earlier history of the Earldom. In one sense it might have been desirable to have compiled a text which would have given the fullest history of the Orkney Earls, but this would not have been the “Orkneyinga Saga.” It would have necessitated the collection and critical collation of all the passages in all the Sagas and early writings relating to the history of the Northmen in Scotland—a work which has long been in progress in abler hands, and under more favourable auspices.

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