Norse settled. About the year 890,[8] after challenging Malbrigde
of the Buck-tooth to a fight with forty a side, to which he himself
perfidiously brought eighty men, Sigurd outflanked and defeated his
adversary, and cut off his head and suspended it from his saddle; but
the buck-tooth, by chafing his leg as he rode away from the field,
caused inflammation and death, and Jarl Sigurd's body was laid in howe
on Oykel's Bank at Sigurthar-haugr, or Sigurds-haugr, the Siwards-hoch
of early charters now on modern maps corruptly written Sidera or
Cyderhall, near Dornoch, which, when translated, is Sigurd's Howe.[9]
"Thenceforward," as Professor Hume Brown tells us, "the mainland
was never secure from the attacks of successive jarls, who for long
periods held firm possession of what is now Caithness and Sutherland.
As things now went, this was in truth in the interest of the kings of
Scots themselves. To the north of the Grampians they exercised little
or no authority; and the people of that district were as often their
enemies as their friends. Through the action of the Orkney jarls,
therefore, the Scottish kings were at comparative liberty to extend
their territory towards the south; and the day came when they found
themselves able to crush every hostile element even in the north.[10]

It is this process of consolidation in the north which it is proposed
to describe so far as Sutherland and Caithness are concerned, using
both Norse and Scottish records, and piecing them together as best
we can, and, be it confessed, in many cases filling up great gaps by
necessary guess-work when records fail.

In the reign of the great king Constantine III, between the years 900
and 942, the Danes again gave trouble. In 903 the Irish Danes ravaged
Alban,[11] as Scotland north of the Forth was then called, for a
whole year; in 918 Constantine and his ally, Eldred of Lothian, were