and politics. Historia Norwegie provides the classic and much cited example (Ekrem and
Boje Mortensen 2003 : 65 – 7 ):
the Pents, only a little taller than pygmies, accomplished miraculous achievements
by building towns, morning and evening, but at midday every ounce of strength
deserted them and they hid for fear in underground chambers... In the days of
Harald Fairhair, king of Norway, certain vikings, descended from the stock of that
sturdiest of men, Ragnvaldr jarl, crossing the Solund Sea with a large fleet, totally
destroyed these people after stripping them of their long-established dwellings and
made the islands subject to themselves.Thus by the late twelfth century the Picts – the pre-Scandinavian cultural, linguistic
and political group of northern Scotland (including at least the north mainland, Orkney
and Shetland, and possibly the Outer Hebrides) – had faded into folklore, having been
replaced by (real or fictional) migrants of Norwegian ancestry. Orkneyinga saga and other
sources provide a slightly different rendition of the story, attributing the colonisation
of the Northern Isles to Harald Fairhair himself, who then gifted them to members of
the dynasty of the earls of Møre (Finnbogi Guðmundsson ed. 1965 : 7 – 8 ). Otherwise,
however, the two traditions are much the same.
These twelfth- and thirteenth-century sources thus provide a destination that an
informed discussion of earlier, Viking Age, developments in Scotland must reach (Owen
2004 : 6 ). By this date a self-consciously Scandinavian elite existed in northern and
western (hereafter Atlantic) Scotland who were recognisable as part of a wider North
Atlantic culture by their peers in Norway and Iceland.
The difficult questions, however, are the degree to which these sources can be extra-
polated back in time and to which they relate to society beyond the elite. The danger of
extrapolation is well recognised within the scholarly literature. Nevertheless, it is com-
mon in discussions of Viking Age Scotland for elements of these high medieval sources
to be accepted as factual – despite heavy qualifications regarding their historicity
(e.g. Hunter 1997 ; Crawford 2004 ; Forte et al. 2005 ). Two assumptions inherent in the
twelfth–thirteenth-century sources are particularly resilient: that an earldom of Orkney
was founded in the years around ad 900 (be it by Harald Fairhair or another) and that it
was then ruled by a single dynasty (albeit not without internecine strife) into the
lifetime of the medieval author in question.
Without corroboration these assumptions are potentially dangerous, leading to the
need to tell history forwards as well as backwards. Fortunately this can be attempted by
combining archaeological evidence (from settlements, graves and hoards) with the very
limited contemporary historical evidence from annalistic sources – preferring the latter’s
laconic precision over the evocative anachronisms of later narrative sources. One can
also make cautious use of skaldic poetry of probable early date incorporated into the
twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts – using it as independent source material in much
the same way as the medieval historiographers themselves.
This optimism must be tempered, however, with the observation that such attempts
have led to widely divergent reconstructions of Viking Age Scotland (see Barrett 2004
and below). To oversimplify for brevity, these can be said to vary largely in the degree
to which they assume continuity or discontinuity from pre-Viking to Viking times and
thus in their interpretations of the nature of culture contact. Specific models will be
–– James H. Barrett––