of the Scottish kings, and their children were two sons, Henry, who
afterwards claimed Ross, and of whom we hear no more, and Hakon, Sweyn
Asleifarson's foster-child, and two daughters, Helena and Margret, of
whom we hear nothing save their names. Hakon, from boyhood, went with
Sweyn on all his spring and autumn "vikings" or piratical cruises,
undertaken every year to the Hebrides, Man, and Ireland, in one of
which Sweyn took two English ships near Dublin, and returned to Orkney
laden with broadcloth, wine, and English mead.[3] Sweyn's life is
thus described in c. 114 of the _Orkneyinga Saga_. "He sat through the
winter at home in Gairsay, and there he kept always about him eighty
men at his beck. He had so great a drinking-hall that there was not
another as great in all the Orkneys. Sweyn had in the spring hard
work, and made them lay down very much seed, and looked much after it
himself. But when that toil was ended, he fared away every spring on a
Viking-voyage, and harried about among the southern isles and Ireland,
and came home after midsummer. That he called spring-viking. Then he
was at home until the cornfields were reaped down, and the grain seen
to and stored. Then he fared away on a viking-voyage, and then he did
not come home till the winter was one month spent, and that he called
his autumn-viking." At last, in a cruise to Dublin, which he captured,
Sweyn was killed by stratagem on landing to receive payment of its
ransom from the town, and the boy Hakon probably fell there with him
in 1171. "And," the Saga adds, "it is the common saying of Sweyn that
he was the most masterful man in the western lands, both of yore and
now-a-days, among those men who had no higher rank than himself."
Sweyn was, in fact the greatest man of his time. For he robbed whom
he pleased, made and undid jarls and earls as he chose, and was the
friend or tool of more than one Scottish king.

Earl Harold had put his wife Afreka away, and probably after Sweyn's
death formed a union, at a date which it seems impossible to fix, with
Hvarflod or Gormflaith, daughter of Malcolm MacHeth of Moray, who
was in rebellion in 1134, and was imprisoned in Roxburgh Castle
until 1157, when he was released and created Earl of Ross, so that
Gormflaith, who could hardly have been born during her father's
imprisonment, must have been born either before 1135 or after 1157.
Harold and Gormflaith's children were Thorfinn, who predeceased
him, and also David