Meantime Olvir Rosta, Frakark’s grandson, who had been stunned and nearly drowned in the sea fight at Tankerness, in which Sweyn’s and Gunni’s father, Olaf Hrolf’s son, had aided Jarl Paul, burned Olaf alive in his home at Duncansby, Asleif, Olaf’s wife, escaping only because she was absent at the time.  Further, Valthiof, Sweyn’s elder brother, was drowned in the roost of the West-firth, while rowing south to Jarl Paul’s Yule Feast.  Sweyn Asleifarson, as he was ever afterwards called, then went to Paul’s Hall at Orphir to complain of Olvir Rosta.  The news of his brother’s death, which arrived during the feast, was considerately withheld from him, and he was greatly honoured there; but he roused the jarl’s anger by slaying Sweyn Breast-rope, the jarl’s forecastle-man, at Orphir, not indeed so much for the murder, as because Sweyn had fled and did not come to submit himself after it to the jarl, and so offended him.[12]

Then follow the stories, well worth reading in the Saga itself, of the raising and lowering of the sails on Ragnvald’s ships and of the mutiny of Paul’s followers, and of the dowsing of the beacons on the Fair Isle by Uni, Ragnvald’s ally, of Ragnvald’s landing in Westray, of his suppression of all opposition to him, of the spies at Paul’s Thing, of Sweyn’s junction of forces with Ragnvald, of Sweyn’s visit to Margret at Athole, and his dramatic kidnapping of Jarl Paul while hunting otters near Westness[13] in the Isle of Rousay, in Orkney, and of the jarl’s deportation by Sweyn first to Dufeyra and thence via Ekkjals-bakki[14] to Athole to his sister Margret, who receives him with the utmost show of cordiality, and finally of Paul’s abdication in favour of Margret’s second son, Harold Maddadson, then a boy of five years of age, with the instructions to Sweyn to tell the Orkneymen that Paul himself was blinded, or, worse still, maimed, so that his friends should not seek him out, and restore him to his jarldom.[15] Such is one version of the story; the other is a more sinister tale, that his half-sister Margret cast Jarl Paul into a dungeon and had him murdered, and, so far as the Saga relates, he left no issue.

Sweyn then returns to Orkney and tells his version of the affair to the bishop, the bishop to Ragnvald, and Ragnvald to the “good men” or lendirmen of Orkney, who express themselves satisfied, and Ragnvald builds the Cathedral he had vowed to St. Magnus in Kirkwall—­a strange medley of craftiness, murder, and piety.

Next we have the vivid scene[16] of the arrival from Athole at Knarstead near Scapa, in his blue cope and quaintly cut beard, on a fine winter’s day, of John, Bishop, probably of Glasgow, and formerly tutor to King David of Scotland, on whom Jarl Ragnvald waits like a page, and who passes on to Egilsay to Bishop William the Old; and the two clerics propose to Jarl Ragnvald that Harald Maddadson, who had already been created sole Earl of Caithness, shall have Paul Thorfinnson’s half of the Orkney jarldom, an