The Viking Age in Scotland opens in the Irish annals with one line about devastated islands, and it closes in a church in Perth with an agreement worth 4,000 marks. In between lie burning monasteries, a people who fell out of the record, a new kingdom, and islands whose farms still carry Norse names today. This overview walks through those stages and keeps apart what the annals report, what the ground shows and what later writers made of it. That changes some familiar pictures: the Picts were not simply wiped out, Iona was not abandoned, and Largs was no full stop.
Around 800 there was no Scotland for Vikings to attack. The Picts held the east and north, and their realm of Fortriu is now usually placed around the Moray Firth rather than in Perthshire, as was long assumed. In the west, in what is now Argyll, lay Gaelic-speaking Dál Riata, closely tied to Ireland. Britons held the Clyde from their rock of Ail Cluaithe, modern Dumbarton, and Anglo-Saxon Northumbria dominated the south-east.
Scandinavians met this world in two very different ways. They settled the Northern Isles and the Hebrides and shaped them for centuries. In the heartland east of the mountains they appear mainly as an army that came, plundered, took hostages and left. Anyone talking about "the Vikings in Scotland" therefore means at least two stories, one of settlers and one of campaigns. Our article on the Vikings in Ireland, Scotland and the islands covers the whole western route; this one looks at what came of it in northern Britain.
The sources are unevenly spread. For the ninth century the key reports come from Irish annals, year-by-year records kept in monasteries that saw Scotland only from the edge. Alongside them stands the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba, a terse king list with notes on events. The grand tales of earls and sea-kings sit in Icelandic sagas written down centuries later.
Under the year 794 the Annals of Ulster record the devastation of all the islands of Britain by heathens. In 795 things become concrete: the Annals of Inisfallen report the plundering of Iona, the small island off Mull where Columba, in Gaelic Colum Cille, founded his monastery in the sixth century. Monks had once gone from here to Lindisfarne. Iona headed a whole federation of monasteries in Ireland and Britain, and its treasures were portable: reliquaries and book covers.
"Iona of Columba was burned by the heathens." (802) – "The community of Iona was killed by the heathens, that is, 68." (806)Annals of Ulster, AU 802.9 and 806.8; Latin "I Columbe Cille a gentibus combusta est" and "Familia Iae occisa est a gentilibus, id est .lxuiii."; my own translation from the wording in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies collection
The next report is the best known. In 825 Blathmac son of Flann died on the island. The annals call it, briefly, his martyrdom at the hands of heathens. A poem by Walahfrid Strabo, a monk of Reichenau, tells more: Blathmac would not reveal where Columba's shrine was hidden and was killed for it. Andrew Jennings, who has studied the record on Iona and the Vikings, relies on that poem for this detail. It is martyr poetry from Lake Constance, close in time but no eyewitness account.
Even so, Iona was not given up. From 807 Kells rose in Ireland, possibly as a refuge. In 849 the Ulster annal says Abbot Indrechtach came to Ireland with the relics of Columba, and the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba says Kenneth son of Alpin moved relics to a church he had built at about the same time. Jennings reads the two as a division of the relics between Dunkeld and Kells. The annals go on to list abbots of Iona, and in 986 the blow fell again: Danes plundered the monastery on Christmas night and killed the abbot and fifteen elders. When Magnus Barelegs sailed through the Hebrides in 1098, his saga says he spared the island.
The gap in the ground is striking. The Scottish research framework ScARF notes that the sackings of Iona stand in texts but have left little archaeological trace.
The most consequential report of the ninth century is a single annal entry. For 839 the Annals of Ulster say the heathens won a battle against the men of Fortriu. Those who fell included Eóganán and Bran, sons of Óengus, and Áed son of Boanta, with many others. Eóganán, Uuen in Pictish form, was king of the Picts, Áed king of Dál Riata. The annal gives no location and no hint of how it went.
ScARF, citing Alex Woolf, calls the defeat a catastrophe that seems to have destroyed the leading families of both realms. That a king of Dál Riata died beside the men of Fortriu suggests he owed the Pictish king allegiance. That is not certain, only an inference from one sentence. What is firm is that the king lists diverge for the years that follow, which fits a time when nobody ruled unchallenged.
From this vacuum comes Cináed mac Ailpín, better known as Kenneth MacAlpin. He was long regarded as the man who subdued the Picts in the mid-ninth century and founded Scotland. The annal entries I read for this overview mention no such conquest. The Chronicle of the Kings of Alba, whose last entries reach only the time of Kenneth II (971–995), does state outright that Kenneth destroyed the Picts, and in the twelfth century Henry of Huntingdon writes of that people's utter disappearance. Both are well removed from the events. How Kenneth came to power cannot be clearly established.
From the 860s the attackers often come from one particular direction: Ireland. In 866, according to the Annals of Ulster, Amlaíb and Auisle led the foreigners of Ireland and Scotland into Fortriu, plundered all the Pictish country and took hostages. The Chronicle of the Kings of Alba knows of an Amlaíb who wasted Pictland and stayed there from 1 January to 17 March. That is no summer raid any more but an army wintering in the country.
In 870 Amlaíb and Ímar besieged the rock of Ail Cluaithe, chief stronghold of the Clyde Britons, and after four months destroyed and plundered it. The following year, again in the Ulster annals, they returned from Alba to Dublin with two hundred ships and a great crowd of captives: Angles, Britons and Picts. Sentences like this show what these campaigns also were in economic terms, namely man-hunting for the slave market, which our article on Viking slavery covers.
In 875 the Annals of Ulster report a great slaughter of the Picts by the "dark foreigners"; the Chronicle names a defeat at Dollar and a pursuit as far as Atholl, and ScARF, following Woolf, gives Halfdan as the enemy. The annals record the death of King Causantín, Kenneth's son, only under 876 and without details; later king lists have him fall fighting Norwegians. In 878 Columba's shrine and other relics reached Ireland in flight from the foreigners. In 900 King Domnall died. The Annals of Ulster say only that he died, while the Chronicle has him killed by heathens at Dunnottar and a later king list has him die at Forres. The sources disagree here, and the matter cannot be settled. In 903 Northmen plundered Dunkeld again. A year later the tide turned: Ímar, a grandson of the elder Ímar, fell in 904 fighting the men of Fortriu, and many of his people with him.
Around 900 the word "Picts" drops out of reports about the kings on the Tay, and Alba takes its place. For Domnall's death the Annals of Ulster read Domnall m. Caustantin, ri Alban, moritur, "Domnall son of Causantín, king of Alba, dies"; the English CELT translation renders it "king of Scotland". Causantín mac Áeda, who reigned for about forty years from 900, met Bishop Cellach in 906, according to the Chronicle, on the Hill of Belief near Scone.
Why this change? ScARF describes the Scandinavian threat as a spur to reorganising kingship, with Forteviot and later Scone at its centre. By the end of the millennium the kings sat on the Tay, around Dunkeld, Forteviot, Scone and St Andrews, far from the Moray Firth. That Kenneth is already said to have brought relics of Columba into this region fits the picture; ScARF calls the translation a possible response to the attacks on Iona, though this cannot be proved.
The order of causes remains disputed. ScARF speaks cautiously of a Gaelic expansion whose nature is unclear. The word Alba itself is old: the Annals of Ulster use it as early as 798, reporting raids "between Ireland and Alba". What was new around 900 was not the name but a kingship claiming it. Yet in 904 the annalist was still writing of the men of Fortriu. The Picts did not dissolve overnight; at some point their descendants spoke Gaelic and stopped calling themselves Picts.
On Orkney and Shetland history ran differently. Visitors became a settled population, Norn became the language, and in time the earldom arose whose lords appear in our article on the Orkney earls. The saga has a Norwegian king give it away. That is a later founding story with no contemporary support. Much the same goes for Thorstein the Red, said in Icelandic tradition to have conquered half of northern Scotland; see Thorstein the Red.
What, though, became of the Picts on the islands? Archaeology gives two opposing answers, both from excavations. Iain Crawford read the transition at Udal on North Uist as violent. Anna Ritchie found signs of more peaceful coexistence at Buckquoy on Orkney. ScARF considers it likely that different things happened in different places at different times.
Violence does have concrete evidence on the mainland, though. At Portmahomack in Easter Ross, ScARF links the destruction of stone crosses to the violent arrival of Vikings. Yet work continued there in the ninth century, with a broken Pictish slab reused as a drain cover.
The Norse called the Hebrides and the islands down to Man Suðreyjar, the "Southern Isles", a name that only makes sense from Orkney and Norway. For the period up to about 1000 the reports are sparse. The sagas have Ketill Flatnose rule here, father of Aud; whether he is the Caittil of the Irish annals remains open. In the mid-ninth century the annals introduce the Gall-Goídil, mixed war bands which show that Norse and Gaelic worlds interlocked early.
The picture sharpens in the late eleventh century with the Kingdom of the Isles, which joined the Hebrides to the Isle of Man. In 1098 King Edgar of Scotland signed the western islands over to the Norwegian king Magnus Barelegs. In the 1150s Somerled, a ruler of mixed descent, took part of this realm from his brother-in-law Godred; he fell in 1164, and his sons inherited. From then on two lines of island lords acknowledged Norway as overlord, often only in name.
The excavation at Bornais on South Uist shows how they lived. Niall Sharples of Cardiff University led it for a decade and interpreted the occupants as a high-ranking family within the Kingdom of Man and the Isles. Material came from as far as Norway and Greece, much of it also from Ireland, England and Shetland. The islands' most famous find fits this: the chess pieces discovered on Lewis in 1831, probably made in Norway in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century.
For the Hebrides, place-names are the most widespread source of all, and they sound startlingly Norwegian once you look behind the Gaelic spelling. Richard Cox traces a whole series of Lewis names to Old Norse bólstaðr, "farm": Siabost from Sæ-bólstað, "loch farm", Làbost from Lág-bólstað, "low farm", Tàbost from Há-bólstað, "high farm", Garrabost from Garðabólstað, "farm of the enclosures". In the Northern Isles, Kirkwall and Scalloway hold vágr, a bay, and Tingwall on Orkney, Old Norse Þingvöllr, holds þing, the assembly. That it met there on the mound of an old broch is only a supposition.
Often quoted are ratios of Norse to Gaelic names from older surveys, compiled by Alan Macniven: about 4:1 on Lewis, 3:2 on North Uist and Skye, 1:2 on Islay, 1:4 in Kintyre, 1:8 on Arran. The figures go back to MacBain and Scott in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and they count later recorded names, not those of the Viking Age. Earlier scholars read a contrast into them: extermination in the north, mixing in the south.
Andrew Jennings and Arne Kruse put it especially sharply. In the Outer and most of the Inner Hebrides, they argue, hardly any pre-Norse names survive, which indicates a clean break. North of Ardnamurchan the Norse met Picts, south of it Gaels, and the Gaelic mainland kept its names. With Richard Cox they expect many of today's Gaelic names to have arisen in Norse times or afterwards. Peder Gammeltoft, as Jennings and Kruse present him, sees bólstaðr as a word for secondary farms, productive from the late ninth century. On that view bólstaðr names would not mark the very first settlements. The model is well argued but remains a model: whether the earlier population was driven out, enslaved or absorbed by language shift, names do not say.
"Papa" names on Orkney, such as Papa Westray, remind us that the Norse knew they had predecessors: they named places after the Celtic clergy already living there.
Two boat burials show how varied the legacy in the ground is. The first came to light in 1985 on Sanday in Orkney, when a storm cut into a bank and the farmer John Deerness noticed bones and a small piece of lead. It sat in a kitchen drawer for years until the archaeologist Julie Gibson recognised it as a Norse weight. A rescue excavation under Magnar Dalland followed in 1991, and a storm a few days later destroyed what remained. Our article on boat burial sets out the rite as a whole.
The boat held a woman in her seventies, a man in his thirties and a child of about ten, apparently buried together. With the man lay a sword, a quiver of eight arrows and gaming pieces, probably for hnefatafl; with the woman a weaving sword, shears, a sickle and spindle whorls. There was also the whalebone plaque with dragon heads, now in the Orkney Museum, which some connect with Freyja; that cannot be proved. How the three died is unknown.
Even reputable figures differ. The Orkney Museum gives the boat about 6.5 metres, the Canmore heritage portal about 7.1 metres. The excavators preferred a date of 875 to 950 on grounds of art style and Norwegian parallels, but radiocarbon dates came out up to 130 years later; old heirlooms would be one possible explanation. Before the excavation the sea had already taken about half of the boat and its contents.
In 2011 the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project found a grave at Swordle Bay where it had expected a clearance cairn. Ardnamurchan is the westernmost peninsula of the British mainland and so lies right on the line that Jennings and Kruse draw between their two zones. The authors of the 2017 paper in Antiquity, Oliver Harris and colleagues, describe it as the first archaeological excavation of an intact Viking boat burial on the UK mainland.
The boat was about 5.1 metres long, a small rowing boat of which 213 rivets remained. With it came a sword, axe, spearhead, shield boss, a long-handled iron ladle holding a hammer and tongs, a ringed pin and a drinking-horn rim of copper alloy, a sickle and a whetstone, probably of southern Norwegian schist. The sword provides the main dating: no earlier than the late ninth or early tenth century, most probably, the authors say, the early tenth. The stones of the fill may have come from the nearby Cladh Aindreis, a Neolithic chambered cairn with burials from around 3700 BC.
Of the dead person, two molars survive. They show how little even modern analysis can say: the isotope values, according to the authors, fit eastern Ireland, north-east Scotland, Norway or Sweden. A Scandinavian origin is plausible but not proven. Even the sex is inferred from the grave goods, not from bone.
The story ends in two steps, told in full in our article on Largs 1263. Scottish kings had wanted the islands since Alexander II, who died on Kerrera in 1249. In 1263 Håkon Håkonarson came with a fleet, an autumn storm drove ships ashore at Largs, and on 2 October a fight broke out during the salvage with no clear winner. Håkon withdrew to Orkney and died there in December. Later Scottish chroniclers turned it into a great victory, and the Norwegian saga tells it differently.
The matter was decided at the negotiating table. On 2 July 1266, in the Dominican church at Perth, envoys of Magnus VI concluded an agreement with Alexander III: Norway gave up Man and the Hebrides, while Orkney and Shetland expressly stayed Norwegian. In return Scotland paid 4,000 marks sterling over four years and 100 marks a year, due at the church of St Magnus on Orkney. The islands were henceforth to follow Scottish law, though the bishopric of Man remained under Nidaros.
Some two centuries later, in 1468/69, Orkney and Shetland passed to Scotland in pledge, and Norn went on being spoken there for a long time. "The end of the Vikings in Scotland" is therefore a label. In the Hebrides the families, the names and much else stayed; only the overlordship changed.
When did the Viking Age begin in Scotland? The first firm report is the annal of 794 on devastated islands of Britain, with Iona named in 795. When the first Scandinavians settled permanently cannot be dated exactly.
Where in Scotland did the Vikings settle? Mainly on Orkney and Shetland, the Hebrides and the far north of the mainland. In the heartland around the Tay and Forth, campaigns are much better attested than settlements.
Did the Vikings create Alba? Not directly. Their attacks weakened the old elites and, according to ScARF, drove the reorganisation of kingship. How Picts and Gaels merged in the process remains open.
What is special about Scar and Ardnamurchan? Scar shows an old woman, a man and a child in one boat; Ardnamurchan is the first intact boat burial excavated on the British mainland. Both are rare, well-documented finds for Scotland.
Why did Norwegian rule end in 1266? After Håkon's death his son Magnus sought a settlement and gave up the claims to Man and the Hebrides for money. Only the Northern Isles stayed with Norway, until 1468/69.
The Earls of Orkney · Largs 1263 · Jarlshof and the Shetlanders · The Vikings in Ireland, Scotland & the Isles.
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