find that Hakon had prepared a force to dispute his rights.  Hakon agreed, however, to give up his claims to Magnus’ half share if Magnus should obtain a grant of it from the Norwegian king.[12] King Eystein about 1106 gave him this moiety and the title of Jarl; and the two cousins lived in amity for “many winters,” joining their forces and fighting and killing Dufnjal,[13] who was one degree further off than their first cousin, and killing Thorbjorn at Burrafirth in Unst in Shetland “for good cause.”  Magnus then married, probably about 1107, “a high-born lady, and the purest maid of the noblest stock of Scotland’s chiefs, living with her ten winters” as a maiden.  After “some winters” evil-minded men set about spoiling the friendship of the jarls, and Hakon again seized Magnus’ share; whereupon the latter went to the court of Henry I of England, where he appears to have charmed everyone, and to have spent a year, probably 1111, in which Hakon seized all Orkney, and also Caithness, which then included Sutherland, and laid them under his rule with robbery and wantonness.  Leaving Caithness, Hakon at once went to attack Magnus in Orkney where he had landed; but the “good men” intervened, and an equal division of Orkney and Shetland and Caithness was made between the jarls.  After some winters, however, they met in battle array in Mainland, and the fight was again stopped by the principal men on either side in their own interest, the final settlement being postponed until a meeting, which was to take place in Egilsay in the next spring, Magnus arrived first at the meeting-place with the small following of two ships agreed upon, but Hakon came later in seven or eight ships with a great force, and, after those present had refused to let both come away alive, Magnus was treacherously murdered under Hakon’s orders by Hakon’s cook on the 16th of April 1116.  The dead jarl’s mother, Thora, had prepared a feast in Paplay to celebrate the reconciliation of the two cousins, which, notwithstanding the murder, Hakon attended.  After the banquet the bereaved mother begged her son’s corpse for burial in holy ground, and obtained it from the drunken earl after some difficulty and buried it in Christ’s Kirk at Birsay.  Twenty-one years after, on the 13th December 1137, Jarl Magnus’ relics were brought[14] to St. Magnus’ Cathedral at Kirkwall.

After making due allowance for the legends which generally cluster round a saint or jarl, and grow with time, and for the desire for dramatic contrast and effect, we must give credit to the writer of the Orkneyinga Saga, probably the Orkney Bishop Bjarni,[15] for the vividness and simplicity of his account of St. Magnus’ life and of the two most striking episodes in it—­his moral courage as a non-combatant in the battle of Menai Straits, and his saintly forgiveness of his murderers in his death-scene on Egilsay; and we must hold him worthy alike of his aureole and of the noble Norman cathedral afterwards erected in his memory by his nephew, St. Ragnvald Jarl, at Kirkwall, which took the place of Thorfinn’s church at Birsay as the seat of the Orkney bishopric.  Magnus, it seems, was all through assisted by the Scottish king, and favoured by the Caithness folk,[16] yet the Saga jealously claims him as “the Isle-earl,"[17] and adds the following description of him:—­