In Our Time - The Orkneyinga Saga

Episode Date: July 4, 2024

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Saga of the Earls of Orkney, as told in the 13th Century by an unknown Icelander. This was the story of arguably the most important, strategically, of all the islands in the British Viking world, when the Earls controlled Shetland, Orkney and Caithness from which they could raid the Irish and British coasts, from Dublin round to Lindisfarne. The Saga combines myth with history, bringing to life the places on those islands where Vikings met, drank, made treaties, told stories, became saints, plotted and fought.With Judith Jesch Professor of Viking Studies at the University of NottinghamJane Harrison Archaeologist and Research Associate at Oxford and Newcastle UniversitiesAnd Alex Woolf Senior Lecturer in History at the University of St AndrewsProducer: Simon TillotsonIn Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio ProductionReading list:Theodore M. Andersson, The Growth of Medieval Icelandic Sagas, 1180-1280, (Cornell University Press, 2012)Margaret Clunies Ross, The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse-Icelandic Saga (Cambridge University Press, 2010)Robert Cook (trans.), Njals Saga (Penguin, 2001)Barbara E. Crawford, The Northern Earldoms: Orkney and Caithness from AD 870 to 1470 (John Donald Short Run Press, 2013)Shami Ghosh, Kings’ Sagas and Norwegian History: Problems and Perspectives (Brill, 2011)J. Graham-Campbell and C. E. Batey, Vikings in Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 2002)David Griffiths, J. Harrison and Michael Athanson, Beside the Ocean: Coastal Landscapes at the Bay of Skaill, Marwick, and Birsay Bay, Orkney: Archaeological Research 2003-18 (Oxbow Books, 2019)Jane Harrison, Building Mounds: Orkney and the Vikings (Routledge, forthcoming)Ármann Jakobsson and Sverrir Jakobsson (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas (Routledge, 2017)Judith Jesch, The Viking Diaspora (Routledge, 2015)Judith Jesch, ‘Earl Rögnvaldr of Orkney, a Poet of the Viking Diaspora’ (Journal of the North Atlantic, Special Volume 4, 2013)Judith Jesch, The Poetry of Orkneyinga Saga (H.M. Chadwick Memorial Lectures, University of Cambridge, 2020)Devra Kunin (trans.), A History of Norway and the Passion and Miracles of the Blessed Olafr (Viking Society for Northern Research, 2001)Rory McTurk (ed.), A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture (Wiley-Blackwell, 2004)Tom Muir, Orkney in the Sagas (Orkney Islands Council, 2005)Else Mundal (ed.), Dating the Sagas: Reviews and Revisions (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013)Heather O’Donoghue, Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Short Introduction, (John Wiley & Sons, 2004) Heather O'Donoghue and Eleanor Parker (eds.), The Cambridge History of Old Norse-Icelandic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2024), especially 'Landscape and Material Culture' by Jane Harrison and ‘Diaspora Sagas’ by Judith JeschRichard Oram, Domination and Lordship, Scotland 1070-1230, (Edinburgh University Press, 2011)Olwyn Owen (ed.), The World of Orkneyinga Saga: The Broad-cloth Viking Trip (Orkney Islands Council, 2006)Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards (trans.), Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney (Penguin Classics, 1981)Snorri Sturluson (trans. tr. Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes), Heimskringla, vol. I-III (Viking Society for Northern Research, 2011-2015)William P. L. Thomson, The New History of Orkney (Birlinn Ltd, 2008)Alex Woolf, From Pictland to Alba, 789-1070 (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), especially chapter 7

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, around the turn of the 13th century,

an unknown Icelander created the Orkneying saga, the story of arguably the most important, strategically, of all the islands in the British Viking World, world. This was a time when Earl's of Orkney controlled Shetland, Orkney and Kate Ness, from which they could raid the Irish and British coasts from Dublin around to Lindisfarne.

And the saga mixes myth with history, bringing to life the places on those islands where Vikings met, drank, made treaties, told stories, became saints, and murdered, or were murdered. With me to discuss the Orkney Inga saga are Judith Yesh, Professor of Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham. Jane Harrison, archaeologist and research

associate at Oxford and Newcastle Universities and Alex Wolfe, senior lecturer in history at the University of St Andrews. Alex, can you give us an idea of what the saga covers and which period? Well, the saga, as you say, written in Iceland in the early 13th century, but apart from a very brief mythological beginning, which basically is part of the mythological origin of the Norwegians, it covers the history of Orkney from about 900 to about 1,200. And it focuses particularly on the internecine strife between the different members of the family of Earls, how they betray each other, ally with each other, go to the Scottish and Norwegian kings to get help in this struggle. And it focuses very much on that internal struggle within the family. The bulk of the land is a single large

island, which is called slightly confusingly mainland nowadays. I was called Horace in the Vichy, the Horse Island. And it lies within sight of the north coast of the mainland of Scotland. Scotland. And then beyond that, you have the Shetlands which are out of sight, though Fair Isle lies between them and is intervisible between the north of Orkney and the south of Shetland. And Shetland was part of the earldom of Orkney, though most of the political action of the saga takes place on the main archipelago and in Caithness, the immediately adjacent bit of Scotland. We've said that an Icelander wrote this. What do we know about him and the origins of the saga? We don't know anything specific about the Iceland.

What we can tell is that he's working in the same milieu as other saga writers, particularly the ones who wrote the accounts of the Norwegian kings. They seem to be familiar with each other's work to some extent or the different scholars argue about whether there's direct copying and so on. But he obviously had some very good sources. Some of them were written, but he probably had spoken to people and perhaps himself even visited Orkney and Keith Ness. Kath Ness in particular is very well described in the latter part of the saga.

So although he was an Icelander and there's no doubt about that, he was closely connected with some people who were involved with Orkney and perhaps a visited Orkney himself. Why did it take an Icelander to do this and not somebody from the Orkness? Iceland generally seems to be the main place where most of the sagas about ages of Ghanaian history were written down. This might be partly a problem of recovery and survival, but it's not just that, because as early as the time the saga was being written around about 1,200, we have other Scandinavian writers like the Danish Latin writer, Saxo Grammaticus, who tells us he's reliant on Iceland as sources for his own history. I sometimes tell my students that because there's nothing else to do in Iceland in the winter, they were very good at telling stories.

And I think that may not be too far from the truth, though other people may disagree. What prompted him to write this? If you were a decent country, you wanted to have a saga, didn't you? Yes. And I think Orkney was perceived as being an important place. As you said in the introduction, it was a kind of stopping off place, one of the first places that Icelanders might reach. They'd either sail to Western Norway or to Orkney before going further afield. and the Orkney Earls and some of the other great families in Orkney

were intermarried with some of the Icelandic chieftains families There was a long tradition of service by Icelandic poets in the retinues of Orkney Earls And there's a connection It's one of the places that connects them to the wider world You speak of earls in the plural There are an awful lot of owls in this story, aren't they? There are, and one of the curious things about the earldom of Orkney

is unlike most other earldoms, it seems to be divided and shared. So at times you might have three people claiming to be Earl of Orkney simultaneously. And sometimes they're in conflict and sometimes they're sharing it together. For example, Paul and Ireland in the period after 1066

are said to have kept the same court and their brothers who simply are both earls. And that's unusual, although it's quite similar to what was happening in the Norwegian kingdom with Norwegian kings at the time. It's not something you usually see with earls. Thank you very much. Jane Jane Harrison, why were they especially important strategically at this time?

Well, you've hinted in the introduction and Alex has picked up on its location geographically because you have that, it's a maritime hub effectively because you come over from Norway and you first you reach Shetland and then you're coming down into Orkney and from there you can go down into Scotland and round the East Coast down into England. there are mentions of voyages from Orkney down the East Coast. They mention the mud of Grimsby. And then also from Orkney around the West Coast and to the Hebrides of Scotland to the Hebrides, Isle of Man,

that whole Irish Sea literal and opening up the places in Ireland that the Vikings became so closely associated with. So it's a really good place. Initially, if you're a raiding Viking, it's a place where on your way to, places on the west or east coast of England, you can stop, you can perhaps pick up more men, you can restock, you can draw breath and then head off. And then I suspect what happened is

that they then realised how fertile Orkney is and what's a range of resources there are there. There are a great many islands and a good deal of very good beaching points, very good harbours. So you've got good places to lay up. There are little islands which can be the layers of major Vikings. There are lovely bays where you can have your farm with all the resources of the sea and the land available. So I think that's when you think, okay, we might not just stop off here on our way to a raid. We're going to settle here as well because it's not just strategic, it's fertile as well. The sea was obviously central to all this. Can you describe that more fully than my sentence? Yes. I mean, obviously because of it's, it's, it's,

location in terms of seaways, but also I think ships, of course, are absolutely crucial and central because it's ships and the mastery of sail that drives the Vikings out to settle and to raid. And we get a sense in the saga of a whole range of those ships from the fine, fully fitted warships, long ships are the classic Viking ship that the Norwegian kings tend to gift to the earls they've decided they're going to support. When you say classic, how big are they? How many men do they carry? They vary, but I think 60 to 70 men. They're light and fast, and they can be contrasted with the big, high, broad cargo ships

that are used to take heavy goods, grain, dried fish, timber, because Orkney has no trees. That's a crucial thing as well. And you get a mention of cargo ships. when one of the earls is off on pilgrimage. Part of the pilgrimage seems to be raiding and they take a big cargo ship and you come across smaller cargo ships

that are being used both for trading but also for opportunistic raids and fishing boats because of course fishing is vital. I suspect all of the farmers of Orkney were equally comfortable on land and sea and were fisher people as well as farmers. So it weaves its way through the saga.

And there were a refuge. People, the men, was always men, wasn't it? Often slept on them. Yes. Yes. There were mentions in the saga, especially when things are tense, when one of those occasions, when there's more than one earl and there's a lot of tension and fighting,

then the safe place to be overnight is on board your ships roped together. But then there's one of the earth. Roped together. So they're roped together like a sort of little settlement. because often ships sound almost like a household and almost like a hall and they're all roped together and that's where you go with watchmen on overnight

and one of the girls is careless, gets careless and despite being on board his ship is captured and killed so it didn't always work but that was supposed to be the safest place. Thank you. Judith, it comes to you to have the honour to read some of the a section or two to give us a flavor of the saga.

Thank you. I've got two short extracts I'd like to read, and they both pick up on a point Alex already made, is that a lot of the saga is about men killing their brothers, half-brothers, nephews and cousins in order to become the sole earl of Orkney. The first one is a bit of poetry, and then the second one will be a little bit of prose. The poetry I'll read in Old Norse.

Bjurt, Verz Sol at Svartri, Suckr Fold in Marduck van, Brestr ervithi Eustra, Allur glimir sial of fjolum, Aver that eum fridrithar, Indrottar, Thorfinny, Thaim-chalpy Gouthi, Göttingar, minifthask.

Now that is... In English, The bright sun will become black, The earth will sink into the dark, dark ocean. Oestri's burden will break. All the sea will resound on the mountains before a more glorious nobleman than Thorfinner will be born for the islands. God help that keeper of a whole troop. That's really good, isn't it? I think it's... I'm going to beat that with your second quote. No, no, I want to tell you a little bit about what it is. It's a stanza

from a memorial poem for an Earl called Thorfin the Mighty who died in the Tense he was a warrior, a successful warrior. He killed his nephew in order to become solar Earl of Orkney, but then he went to Rome and that was absolved of his sins by the Pope himself. And then he came back and concentrated on governing and making laws and building churches and doing good things. And this is an Icelandic poet saying basically that there will never be a better earl than Thorfin. My second extract, I won't read in the Old Norse, I'll just read in the English translation. It is a part of the story of the martyrdom of St. Magnus in the 12th century, the early 12th century. Magnus actually ruled, you were talking about co-eurls earlier,

that he and his cousin, Halkun Palson, managed to get on for quite a few years together, and they went raiding together and did stuff like that. But eventually, Hawkon was too ambitious and he lured Magnus to an ostensible peace meeting and treacherously had him executed there. And this extract features

Magnus's mother, Thora. Thora, the mother of Earl Magnus, had invited both the earls to a feast after the meeting. And now Earl Howcon came to the feast after the killing of the Holy Earl Magnus.

Thora did the serving herself, and carried drink to the earl and those of his men who had been at the killing of her son. And when the drink had affected the earl, then Thora went before him and spoke, Now you have come here alone, sir, but I expected both of you. You will now want to gladden me before God and men. Be now in place of a son to me and I will be in place of a mother to you. I now have great need of your mercy, and that you allow you. me to have my son carried to church.

Be as good to me in answering my prayers as you want God to be to you on the day of judgment. The Earl falls silent and thinks over the matter and felt guilty of his misdeeds when she begged so softly weeping that she could carry her son to church. He looked at her and shed a tear and spoke to her,

bury your son where you like. Graf son, This sounds quite difficult. How difficult is it to translate? Different parts of it are more difficult than others, so it's long, so it takes time. I think you have gathered from the prose reading that it's actually a fairly, very specific style. It makes use of paratactic style. Everything is and, and, and. It switches between tenses, between past and present tense. That's something that other translators have eliminated from their English translations,

whereas I think it's so much a characteristic of this saga style that I think it should be kept. But the real difficulty comes with the poetry because it's a very strict meter. They're very strict rules about alliteration and rhyme. There's a very special diction you have to use. You have to use cannings. And because Old Norse is an inflected language, the word order in these stanzas is not normal word order. So speakers of the language would understand it, but you can't turn it into English and make it sound like poetry.

It sounds like poetry in the original. It doesn't really sound like poetry in English. Thank you very much. Right, Alex, what are the main themes of the saga? Well, we've touched on some there. It's the internecid strife between the earls. And usually one of the ways you see this arising is, as Judith just said, to begin with, often groups of earls go raiding together, they govern together happily, but their immediate personal friends and supporters egg them on to

say, well, you know, you could have it all if you wanted. You're much better man than him. And that internecid strife and the way that these relationships break down and the way that supporters change sides quite regularly is one major theme. And the other major theme is really the relationship with the kings of Norway, and to a much less of extent the kings of Scotland. The earls will frequently go to the kings of Norway to get support against their rival, or perhaps someone who's not yet an earl, but who thinks he has a claim, will go to Norway first and be given ships, as Jane mentioned, and maybe men by the Norwegian earl, by the Norwegian king rather, and said to cross.

And one of the earls, who we hear most about in the 12th century section, Earl von von Waldcaulie, is in fact a Norwegian who is the grandson of an earl. He's the son of the murdered Earl Magnus's sister. And he's sort of given the title of Earl, as a whim by the Norwegian king, as a favour to him because he's one of his retainers whom he's become particularly enamoured with. And then subsequently he's given several attempts at taking fleets across

and eventually does make himself, establish himself in the islands. So it's that kind of relationship. And yet at the same time, once they're in power, the earls try and distance themselves, from the Norwegians. So on one hand, they want to be independent rulers, almost like kings themselves, but they require the help of the Norwegian kings. And tied in with that is their relation with the farmers. And there's rather a complicated element that recurs in the saga, which an awful lot of ink has been spilt by modern academics trying to understand what's going on, which is talking about

what's called the Oathel rights, the freehold rights of the farmers, which various earls grant, back to the farmers or take away from the farmers. And this seems to be somehow also about the relationship of the earls to the king. If you think about the freeholders having a direct relationship to the king, is that relationship mediated through the earl, or is the earl simply a civil servant, if you like? And so those are the major themes that run through the saga. Jane, can you, are the places you can stand with the saga in hand now

and say it's the hall, because there were great hall skulls though, won't there? The hall is over there, the little church is over there, the mound is over there, you can do that now. Absolutely, you can. I mean, this is one of the extraordinary things about the combination of Orkney Inga Saga and Orkney as it is today. And there are a range of places that you can go to of different sorts across the, I think it's nearly 70 islands, if you can't, all the tiny little scurries and uninhabited bits, but 12 sort of main islands. And there are the big Earldom sites. There's the Brochre Bessé and the land connected to it,

which is the northwest corner of the biggest island, which Alex mentioned. And that's an extraordinary offshore island, which is sort of canted dramatically, as someone has stamped on the inland edge and is splashed by Atlantic on its cliff edges. And on that island now are the ruins of a church and the grass-covered outlines of Viking halls and buildings. And so you can cross at low tide to the island and you can stand there.

And this is the place that Judith mentioned. This is Thorfin's Centre in the 11th century. It's where he goes and he builds his cathedral after he's been absolved. And it's where he's supposed to have settled and turned into a great lawmaker and ruler of all his people. And you can stand there and you can look back at the. mainland and see the acres of fertile land and the little lochs. And you can see why that would be a great place to set up if you were the Earl. And there's another Earldom site just down the coast where again there are the ruins of a church. And you can imagine the big hall, which

features in a number of the more dramatic stories in the saga. Two of the murders. One is the accidental killing of an Earl. And the other is the murder. by the Great Last Viking, Svein Aslifson, of another Svane. They get into an acrimonious drinking fight. And there's a wonderful description of Svain hiding behind the stone uprights that hide the ale vats and jumping out with his axe and getting rid of the rival Svein. And so you can stand there and imagine this story because the church is described as just paces from where this happened.

But then you can go to any of the sandy bays on any of the main islands and you can imagine being one of the chieftains in your Scarly Hall and they're always up on mounds with great views looking out over the sea and over the land that they control. And you can think, okay, the earl's coming and I've got to get myself sorted. I've got to be able to house and feed him and his retinue and I've got to call in all the favours from my farmers and get that all set up.

So it's really vivid. And all those places you are there, from the big places to the landing places to the hall sites. Thank you. Judith. Yeah, no, I wanted to add to what Jane was saying because the most obvious place that's mentioned in the saga is, of course, the Cathedral of St. Magnus in Kirkwall, a beautiful, one of the most beautiful cathedrals in Britain, in my opinion,

and beautiful red and gold sandstone, a kind of miniature Durham. And it relates to what Alex was saying, because it was built by Rögenwalder Kali Kohlson, who was not a very effective politician, and his father persuaded him that if he invoked the power of his uncle, the Saint Magnus, then he would become Earl of Orkney. And in order to do that, he had to build the church, the cathedral, in memory of St. Magnus.

And that's one of the occasions when he taxes people in order to be able to fund it. Nothing changes, does it? So what values do they seem to hold? It's interesting. Are they Christian values? It depends what you mean by Christian values. It's pretty obvious. There is a Viking theme running through the saga,

but it's important to remember there are 112 chapters in the saga and Christianity is introduced in chapter 12. So the vast majority of the saga takes place in Christian times. These are Christian people killing each other regularly. I think my way of reading the saga is that the narrative voice is often non-judgmental. It's just this is what happened and this is what had to happen. And it's interesting. Certain of the characters are said to be handsome and intelligent and so on.

And as soon as someone is said to be popular, you know they're going to come to a sticky end, having been killed by their cousin or whatever. At the same time, Magnus is, of course, he's a saint. he has all kinds of virtues. By being killed by his cousin. It's what happened in a lot of countries in northern Europe at the time. Countries that were relatively recently converted to Christianity, the ruling dynasty and the church found it useful to make an alliance.

And they'd make one of the people, somebody who was killed for political reasons, into a martyr in order to strengthen the power of the church and the state over the people. population. And it worked? It seems to have done. Can I come at you now, Alex? It's not history quite, is it? But historians use it. Can you unpick some of that? Well, it varies. As Judith said, it goes on for a very long time, and the early bits of it are terrible from a historical perspective. What do you mean by terrible?

They're probably largely imaginative. They might have a sense of the pedigree, the list of ancestor of the earls and one or two broad brush events, but a lot of the detail seems more like it's drawn from folklore or maybe even just made up. But as it goes on, it becomes more historical and the section set in the 12th century and the very beginning of the 13th century where it ends, some of them are probably as good as most historical sources. It's also, its historical value varies according to what it's dealing with. The author is very well-grounded, in Scandinavian society and history. So things to do with Orkney itself and with Norway

are often things that we can sort of verify from other sources and seem plausible. The further they go away from there, down into the Irish Sea world, or in the case of Earl Lundvald's pilgrimage to Jerusalem, into the Mediterranean, you get the feeling that they've not really got a very clear sense of the geography

or of the political background. So Lundy, for example, almost appears to be regarded as one of the Hebrides rather than an island off the north of Devon. And their understanding of Scottish history has moments where it seems to link to what we understand from Scottish sources and English sources. But at other times they seem to throw in names which are just stereotypically Scottish. So, for example, when we're told that Magnus Bareleg, the Norwegian King, sails to Orkney and then down the West Coast,

we're told he makes a treaty with the Scottish King Malcolm. But at that point in time, there wasn't a Scottish king called Malcolm. But it's a nice stereotypical Scottish name. So perhaps added for very similitude by the Icelandic author. And there are other things that are puzzlingly missing. So, for example, Thorfin the Mighty, who we've talked about, the poem that Judith read out relates to, is an almost exact contemporary of Macbeth who originated,

in the north of Scotland in Maryshire or that sort of region. And yet Macbeth isn't mentioned in the saga at all. And yet we're told that Thorfing controlled nine earldoms in Scotland, which must be pretty much all of Scotland, and ravaged far and wide and so on. And he went on pilgrimage to Rome, as we've heard from Jane. And Dorothy Dunnett, the historical novelist, actually tried to solve this dilemma

by suggesting that Thorfin Macbeth were the same person, which I think very few scholars would believe, but it is a puzzle that certain people you would expect to be present and not present. And whether that's done deliberately because they perhaps would have put the earls in shadow or whether it's done because they really don't have much understanding of non-Scanadian, non-North-speaking communities is unclear.

Thank you very much. Jane. The saga is partly about who holds power, over whom and on what authority. How do we find out what's going on? Yes. There are all sorts of levels of authority that are mentioned in the saga, and Alex and Judith have already referred to relationships with the kings of Norway and Scotland, and those are clearly key for the earls.

But we get a sense of how the rest of the structures of authority work as well, because the earls have a group of a retinue, a group of leading men who are their supporters. And as well as the strife between cousins and brothers and earls, you see them trying to keep allegiance of leading people. And farmers and chieftains are mentioned. And it's a really interesting sort of bond that is reflected in that hall culture. We've mentioned the big halls, where they had the feasts, where they declaimed the poetry, where they took oaths, where they gave gifts.

and it's all a very personal and present face-to-face authority where you have to meet the people, you have to see them. And so it's also very peripatetic. So the Earl moves around a lot and goes and visits, spoken about as being a vis-loo, as being visiting one of their chief people. There's someone called Sigurd of West Ness, who is one of the chieftains. And Earl Paul is mentioned. as feasting with him on a couple of occasions,

on one of which he's then kidnapped by Svain Aslis and the Marauding and Viking, who seems to be able to have allegiance with a number of people over his career. So it's a very personal sort of authority. And then the other group, who Alex mentioned, are these farmers. And of course, they're the people

who in effect are supporting it all because they are the group who are producing the taxes in kind, the renders, that support the chiefs in being able to house and feed these roving earls and who do the fishing and who produce everything that is supporting the chiefs and the earl. But they also have a role. And they're mentioned a number of times in the saga as, firstly, as a kind of grumbling chorus.

There are moments when they pop up and say, look, you're asking too much of us. And they ask one of the leading men called Thorkel, who's the foster father of Thorfin the Mighty, to intervene and ask for less of an imposition. But they also help to reconcile occasionally. They're obviously fined the times of trouble and strife harder. There are more demands made on them. They're probably asked to crew boats and taken away from their everyday roles. And so they intervene and they want to reconcile and to try to.

and bring the Earls together. So they pop up. And by the 12th century, they're actually being called to regular assemblies in Kirkwall by Earl Roggenwald. So far, you haven't mentioned one woman? No, but they run through as an important thread. And Judith can probably say more.

Judith. Well, how long have you got? They don't play a huge role, but they really pack a punch when they do get involved in the saga. We can start with the Ragenhielder, who's actually the daughter of Eric. Bloodax, who was a Viking king in New York, and she manages to marry three of the sons of Earl Thorfin Skullsplitter, and causes the death of two of them and two nephews.

Causes the death. Is that a polite way of saying what? Well, she promises marriage to various men on the grounds that if they kill the person she once killed, she will marry them. Of course, then the promise doesn't really come to anything. Then there's an Irish mother of Earl Sigurd who made a magic banner for him so that when he went into battle it would bring victory to the man before whom it was carried but death to the man who carried it.

So it brings him a victory at first but then he runs out of banner carriers and then he dies. He has to carry his own banner and dies. Then there's Thori you've already heard about as a rather different kind of woman. Then there's Ragnah, who actually has a bit of authority because she seems to have been a widow, or at least there's no mention of a husband.

She has a son. She has two estates. She gives advice to Earl Paul, and he basically mansplains her and says, oh, no, I'm not going to take your advice. I'm the one in charge here. It doesn't end well for him. She also stands up to Earl Regenvalder who doesn't want to let a visiting Icelander join his court.

I think we're convinced. I think we're convinced. We mentioned St. Magnus earlier. Were there many more persons there who were almost saints and was that hierarchy there? The interestingly previously mentioned Earl Regenvalder Kali Colson, who was the nephew of St. Magnus, and his father was a Norwegian. He grew up in Norway. He was also considered a saint in Orkney, although he was never officially canonized by the church. But when they found a skeleton, which is almost certainly that of St. Magnus in Kirkwell Cathedral in 1919,

they also found another one that quite possibly was his. We don't know what he did to become a saint other than build the cathedral, I think. Quite something, though, isn't it? Yeah. Alex, what would a neighbouring people think of these earls going around, murdering each other and taking over? Well, the interesting thing is that we don't have very many notices of them in neighbouring sources. We have a writ from the Scottish King David I, which is sent to Earl Harold and Earl. the other Earl, that's all he's called, telling them to leave the monks at Dornock alone

and not to bother them. That would date to probably the late 1130s or 1140s. There are occasional references to them involved with piracy. The first one to be mentioned in any contemporary source is Earl Sigurd the Fatt, who's the one with the Raven banner that Judith mentioned, who fights at the Battle of Clontarf in Ireland in 10, 1014 and that's where he's killed. And that's the first contemporary reference to the earldom. And then we don't hear about it for a while.

In Norwegian sources, they seem to be presented, or Scandinavian sources, mostly Icelandic, in fact, they seem to be presented as rulers who are admirable. In several other Icelandic sagas like Niel's saga, young men will go and spend some time in their retinue, going off raiding and making their fortune. and that's what establishes them as heroic when they return to farming life in Iceland. So they were admired in the Scandinavian world, but there's very little notice of them further south. Thank you. Jane, you know about artefacts on the island, to your life study being artefacts.

What do you want to tell us about them? I think that you get less of a sense in the saga of objects than you're doing some of the other sagas actually. But... Why is that? I think because it's focused so much on the politicking of the Earls. But one of the extraordinary things about Orkney is the quality and the preservation of the archaeology.

So we do actually have a lot of objects associated with sites that are in the saga. And the important thing I think really is that in an essentially non-literate and very sensory and a physical visual culture, all these objects are very potent and very meaningful. They can tell you things about someone's social position, their affiliations,

and they can speak in a way that perhaps we have lost a sense of. Can you make for examples? Yes. So, for example, there are in Orkney a number of hordes where precious things have been buried in the ground, and there's a lot of dispute about whether these are always, done for safekeeping to be recovered later and then forgotten about whether they're done deliberately

as some kind of offering. And there's an extraordinary one on one of those bays where you have a long house, a big stone hall long house and the beautiful silver, big silver brooches, they must have been so heavy and difficult to wear and twisted neck rings and armlets. You've got very high status, beautiful things,

but then you have very ordinary things like combs that you also find in burying, and buried in the foundations of houses, which again are much more mundane, but carry a lot of meaning because they can perhaps associate with your affiliation and your belonging. So there are a whole range of different objects.

Are they still to be dug up or have you dug them all up? We haven't dug them all up. There's a surprising... I mean, we've done a number of excavations, but there's still a lot out there that we could discover waiting to be... Alex, where's the writer of this saga on the firmest ground?

He's on the firmest ground in the later part of the period probably from about the middle of the 12th century onwards which is presumably within living memory either of his own generation or of the older generation whom he relied on and particularly his understanding

the geography of parts of Cath Ness seemed to be extremely good so that some of the events such as the killing of Earl Ron Val Cali Colson at a farm called Forci you could actually plot it out. You can get the Ordnance Survey map out

and you can follow almost step by step the route that's being taken and it's hard to believe that didn't come from an eyewitness account and that maybe the author himself had been there or he was sitting down with someone telling him over his shoulder as he wrote. And there are other accounts such as the killing of Frackok, one of the powerful women who lives in Helmsdale, where again you get a sense that the

geography is really clearly understood by the author. So that's always struck people as interesting and suggesting either that the author has been to Kath Ness or that perhaps his main informants are from the Keth Ness branch of the various noble families that are associated with the Earls. And then there are one or two places that Jane talked about the description of Orphir, where the hall and the church are adjacent to each other, where there seems to a very direct understanding of the geography. So you get moments of place like that, perhaps also West Ness,

where the relationship between Sigurd of West Ness's farm and the narrow strait between Roussa and the island of mainland, which Svane Aslefusson takes his boat into when he's going to kidnap Earl Paul. There are moments where you get a real sense that the geography is real, and then there are other places where you get a sense that there isn't. And in the early part of the saga, it's very noticeable. I noticed that I reread the saga just before Christmas, that before the 12th century, individual farms are very rarely named.

The saga will say things like, and then they went to the farm where the Earl was. But from about 1,100 onwards, you're always told the name of the farm, often where it's near, and you're given quite a lot of genealogical information about the farmer and who he's related to, and suddenly it all comes alive. So that 12th century section is very alive and you feel you could almost reconstruct society. You could use it as the basis of some kind of soap opera, I think, probably. Just to come back to you for a moment, Jane. What evidence is there of peaceful existence in the artefacts?

When you excavate one of those big long houses with the hall space, what you normally find are a lot of animal. bones, cattle, pigs, sheep, deer, otters, whale, seal, with the evidence for the fishing and the farming. Also, lots of bits of steertight bowls. Steretight is a soft stone that the Vikings used instead of pottery. And you find lots of iron bolts and nails and roves from ships because timber is scarce. You use it in the roof. So you get the everyday things from farming and fishing, spindle wells and fishing weights. I just wanted to say the saga itself acknowledges that there was occasionally peace.

It will often say, yes, there was peace for a few years. And it's obviously not interested in telling us about the peaceful times. The other bits make a better story. You get two sentences, don't you? We're coming to the end now, unfortunately. But Judith, what do we gain from reading the saga today? Everything. I think certainly for British readers

it's quite a good way into the saga genre because it's set in Britain and in a landscape that many people are familiar with so you can get used to the style. It is an important part of the history of these islands I mean for 500 years a part of what is today the United Kingdom was not a part of even Scotland

let alone a United Kingdom it was a part of Norway and subsequently Denmark. Orkney is a great tourist destination and as we've said several times already, you can go there and take the saga with you and see all the places in it. And so I think there are many reasons to want to read the saga. Is there a final word from right?

Yes. Well, quite interesting also in the way in which geopolitical situations can change. From being that strategic Nodal Island, it then becomes a quiet, that port of far off the northern coast of Scotland. And then it's briefly during World Wars becomes again a strategically importance. But it's a good example of the way in which things come in and out of focus. Finally? I think also particularly that 12th century section gives you a huge amount of information

about how ordinary people live, the interaction between the farmers and each other as well as the farmers and the earls. It gives you a sense of what an agrarian society with no towns, very little cash, and a sort of consensual forms of government operated. And that was probably how much of Britain operated in this period. But further south, the focus is on high politics only, and we don't see that level of the wealthy farmers who make up the backdrop for the 12th century section of opening Casabia. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Judith Hirsch, Jane Harrison and Alex Wolfe. And to our studio engineer Emma Hath.

Next week, it's Henry Fielding's comic novel from 1749. Tom Jones. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So to start from the beginning here, what did you not say that you would like to have said, starting with you, Alex? Well, I think that one of the things that is to always,

can use it for is the social historical detail, which is often things that you miss if you're focusing on the plot. So, for example, there's one episode, which is actually set in Western Norway, when a servant named Brynjolf is sent from one farm to a neighbouring farm to pick up his mistress and take her home. And we're told when he arrives that she brings out her clothes, and while he's putting the clothes on the pack pony, she goes back into the house to kiss the servants goodbye. And we're also told that while he's putting the clothes on the pack pony, he's put his weapons down. So this gives us this kind of intimate relationship between the women, the mistress and the maid servants who kind of hug and kiss when they say goodbye. But also it tells us

that even on a relatively minor errand from one farm to another neighbouring farm, a servant was carrying weapons. And there are dozens, if not hundreds, of little moments like that in the saga, which if you focus too much on the plot, you can miss, but which tell us a huge amount about society. Judith, you want to coming? Yeah, I have a very similar comment, actually, because you did say in the beginning that the Earls of Orkney ruled over Shetland, and Shetland plays very relatively little part in the saga. But there are some wonderful episodes in Shetland, including Rögenvalder being shipwrecked

there. And that's also, again, where you get a glimpse of serving women. Two serving women go out. It's cold and it's winter to bring water back and one of them falls into the well and the other one comes running back and complaining that she's frozen and everyone else is sitting in front of the fire.

And also in the miracles of St. Magnus because we mustn't forget he was a saint. So there were miracles. Most of the miracles seem to take place in Shetland. And you get an idea of the things that ail people. You can fall off a haystack or you can have leprosy or you can just have a very bad headache and going to the shrine of St. Magnus in Kirkwall will cure you. But the most amazing miracle really is the English guys with the dice. They're playing dice and one of them throws two sixes so the other one thinks that's the end of it. I can't win over

two sixes but he prays to St. Magnus and one of the dice breaks in two so he gets a six and a one as well as the other six so he wins. Anything else? I think just to pick up

on the values running through and think about the Vikings because there's a great character this Féna Slefsson who is mentioned who's talked about

as the last Viking and there's a sort of theme where once the earls settled down had been on their pilgrimages and start being lawgivers then they stop the raiding They've moved on from being Vikings.

And Svana Slefson is the man who has the huge drinking hall where over winter he has 80 men there and at his own expense he feeds them and feasts them. But then when he goes on his final Viking trip and is killed in Ireland, after having a lifestyle where he planted his crops in spring, went off on his spring raid, came back and harvested his crops in summer and goes off on his autumn raid, he finally meets his end.

and his sons, what they do is they divide up his big hall. And that's a kind of symbolic end of the great Viking age. And we've gone into the sort of 12th century Christian Latinate, more sort of feudal society. So there's that sort of running through as well. The two things I'd like to bring up. The first is Lindisfar. It seems a pity we can talk about this without mentioning Lindisfar.

Would anybody like to volunteer a comment or three comments about Lindisfarne? Well, I think we can see that the raid on Lindisfar at the end of the 8th century, I think the beginnings of Scandinavian contact in Orkney are around the same time. And I think you can picture that the raids that brought Vikings to Lindisfarne may well have brought them from Shetland through to Orkney. And that's that first contact where Scandinavians begin to see the point of Orkney, not just as a raiding base, but also as a place to settle, but also that they must have known about Lindisfarne.

If they're getting as far south as Grimsby and it's muddy, it's mud, then Lindisfarne is part of that world. It's not specifically mentioned, but they go off raiding down the East Coast of England. We know that. When you were excavating, did you find anything that might have come from Lindisfarne? No, no.

I don't think we ever did, but we found things that could have come from that sort of milieu. I mean, when you're digging, on a site in Orkney, you find imported pottery and jewelry and things that have come from all over, the Viking diaspora, from all over the places that the Scandinavians are coming to and fro. It's that sense of mobility, you get a real sense of the, from the Orkney-I-Negasaga, I think, of that mobility and of the comings and goings. Yes, on one occasion when Svainazov, in the late 12th century, has to flee Auckland

because he's fallen out yet again with yet another earl. He stops at the Isle of May, which is a monastic island in the mouth of the Firth of Fourth, between Fife and Lothian, from which you can see Liddisfarna. It's intervisible within Liddera. And there are abbots there, and the abbot Baldwin takes Sibir,

and they make up some story about them being storm-belieged merchants. But we're told in the saga that the monks think they might be pirates, so they send a message to the mainland to get help. And when Sven discovers this, he decides he's got to leave pretty quickly. So he takes everything he can from the monastery and sails off anyway. Well, a final, final question. I mean, this is for the podcast. How many of them set off four and got to the Holy Land in those boats?

Do we know? Earl Ronvalde. Well, yeah. Well, a king of Norway had also been there before him. they went down the Atlantic route and into the Mediterranean. It took a long time. How long? I think they were away for two or three years for the whole journey.

And with a number of ships. Yeah, a large number of ships, yeah. You know, they come back overland by horses. They came back overland. So they sail to the homeland, then they go to Constantinople, and then they switch to horses and ride back through Germany. Why is I? Just for a variety, I suppose.

and it's not really explained but it seems to be the way it was called the Rome Road so that would have been a route that was already well established by then and at least two of the earls went on pilgrimage to Rome Earl Thorfe in the Mighty in the 11th century and Alcham Paulson

when he's appeasing God for killing St. Magnus they both go on pilgrimage to Rome and come back well thank you very much and here's the producer who would like tea or coffee tea please tea please I'll have some tea, please.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Well, thank you all very much. There's some very good stuff there. I could do another three hours. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production. Do you know Powys? I did a bit of hiking there a few years ago.

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