coast, and, we are told, seized "Caithness and Sutherland and Moray
and more than half Scotland,"[4] being killed, however, by treachery
within the year. His mother Aud thereupon built a ship in Caithness,
and sailed for the Faroes and Iceland with her retinue and
possessions, marrying off two grand-daughters on the way, one, called
Groa, to Duncan, Maormor of Duncansby in Caithness, the most ancient
Pictish chief of whom we hear in that district, and probably ancestor
of the Moldan, or Moddan, line in Cat. Two years later, in 877, King
Constantine was defeated by a force of Danes at Dollar, and slain by
them at Forgan in Fife.[5]

After the great decisive battle of Hafrsfjord in Norway in 872,
because Orkney and Shetland and the Hebrides had become refuges for
the Norse Vikings, who had been expelled from their country or had
left it on the introduction of feudalism with its payment of dues
to the king, but were raiding its shores, Harald Harfagr,[6] king of
Norway, along with Jarl Ragnvald of Maeri attacked and extirpated the
pirate Vikings in their island lairs; and, as compensation to the
jarl for the loss of his son Ivar in battle, Harald transferred his
conquests with the title of Jarl of Orkney and Shetland to Ragnvald,
who, in his turn, with the king's consent, soon made over his new
territories and title to his brother Sigurd.

This new jarl, the second founder of the line of Orkney jarls,
conquered Caithness and Sutherland as far south as Ekkjals-bakki,[7]
which is believed by some to be in Moray, and by others, with more
truth, to be the ranges of hills in Sutherland and Ross lying to the
north and to the south of the River Oykel and its estuary, the Dornoch
Firth; and the second part of the name still happens to survive in the
place-name of Backies in Dunrobin Glen and elsewhere in Cat where the