But St. Barr of Dornoch, in all probability, belongs to the sixth century,[34] not to the tenth, and was a Pict or Irishman, not a Norseman.  He was never Bishop of Caithness, so far as records tell.  His Fair, like those of other Pictish Saints elsewhere in Cat, is still celebrated, and is held at Dornoch.

The battle of Clontarf, fought on Good Friday, the 23rd of April 1014, outside Dublin, between the young heathen king of Dublin, Sigtrigg Silkbeard, and the aged Christian king, Brian Borumha, was, notwithstanding Norse representations to the contrary, a decisive victory for the Irish over the Norse, and for Christianity against Odinism.  Sigurd, Jarl of Orkney, though nominally a Christian, fought on the heathen side, and fell bearing his Raven banner, and the old king, Brian, was killed in the hour of his people’s victory.

Sigurd’s death is the subject of a strange legend, and the occasion of a weird poem, The Darratha-Liod[35] said to have been sung in Caithness for the first time on the day of Sigurd’s death.

The legend is given in the Niala[36] as follows:—­“On Friday it happened in Caithness that a man called Dorruthr went out of his house and saw that twelve men together rode to a certain bower, where they all disappeared.  He went to the bower, and looked in through a window, and saw that within there were women, who had set up a web.  They sang the poem, calling on the listener, Dorruthr, to learn the song, and to tell it to others.  When the song was over, they tore down the web, each one retaining what she held in her hand of it.  And now Dorruthr went away from the window and returned home, while they mounted their horses, riding six to the north and six to the south.  A similar vision appeared to Brand, the son of Gneisti, in the Faroes.  At Swinefell in Iceland blood fell on the cope of a priest on Good Friday, so that he had to take it off.  At Thvatta a priest saw on Good Friday deep sea before the altar and many terrible wonders therein, and for long he was unable to sing the Hours."[37]

This strange legend of early telepathy may be explained by the fact that Thorstein, son of the Icelander Hall o’ Side, fought for Sigurd at Clontarf, and afterwards returned to Iceland and told the story of the battle, which the Saga preserved; and the English poet, Thomas Gray, used it as the theme of his well-known poem intituled The Fatal Sisters.  The old Norse ballad referred to Sigurd’s death at Clontarf in 1014.  It is known as Darratha-Liod or The Javelin-Song, and is translated by the late Eirikr Magnusson and printed in the Miscellany of the Viking Society with the Old Norse original[38] and the translator’s scholarly notes and explanations.  It is said that it was often sung in Old Norse in North Ronaldsay until the middle of the eighteenth century.

As translated it is as follows:—­

  DARRATHA-LIOD.