n its history, as have survived, so as
to form a connected account, from the Scottish point of view, of the
Norse occupation of most of the more fertile parts of Sutherland and
Caithness from its beginning about 870 until its close, when these
counties were freed from Norse influence, and Man and the Hebrides
were incorporated in the kingdom of Scotland by treaty with Norway in
1266.

References to the authorities mentioned above and to later works
bearing on the subject have been inserted in the hope that others,
more leisured and more competent, may supplement them by further
research, and convert those portions of the narrative which are at
present largely conjectural from story into history.

What manner of men the prehistoric races which in early ages
successively inhabited the northern end of the Scottish mainland may
have been, we can now hardly imagine. Dr. Joseph Anderson's classical
volumes[1] on _Scotland in Pagan Times_ tell us something, indeed
all that can now be known, of some of them, and in the Royal
Commission's[2] _Reports and Inventories of the Early Monuments_ of
Sutherland and of Caithness respectively, Mr. Curle has classified
their visible remains, and may, let us hope, with the aid of
legislation, save those relics from the roadmaker or dykebuilder.
Lastly, such superstitions, or survivals of beliefs, as remain in the
north of Scotland from early days have been collected, arranged, and
explained by the late Mr. George Henderson in an able book on that
subject.[3] Enquiries such as these, however, belong to the provinces
of archaeology and folk-psychology, and not to that of history, still
less to that of contemporary history, which began in the north,
as elsewhere, with oral tradition, handed down at first by men of
recording memories, and then committed to writing, and afterwards
to print; and both in Norway and Iceland on the one hand, and in
the Highlands on the other such men were by no means rare, and were
deservedly held in the highest honour.

Writing arrived in Sutherland and Caithness very late, and was not
even then a common indigenous product. Clerks, or scholars who could
read and write, were at first very few, and in the north of Scotland
hardly any such were known before the twelfth century of our era,
save perhaps in the Pictish and Columban settlements of hermits and
missionaries. Of their writings, if they ever existed, little or
nothing of historical value is extant at the