During the last half of the tenth century there was constant war by the kings of Alban against the Northmen who had seized the coast of Moray, and Malcolm I was killed at Ulern near Kinloss, about the year 954, and his successor Indulf fell in the hour of his victory over the invaders at Cullen in Banff.[24] But on the whole probably the Scots had succeeded for a time in driving out the Norse from the laigh of Moray, which the latter needed for its supplies of grain.

Hlodver or Lewis, (963-980), the only surviving son of Thorfinn Hausa-kliufr, succeeded Ljotr in the jarldom; and by Audna or Edna, daughter of Kiarval, king of the Hy Ivar of Dublin and Limerick, Hlodver had a son, the famous Sigurd the Stout, or Sigurd Hlodverson.  Hlodver was, (as Mr. A.W.  Johnston points out),[25] by blood slightly more Norse than Gaelic.  We know little of him save that he was a mighty chief; and, according to the usual reproach of the Saga, died in his bed and not in battle about 980, and was buried at Hofn, probably Huna, in Caithness, near John o’ Groats, under a howe.[26]

The line of the so-called Norse earls, at the period at which we have arrived, 980 A.D., was represented by Sigurd Hlodverson, the hero of the Raven banner, which, as his Irish mother had predicted, was to bring victory to every host which followed it, but death to every man who bore it in battle.[27] Sigurd claimed Caithness by the rules of Pictish succession, as grandson of Grelaud daughter of Duncan of Duncansby, Maormor of that district.  This claim was disputed by two Celtic chiefs, Hundi (possibly Crinan, Abthane of Dunkeld) and Melsnati, or Maelsnechtan; and in a battle at Dungal’s Noep, near Duncansby, at which Kari Solmundarson is said in the Saga of Burnt Njal[28] to have been present, Sigurd defeated them, but with such loss to his own side that he had to retire to Orkney, leaving Hundi,[29] the survivor of his two enemies, in possession of his lands in Caithness.  Sigurd himself, on his voyage from Orkney, fell into the hands of the Norse king, Olaf Tryggvi’s-son, who was returning from Dublin to Norway, in the bay of Osmundwall or Kirk Hope in Walls; and the king insisted on the jarl being baptized on the spot, under penalty, if he and all the inhabitants of his jarldom did not become and remain Christians, of losing his eldest son Hundi or Hvelpr, whom the Norse king seized and retained as a hostage.  He also sent missionaries to evangelize the jarldom.  Such was the conversion of Orkney and its jarl from the worship of Odin, at or about the end of the first millennium of the Christian era.

On his son’s death in captivity, Sigurd seems to have deserted the Norse for the Scottish side, and to have devoted himself to seeking the favour, by his assistance in completing the conquest of Moray from the Norse, of the Scottish king Malcolm II, whose third daughter he married as his second wife.[30] He was, by race, more than two-thirds Gaelic, and he clearly at first held Caithness in spite of all Scottish attacks, and probably later on agreed to hold it from the Scottish king.