1 - Landnám and Landscape in Viking Orkney

Summary

The Viking heritage of Orkney and Shetland is widely and justifiably celebrated. Norse place-names abound in the landscapes and seascapes of the Northern Isles, to the virtual exclusion of other linguistic origins. Saints’ dedications and other local traditions hark back to the islands’ Norse earldom association with Scandinavia, prior to their transfer to Scotland in 1468–71. The Orkneyinga Saga, composed in Iceland around 1200, gives the origin of the Earldom of Orkney as happening in the reign of Harald Fairhair of Norway, around 870, although there are grounds for suspecting this to be a retrospective claim. The saga describes Harald’s expedition to rid the islands of plundering Vikings (ethnicity unspecified) who had become a problem for Norway (Palsson and Edwards 1978: 26). However, its coverage of events only becomes fully fledged from the time of Earl Sigurd II (960–1014), and there were political reasons in the context of 1200 for the advocates of Norwegian rule in the North Atlantic to ‘back-date’ its claim (Griffiths 2019; 2020). As argued below, the imprint of Scandinavian influence on the landscape of the Northern Isles may be a somewhat later development than traditionally supposed.

Eighteenth- and 19th-century antiquarians excavated in and around prehistoric monuments, and were not unaware of the legacy of the ‘Danes’ (Graham-Campbell 2004), but the Viking era in the Northern Isles was not a significant academic concern for excavation until more recently. Orkneyinga Saga was first translated into English as late as 1873 (Goudie et al. 1873), but it took yet longer for a search for the Viking presence to enter archaeological consciousness in a systematic way. An upsurge of nationalist-minded Viking scholarship in Scandinavia, particularly in Norway after its independence from Sweden was achieved in 1905, was undoubtedly influential, yielding the Viking Antiquities in Great Britain and Ireland series of volumes largely researched in the 1920s and published in 1940. Home-grown scholars of that era, notably J. Storer Clouston, and later Hugh Marwick, focused their attentions on documenting the physical and toponymic legacy of Norse rule. To Marwick, the Viking arrival was as bloody and complete as his scholarly Norwegian counterparts would have wished to hear: truly an ethnic cataclysm (Smith 2003: 145–6).