Inverallochy, Week 6: 5 February

Caithness used to be part of the Viking earldom of Orkney, and I’ve been wading up to my knees in its cheerfully blood-soaked history. Well, I say history—actual records are in short supply, so for most of the time you have to take the sagas on trust; which is a bit like writing the history of postwar Europe using only back copies of the Daily Mail.

The first rule of being a successful Viking was, of course, to cheat. The sagas are full of gentlemen’s agreements between rival lords, promising to settle their differences by meeting at a certain place with a set number of followers—only for one of them to turn up with a small army and slaughter the other. The standard clause was for a certain number of horses and their riders, but obviously some Vikings had better lawyers than others and turned up with several men per horse, breaking the spirit, if not the letter, of the pact. (This happens so often I imagine the average Viking horde arriving in something like the human pyramid favoured by motorcycle display teams, or the sheep in Aardman Animation’s A Close Shave. On the plus side, even if you ended up slain you’d go out in style.)

View from the Castle, Inverness

My favourite candidate for most ironic Viking death is that of Sigurd the Mighty. In 892 he was campaigning in Sutherland, and having defeated a Celtic chieftain he then, as was his custom, attached the severed head of his fallen enemy to his saddle. The dead man had a protruding tooth which cut Sigurd’s thigh—the wound became infected, and, there not being a doctor on hand to prescribe him a course of antibiotics, Sigurd died of it. (I like to think he was serenaded to his grave by Nelson Muntz from The Simpsons going, “Ha, ha!”)

Waves at John o’Groats

Not much to report on the gansey front this week. I am almost to the end of the gussets (slightly longer given the size of the garment), and the pattern is becoming clearer. At some point in the coming week I shall divide for front and back, after which progress should be more noticeable.

Finally, a curiosity for fans of Treebeard the Ent, one of those shepherds of trees from The Lord of the Rings. There once was a Viking earl of Orkney called Einar (nicknamed “Turf” for some obscure reason). The sagas say that he began his rule by defeating a couple of Danish Vikings who’d taken up residence in Orkney—one of whom was named Thorir “Treebeard”. Isn’t that great? The saga includes the line, “Turf-Einar gave Tree-Beard to the trolls“, a poetical way of saying he killed him. Tolkien of course knew the sagas inside out, and, as he often did, must have taken the name and reforged it in the crucible of his own imagination. (Mind you, the other Viking was called Kalf Scurvy—can’t imagine why Tolkien didn’t borrow that one too…)