Meantime to Norway Orkney and Cat were essential.  For their fertile lands yielded the supplies of grain which Norway required; and when the Norse were driven from the arable lands of the Moray seaboard, Orkney and Cat became still more necessary to them and their folk at home.  Cat the Scots could not then reach, for the Norse held the sea, while on land Pictish Moray, a jealous power, hostile to its southern neighbours, lay in its mountain fastnesses between the territory of the Scots in the south and the land of Cat in the extreme north, and formed a barrier which stretched across Alban from the North Sea to the shores of Assynt on the Skotlands-fiorthr or Minch.

CHAPTER IV.

Thorfinn—­Earl and Jarl.

Malcolm II, with whom Scottish contemporary records may be said to begin, ascended the Scottish throne in 1005, and defeated the Norse at Mortlach in Moray in 1010, and drove them from its fertile seaboard, probably with the help of Sigurd Hlodverson, Jarl of Orkney.  The men of Moray, however, and their Pictish Maormors remained ungrateful, and irreconcilably opposed to Scottish rule; and Moray, then stretching across almost from ocean to ocean,[1] barred the way of the Scots to the north.

What he could not achieve by arms, Malcolm, both before and after his accession, decided to secure by a series of matrimonial alliances.  He had no son; but he had three available daughters,[2] of whom the eldest was Bethoc, and the two others are said to have been called Donada or Doada and Plantula.

1. Bethoc he married to the most powerful Pictish leader of the time, Crinan, Abthane of Dunkeld, the capital of the southern Picts, and they had issue

(a) Duncan, afterwards Duncan I of Scotland, born about 1001;

(b) Maldred of Cumbria, whose eldest son was Gospatrick, and whose second son was Dolfin; but with Maldred we are not concerned;

(c) A daughter, who became the mother of Moddan, whom Duncan I, after his accession in 1034, created Earl of Caithness or Cat, probably about 1040, his father being possibly of the family of Moldan of Duncansby, whose sons Gritgard and Snaekolf, if we may believe the Njal Saga, were slain by Helgi Njal’s son and Kari Solmundarson, Moldan being said to be a kinsman of Malcolm the Scots king.

2.  Malcolm’s second daughter, Donada, he married to Finnleac or Finlay Mac Ruari, Maormor of North Moray, and a chief of the northern Picts, and they had a son, Macbeth, born about 1005, who succeeded Duncan I on his death in 1040 as King of Scotland, but left no issue.[3]

3.  Malcolm’s third daughter, said to have been called Plantula, he gave, about 1007, as his second wife to Sigurd Hlodverson, who, as we have seen, was killed in 1014 at the decisive battle of Clontarf, his wife having died probably before that event; and their only child was a son, born about 1008 and created Earl of Caithness and Sutherland, who became the great Earl and Jarl Thorfinn.