Man, and Ireland, in one of which Sweyn took two English ships near Dublin, and returned to Orkney laden with broadcloth, wine, and English mead.[3] Sweyn’s life is thus described in c. 114 of the Orkneyinga Saga.  “He sat through the winter at home in Gairsay, and there he kept always about him eighty men at his beck.  He had so great a drinking-hall that there was not another as great in all the Orkneys.  Sweyn had in the spring hard work, and made them lay down very much seed, and looked much after it himself.  But when that toil was ended, he fared away every spring on a Viking-voyage, and harried about among the southern isles and Ireland, and came home after midsummer.  That he called spring-viking.  Then he was at home until the cornfields were reaped down, and the grain seen to and stored.  Then he fared away on a viking-voyage, and then he did not come home till the winter was one month spent, and that he called his autumn-viking.”  At last, in a cruise to Dublin, which he captured, Sweyn was killed by stratagem on landing to receive payment of its ransom from the town, and the boy Hakon probably fell there with him in 1171.  “And,” the Saga adds, “it is the common saying of Sweyn that he was the most masterful man in the western lands, both of yore and now-a-days, among those men who had no higher rank than himself.”  Sweyn was, in fact the greatest man of his time.  For he robbed whom he pleased, made and undid jarls and earls as he chose, and was the friend or tool of more than one Scottish king.

Earl Harold had put his wife Afreka away, and probably after Sweyn’s death formed a union, at a date which it seems impossible to fix, with Hvarflod or Gormflaith, daughter of Malcolm MacHeth of Moray, who was in rebellion in 1134, and was imprisoned in Roxburgh Castle until 1157, when he was released and created Earl of Ross, so that Gormflaith, who could hardly have been born during her father’s imprisonment, must have been born either before 1135 or after 1157.  Harold and Gormflaith’s children were Thorfinn, who predeceased him, and also David and John, both afterwards in succession earls of Caithness and jarls of Orkney, and three daughters, Gunnhilda, Herborga, and Langlif; and of the daughters the Saga-writers tell us nothing, except that the Icelander Saemund, Magnus Barelegs’ grandson, wished to marry Langlif but did not do so;[4] and her son Jon Langlifson, according to the Saga of Hakon was in 1263 a spy on the Norse side.

Here the Orkneyinga Saga ends.  But additions to its generally received text are found in the Flatey Book,[5] and the additions are by no means so trustworthy as the Saga proper.  From these we learn that of Eric Stagbrellir and Ingigerd’s children, who were settled in Sutherland, the sons, Harald Ungi, Magnus, and Ragnvald Eric’s son, fared east to Norway to King Magnus Erling’s son, where young Magnus Eric’s son fell with that king in the battle of Norafjord in Sogn in 1184.[6] Probably some of them were, on Eric Stagbrellir’s death, subjected to exactions in respect of their lands by Harold Maddadson.