VIKING BATTLE FOR SCOTLAND

How Orkney and Shetland became the centre of the Viking world and their last outpost

- Written by Angus Konstam

In the last years of the 9th century, Norway's King Harald ‘Finehair’ stepped ashore in Orkney and claimed the archipelago for himself.

This wasn't an idle whim. A few years before, he had united central Norway after his victory at the Battle of Hafrsfjord, fought between two fleets of longships, almost within sight of Stavanger. Most of his enemies fled Norway, and many of them established themselves in what we'd now call the Northern Isles of Britain, as well as Scotland's Western Isles. From there they launched Viking raids along Harald's coastline, plundering whatever they could. King Harald, then, wasn't visiting Orkney just to plant his standard. He was out for revenge.

Harald had spent the summer subduing the ‘rebels’ in Sudreyjar - the southern isles. Today, with a very different perspective on geography, we'd called them the Western Isles. The name lay at the heart of the Norse king's view of these islands. To the Norse, what we now call the North Sea was the West Sea. So the archipelagos of Orkney and Shetland, just over 320km away on the opposite side of the sea from Norway, were fittingly known as the western isles. That wasn't just a case of old-fashioned toponyms. It actually lay at the heart of the Norsemen's view of the world around them.