CHAPTER THIRTY

THE NORSE IN SCOTLAND

James H. Barrett

T

he long-term Scandinavian influence on what is now Scotland was considerable.
Scandinavian place names blanket the Northern Isles of Shetland and Orkney and
are part of the onomasticon across the northern and western mainland, the Hebrides
and as far south as the islands of the Firth of Clyde (Nicolaisen 1982 ; Jennings 1996 ;
Gammeltoft 2005 ). A Scandinavian dialect, Norn, continued to be spoken in the
Northern Isles into the eighteenth century (Barnes 1998 ). In the political sphere, much
of western Scotland remained under at least nominal Scandinavian rule until the Treaty
of Perth in 1266 (Cowan 1990 ) and Orkney and Shetland were only transferred to
Scottish authority in 1468 and 1469 respectively (Crawford 1969 ). Genetically, this
long period of interaction has led to a modern population in northern and western
Scotland with Scandinavian ancestry in both the female and male lines (Goodacre et al.
2005 ). In the Northern Isles, the proportion of Scandinavian female ancestry may
approximate that of the modern Icelanders.
Moving back in time, the greatest challenges to the expansion of the Scottish
kingdom in the twelfth century were posed by independent petty kings and warlords
of Norse ancestry such as Harald Maddadarson, earl of Orkney, and Somerled of Argyll
(McDonald 2003 ). Earlier still, it has been argued that Scandinavian raiding and settle-
ment in the ninth century played an important – if ambiguous – role in the emergence
of a united kingdom of Alba (later Scotland) from the harassed remnants of the
kingdoms of Dál Riata (in Argyll), Pictland (in eastern and northern Scotland) and
Strathclyde (in the south-west) (Broun 1994 ; Driscoll 1998 ; Crawford 2000 ; Woolf
2004 ).
The need to understand this Scandinavian impact has been felt by the historically
inclined in both the past and the present. In twelfth- and thirteenth-century Norway
and Iceland, for example, it formed a significant theme in texts such as the Latin Historia
Norwegie (written in Norway in the second half of the twelfth century) and the Old
Norse Orkneyinga saga (written in Iceland c. 1200 and updated in the thirteenth
century) (Finnbogi Guðmundsson ed. 1965 ; Ekrem and Boje Mortensen 2003 ). Their
authors had broadly historical intent, but worked with source material of highly
variable historicity (e.g. Jesch 1996 ). With minor caveats, these texts describe a largely
Scandinavian world in the Northern and Western Isles – in terms of language, culture