Orkney’s Saga: the Islands between Kingdoms

In July 2023 the Orkney Islands, lying just off the northeast coast of Scotland, made headlines around the world after the local council voted to explore ‘alternative forms of governance’. One option under consideration, it was widely reported, was for Orkney to secede from Scotland and the United Kingdom to become a self-governing territory of Norway. In reality ‘Orxit’ was not an imminent prospect, and the council’s move was something of a political stunt to underline frustration in the islands with the Scottish government’s policies concerning ferry subsidies.

One result of the furore, however, was to remind the rest of Britain about something the people of Orkney have always been acutely aware of. The islands have strong historical links to Scandinavia, and for hundreds of years represented a frontier zone, a fragile northern border of Britain. At the end of the Middle Ages control of Orkney, along with Shetland further to the north, passed from Norway to the kingdom of Scotland. But, through the centuries that followed, the legal and constitutional position of the islands remained unsettled and at times fiercely contested.

Viking earldom

From the early ninth century, seafarers from the western coast of Norway began to settle in Orkney, which developed into a skattland of the Norwegian kingdom – a tributary territory owing ‘skat’ (tax) to the Crown, like Iceland, Greenland and the Faroes. Kings appointed officials to raise taxes and administer law in the islands. In theory, they nominated and controlled local jarls. But in practice, for much of the Middle Ages Orkney was the centre of a powerful and semi-independent hereditary earldom, encompassing Shetland and part of mainland Scotland – an explanation for the otherwise puzzling fact that one of Britain’s most northerly counties is Sutherland, the southern land. The collective description of Orkney and Shetland as ‘the Northern Isles’ also predates the union with Scotland. They were ‘Norðreyjar’ to differentiate them from the ‘Suðreyjar’ – the ‘southern islands’ of the Hebrides, likewise colonised by Vikings and claimed by the Norwegian Crown.

In the early Middle Ages the islands were a hub of a Norwegian maritime empire, extending to the south and west. Royal expeditions stopped to provision and raise troops there on their way to the Isle of Man, the Western Isles, Ireland or (as in 1066) England. The bishopric of Orkney was a pivotal piece of the ecclesiastical province of Trondheim, whose archbishop exercised authority over bishops and cathedrals in the Isle of Man, the Faroes, Iceland and far-flung Greenland. The cathedral in Kirkwall was dedicated to St Magnus, an early 12th-century earl of Orkney killed in a power struggle with his cousin. His reputation for piety ensured he was remembered as a martyr, and the cult of St Magnus spread across the Scandinavian world.

Political developments moved Orkney from a position at the centre of the Norwegian polity to one on its periphery. In 1263 Hakon IV was defeated by the Scots at the Battle of Largs, and three years later his successor Magnus VI signed the Treaty of Perth. The Norwegians gave up claims in Caithness and surrendered to Scotland at least titular control over Man and the Hebrides. In return, Scotland confirmed Norwegian possession of Orkney and Shetland.

The Pentland Firth separating Orkney from Caithness can be a ferocious stretch of water, but in the late Middle Ages it was not a ‘hard’ political border. Scots traded with Orkney, and increasingly settled there. The process accelerated after the original line of jarls died out in the mid-13th century, and the earldom passed into the hands of Scots landowners. The Church, too, was a vector of Scottish influence; from the 14th century, bishops of Orkney were usually Scotsmen, and brought kinsmen and chaplains north. By the early 15th century, Scots was the preferred language of Orkney’s ruling elites and of Kirkwall’s merchant class, though the majority of the population continued to speak ‘Norn’, a variant of Old Norse similar to Icelandic.

It has been claimed that late medieval Orkney’s position was increasingly untenable – especially after the earldom was acquired by the Sinclair family, lairds of Anglo-Norman descent with estates in Midlothian. In 1455 James II invested Earl William Sinclair with the earldom of Caithness, thus making him a vassal both of the king of Scots and the king of Norway. But the demands of dual allegiance don’t seem to have bothered William much, and it may have suited Norwegian monarchs to have earls and bishops among their counsellors with close ties to the Scottish court.

Within Orkney, ‘national’ identity was likely not much of a concern. There was political unrest in the early 15th century, but it was not a matter of ‘ethnic’ tension between Scots and Norse-Orcadians. Rather, settled members of the community, whether of Scots or Scandinavian descent, resented the arbitrary rule of a carpet-bagging administrator appointed by the absentee earl. A 1425 letter of complaint, sent to the queen of Norway in the name of ‘the whole country of Orkney’, is the last surviving document from the islands in the Norse language.

Marriage and mortgage

That petition went to Copenhagen, rather than Oslo. A seismic shift in Scandinavian politics had occurred in 1397 when, with the Union of Kalmar, Norway, Sweden and Denmark came together under the rule of a single monarch. The union’s centre of gravity shifted towards Denmark, particularly after the accession of Christian I in 1448. Political and economic priorities also increasingly turned in the direction of the Baltic and away from the Norwegian skattlands in the west.

In 1468 Christian arranged a dynastic marriage to James III of Scotland for his daughter, Margaret. The Danish king was able to find only a fraction of the 60,000 florins agreed as the dowry, and for the rest pledged to his new son-in-law ‘all and sundry of our islands of the Orkneys’, until ‘whole and full satisfaction and payment is effectually made by us, [or] our heirs and successors, kings of Norway’. Shetland was pledged separately, for a smaller sum, the following year.

The arrangement was explicitly temporary, a mortgaging of royal rights over the islands. James, however, quickly bolstered his position. In 1470 he persuaded Earl William Sinclair to surrender to him his rights to the earldom of Orkney. Two years later, Parliament passed an act declaring the king to have ‘annexed and united the earldom of Orkney and the lordship of Shetland to the crown, not to be given away in time to come to any person or persons except only to one of the king’s sons of lawful bed’. Whether this constituted an assertion of outright ‘sovereignty’, or simply secured the title and extensive estates of the earldom, is debatable. Yet James clearly had no intention of relinquishing his acquisition. In later years the claim started to be put about in Scotland that Christian I had formally renounced his rights to the islands when his grandson, the future James IV, was born in 1472. But no copy of this document survives, if it ever existed.

Christian I mortgaged Orkney and Shetland as king of Norway, rather than Denmark, and claimed to have done so with permission of the Norwegian Council of State, the Riksråd. This seems unlikely to be true, and there was genuine dismay in Norway at the loss of an ancient appendage of the kingdom. In 1482 the Riksråd demanded that the new king, Christian’s son Hans, take steps to recover the islands, and Hans made a formal commitment to do so. A similar promise was included in the customary Valghåndfestning, or charter of promises, issued at their coronations by Christian II in 1513 and Frederik I in 1524.

It no doubt suited Danish kings to flatter the patriotism of their Norwegian subjects just as they were strengthening their own grip on the once-independent kingdom. It was also a way of raising revenue: if Norwegians wanted to redeem the dowry, they would need to pay for it through increased taxation.

Yet Christian I’s successors never ceased to maintain that the islands were rightfully theirs, and they kept a watchful eye on events there. In 1486 Hans heard reports that native islanders were being expelled from Orkney and Shetland to make way for newcomers who would be governed by Scots law and language. He wrote to James III, threatening military intervention, and was assured the rumours were groundless.

Social change was in fact glacially slow during the first years of Scottish rule. A proposal before Parliament in 1504 to make inhabitants of Orkney and Shetland subject to Scots law and ‘none other laws’ was quietly dropped. The islands’ traditional courts and lawcodes continued in force, Norn was still widely spoken and commercial links with Norway remained strong. Orcadians and Shetlanders trading in Bergen enjoyed an advantage over other Scottish merchants: as Norwegian subjects they were not required to pay the foreigners’ tolls.

Connections were spiritual as well as economic. James III wished to draw the islands into the orbit of the Scottish Church, and in 1472 persuaded the pope to elevate the bishopric of St Andrews to an archbishopric and transfer the diocese of Orkney to it. Neither the ecclesiastical nor the political authorities in Norway recognised the new arrangement. In 1501 Hans provocatively appointed an archdeacon for Shetland, and in 1521 a newly consecrated bishop of Skálholt in Iceland, sailing home from Norway, conducted an ecclesiastical visitation in Shetland at the request of the Trondheim cathedral chapter.

The papacy, meanwhile, seemed to have forgotten about the order of 1472. In 1520 Leo X wrote to the bishop of Orkney, ordering him to send to Trondheim monies raised in the islands through sale of indulgences. An investigation launched by the Trondheim authorities into the allegiance of the Orkney bishopric discovered in 1525 in the archives in Rome a copy of the bull transferring Orkney to St Andrews; they were confident it was legally unsound and could be overturned.

The wider political status of the islands also seemed back on the table in the early 16th century. In 1513 the Scots were defeated by the English at the Battle of Flodden. James IV was slain, leaving a minor on the throne. Short of money, the Scots regent, the duke of Albany, sent an envoy to Denmark in 1514, offering to return the pawned territories in exchange for 6,000 well-armed soldiers. Christian II drafted a letter to the people of Orkney, promising that ‘at the very first opportunity, we will redeem you, so that hereafter you will belong, as you should by right, to the crown of Norway’. The Scots cooled on the deal when the immediate crisis passed, but in 1524, with Scotland once more at war with England, Albany again dangled the prospect.

Christian the Redeemer?

Danish claims were pursued with surprisingly renewed vigour in the middle decades of the 16th century. In 1536 Christian III, victorious in a civil war over his deposed cousin Christian II, abolished Norway’s status as an independent kingdom, turning it into a mere province of Denmark. At the same time he disestablished the Catholic Church and declared Lutheranism the new official religion; at a stroke, the Trondheim archbishopric’s hopes of recovering Orkney’s allegiance became irrelevant.

Yet growing Danish authoritarianism meant Orkney and Shetland were now personal possessions of the king, rather than elements of a corporate Norwegian realm. In his coronation oath of 1536 Christian III solemnly swore to redeem the islands and in 1539 raised a special tax in Norway for the purpose. It can scarcely be coincidence that in summer 1540 James V decided to stop in Kirkwall on his way to quell disorders in the Western Isles. This first visit of a Scots monarch to Orkney underlined its place in the realm, even though Scottish writers habitually located the islands ‘beyond Scotland’ throughout this period.

James V’s premature death, in the wake of another defeat by the English in 1542, plunged the country back into crisis and emboldened Christian III to try his hand. One possibility for recovering the islands, mooted by Francis I of France in 1546, was a betrothal between the infant Mary, Queen of Scots and Christian’s son Magnus. In the event, it was Francis’ own son to whom Mary was married, but Danish diplomatic pressure continued during Mary’s time in France. In 1549 Christian levied another Orkney tax and sent ambassadors to Scotland’s regent, the earl of Arran, offering the money and demanding imminent restoration of the islands. Arran disingenuously protested that, due to the war with England, he could not find the relevant documentation relating to the original transfer, and anyway a decision could not be taken while Mary remained a minor; reluctantly, Christian agreed to a postponement.

The adult Mary, Queen of Scots returned to Scotland in 1561. The country was in the throes of Protestant Reformation, posing challenges a defter monarch than Mary would have struggled to overcome. Mary’s suspected involvement in the death of her second husband, Lord Darnley, led to her dethronement in 1567. She did not help her cause by marrying Darnley’s likely murderer, the earl of Bothwell, and making him duke of Orkney. Pursued by his enemies, Bothwell failed to take possession of Orkney and fled to Bergen, where he was arrested and sent to Copenhagen. From his cell, he made a written offer to the Danish king, Frederik II, claiming to have the queen’s authority to restore to him Orkney and Shetland.

It was not the only such enticement Frederik received. After Mary’s deposition, authority in Orkney and Shetland devolved to her half-brother, Lord Robert Stewart, a bastard son of James V. In 1581 the young James VI would make him earl of Orkney, in contradiction of James III’s annexation act. A few years earlier, Lord Robert found himself out of favour, and in 1572 secretly contacted Frederik, offering him ‘supremacy and dominion of the countries of Orkney and Shetland’ in exchange for confirmation of his position there.

Denmark’s last stand

Frederik II was right to be cautious about these reckless promises. There was greater potential in another Dano-Scottish marriage: between his daughter Anne and the now adult James VI. Negotiations in the mid-1580s snagged on the question of Orkney and Shetland. Frederik sent ambassadors bearing the redemption money and brimming with learned arguments about inalienable rights. The Scots again obfuscated and delayed; only the death of Frederik in April 1588, and the accession of the 11-year-old Christian IV, allowed the marriage to go ahead with a recognition that Scotland could, for now, remain in peaceful de facto possession.

James’ accession to the English throne in 1603 was a blow to Danish hopes. Foreign ambassadors noted how Christian IV was reluctant to press the claim too strongly, for fear of losing England’s friendship. In treaties of 1621 and 1639 he promised not to raise the question of Orkney and Shetland again in his lifetime. But Britain’s ‘troubles’ in the mid-17th century changed things. In 1640, facing rebellious Scots and a recalcitrant parliament, Charles I offered to re-pawn the islands to Denmark for 50,000 guilders. Christian considered this too much and proposed instead to put pressure on the Covenanters, the zealous Protestants in control of the government of Scotland, by seizing control of Orkney. The offer came too late to prevent Charles from losing the Second Bishops’ War. But in 1643, at war with both Scots Covenanters and English parliamentarians, he authorised an envoy to offer Orkney and Shetland as security on payment for munitions. This time Christian IV’s entanglement with Sweden prevented him from taking up Charles’ offer.

After Charles I’s execution, the exiled Charles II offered to mortgage Orkney and Shetland to the Dutch in return for financial and military assistance. In 1653 the States General wisely declined the proposal, which would have antagonised the Danes. Denmark itself made one last significant effort to recover the islands. In 1667 Frederik III found himself on the winning side, along with Louis XIV, after the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The French and Dutch, however, and the Swedes brokering the peace negotiations, had no particular incentive to support Frederik III’s claims. Orkney and Shetland went unmentioned in the final treaty – though Danish envoys put on record that their claim would remain ‘until a better opportunity presents itself’.

It was never formally rescinded. As late as 1749 Frederik V raised the issue, albeit informally, with regard to fishing rights. By then, the Norn language was on the verge of extinction in Orkney (it lasted a little longer in Shetland), and the islands were more recognisably ‘Scottish’ than they had been two centuries earlier. It is hard to imagine islanders would have now welcomed a ‘homecoming’ to Danish-Norwegian rule. Yet awareness of their distinctive past remained strong – it played an important part, for example, in mid-18th-century debates about payments due from Orcadian lairds to the noblemen leasing earldom estates from the Crown. The complainants argued, on the basis of the continuing validity of Norwegian law, weights and measures, that they were being unreasonably charged.

Orcadians

Was there ever any realistic prospect of Orkney and Shetland being returned to Danish-Norwegian rule? Commentators have usually suggested not, though the recurrent willingness of Scottish nobles and British monarchs to entertain the possibility should supply pause for thought. Europe’s 19th-century pre-eminent breaker of boundaries was aware of the controversy: in a speech to troops of the invasion force gathered around Boulogne in 1804, Napoleon made supportive reference to Denmark’s claim. It is not inconceivable that, if the armée d’Angleterre had sailed and triumphed, Napoleon might have rewarded his Danish allies by returning the lost islands.

The people of Orkney were rarely if ever consulted in this game of zero-sum dominion. Modern Orcadians are generally proud to be Scottish but seem – on the evidence of a decisive ‘no’ vote in the 2014 independence referendum – happy enough to remain British. In 2016 they voted heavily to stay citizens of the European Union. And every year, on 17 May, the citizens of Kirkwall celebrate with a procession and the waving of a variety of flags, Norwegian Constitution Day – marking the moment in 1814 when Norway threw off Danish rule. It is a reminder that, in what can seem like an age of exclusive nationalisms, identity doesn’t have to be just one thing.

Peter Marshall is Professor of History at the University of Warwick and author of Storm’s Edge: Life, Death and Magic in the Islands of Orkney (William Collins, 2024).