CHAPTER I.

_Introductory._


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[1] 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[2] _Reports and Inventories of the Early Monuments_ of