Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time | Page 4

present time. But the _Orkneyinga, St.
Magnus_, and _Hakon's Sagas_, when they take up their story, present
us with a graphic and human and consecutive account of much which
would otherwise have remained unknown, and their story, though
tinged here and there with romance through the writers' desire for
dramatic effect, is, so far as the main facts go, singularly faithful and
accurate, when it can be tested by contemporary chronicles.
Until the twelfth or the thirteenth century, save for these Sagas, we
learn hardly anything of Sutherland, or, indeed, of the extreme north of
Scotland from any record written either by anyone living there or by
anyone with local knowledge, and for facts before those given in the
Orkneyinga Saga we have to cast about among historians of the Roman
Empire and amongst early Greek geographers, or later ecclesiastical
writers, to find nothing save a few names of places and some scattered
references to vanished races, tongues and Churches. For information
about the Picts we have at first to rely on the researches of some of our
trustworthy archæologists, and at a later date on the annals, largely
Irish, collected by the late Mr. Skene in his Chronicles of the Picts and
Scots, and in the works of Mr. Ritson, into which it is no part of our
purpose to enter in detail. All the authorities for early Scottish history
have been ably dealt with by Sir Herbert Maxwell in his book on the
Early Chronicles Relating to Scotland, reproducing the Rhind lectures
delivered by him in 1912. At the end of our period reliable references
to charters from the twelfth century onwards will be found in Origines
Parochiales Scotiae, and especially in the second part of the second
volume of that valuable work of monumental research, produced, under
the late Mr. Cosmo Innes, by Mr. James Brichan, and presented to the
Bannatyne Club by the second Duke of Sutherland and the late Sir

David Dundas. There are also the reprints, often with elaborate notes,
of Scottish Charters by Sir Archibald C. Lawrie, The Bannatyne Club,
The Spalding Club, The Viking Society, Mr. Alan O. Anderson, and
others. The first volume of the Orkney and Shetland Records published
by the Viking Society is prefaced by an able introduction of great
interest.
By way of introduction to Norse times, we may attempt to state very
shortly some of the leading events in Caledonia in Roman, Pictish, and
Scottish times from near the end of the first century to the beginning of
the tenth, so far as they bear on the agencies at work there in Norse
times.
The first four of the nine centuries above referred to had seen the
Romans under Agricola[4] in 80 to 84 A.D. attempt, and fail, to
conquer the Caledonians or men of the woods,[5] whose home, as their
name implies, was the great woodland region of the Mounth or
Grampians. Those centuries had also seen the building of the wall of
Hadrian between the Tyne and Solway in the year 120, the campaigns
of Lollius Urbicus in 140 A.D. and the erection between the Firths of
Forth and Clyde of the earthen rampart of Antonine on stone
foundations, which was held by Rome for about fifty years. Seventy
years later, in the year 210, fifty thousand Roman legionaries had
perished in the Caledonian campaigns of the Roman Emperor Severus,
and over a century and a half later, in 368, there had followed the
second conquest of the Roman province of Valentia which comprised
the Lothians and Galloway in the south, by Theodosius. Lastly, the
final retirement of the Romans from Scotland, and indeed from Britain,
took place, on the destruction of the Roman Empire in spite of
Stilicho's noble defence, by Alaric and the Visigoths, in 410.
From the Roman wars and occupation two main results followed. The
various Caledonian tribes inhabiting the land had then probably for the
first time joined forces to fight a common foe, and in fighting him had
become for that purpose temporarily united. Again, possibly as part of
the high Roman policy of Stilicho, St. Ninian had in the beginning of
the fifth century introduced into Galloway and also into the regions

north of the Wall of Antonine the first teachers of Christianity, a
religion which, however, was for some time longer to remain unknown
to the Picts generally in the north. But, as Professor Hume Brown also
tells us in the first of the three entrancing volumes of his History, "In
Scotland, if we may judge from the meagre accounts that have come
down to us, the Roman dominion hardly passed the stage of a military
occupation, held by an intermittent and precarious tenure." What
concerns dwellers in the extreme north is that although the Romans
went into Perthshire