Norway and
Denmark in succession until the reign of Charles II and even later;
and possibly this right remains, to the legal mind, open until the
present day.

On the 20th February 1471 the Earldom of Orkney and Lordship of
Shetland were, by an Act of the Scottish Parliament, finally annexed
to the Scottish Crown. But Norse law and usages and the Norse language
long lived on in Orkney and longer still in Shetland.

CHAPTER XI.

_Results and Conclusion._

Restless energy, and a religion that taught its followers that death
in combat alone conferred on the happy warrior a title to immortal
glory and a perpetual right to the unbroken joy of battle daily
renewed in Valhalla drove the Viking to war.

Headed off on the south by the vast army and feudal system of
Charlemagne, this energy in war could be exercised, and its religious
aims achieved, solely on the sea, which skill in shipbuilding and in
navigation as well had converted from a barrier into a highway to the
west.

As already stated, over-population in the sterile lands of Norway,
and famine probably increased by immigration from the east and south,
drove its people "at times in piracy and at times in commerce"[1]
forth from the western fjords and The Vik across the North Sea to
the opposite coasts of Scotland, and so to its western lochs and to
Ireland, where they found cattle to slaughter on the nesses, stores of
grain, and other booty.

War, in fact, paid; and, after generations of harrying, many of the
raiders concluded that the western lands in Britain were fairer and
more fertile than their native shores, and desired to settle in the
west.

Finally the feudalism of Charlemagne was imitated by Harald Harfagr in
Norway; and, against that, Norse independence revolted and rebelled.
The true Viking would be no other man's man, and to secure Harald's
feudal power he was driven forth from Norway by an organised navy
manned by those of his countrymen who had agreed to accept King Harald
as feudal overlord and to pay him tribute. Defeated, as we have seen,
at the naval battle of Hafrsfjord in 872, the rebel remnant of the
Vikings found their return to Norway barred; and those of them who
became pirates in Orkney and Shetland and raided Norway as such,
were, in their turn, assailed in these islands by King Harald, and
destroyed. Others of them colonised Ireland, the Hebrides, and the
Faroes; and from all these islands as well as from Scotland and Nor