The storyways of Orkney

Amy Jeffs traces the paths of St Magnus, from sea to Mansie stones and Kirkwall’s red cathedral

The paths of St Magnus led from the sea to Mansie stones and onwards, relates Amy Jeffs

ACCORDING to The Orkneyinga Saga, Magnus Erlendsson was pious even in youth. When the Norwegian king waged war on Wales in the Menai Strait, Magnus refused to participate. Rather, he ‘sat down on the foredeck, and did not take his arms… The King said “Go down below, and do not lie among other people’s feet if you dare not fight”… Magnus took a psalter and sang during battle, and did not shelter himself’. Despite his disobedience, Magnus became Earl of Orkney. He was generous to the poor, judicious in his arbitration and so devout that, when he married a Scottish woman, he refused to sleep with her.

Magnus was killed in 1115, at the orders of another Norwegian earl, on the island of Egilsay. Although it was agreed they were to settle a dispute by negotiation, upon arrival, Magnus found his opponent poised with an army. To avoid war, Magnus offered his life: ‘Let me be maimed as you like, or deprived of my eyes, and throw me into a dark dungeon.’ He was struck in the head with an axe.

Magnus’s canonisation took place in 1136 and, in 1137, Kirkwall’s St Magnus Cathedral began being built for his relics. These are identified with the box of bones, complete with wounded skull, discovered inside a column in 1919. The cathedral, of local red sandstone, contrasts like a towering, blood-red sea anemone with the crisp blues of the Northern sky. This, however, isn’t the only way in which Magnus is connected to the landscape. As with so many medieval saints’ cults, the ways and waters he once inhabited are imbued with Magnus’s memory.

Some of this legacy is literary. The Orkneyinga Saga describes how, when Magnus was sailing to his death on Egilsay, the sea sought to forestall him: ‘As they were rowing in calm and smooth water a great wave rose under the ship, which was steered by the Earl, and

In calm water a great wave rose under the ship and broke over where he sat. Magnus recognised the wave as an omen, but did not turn back

broke over where he sat.’ Magnus recognised the wave as an omen, but did not turn back.

Echoes of the cult endure in local toponyms. According to scholars of Magnus Sarah Jane Gibbon and James Moore, ‘Mans’ is a contraction of the name Magnus, hence Orkney’s Mans farm and Mines Point (notwithstanding Ordnance Survey map spellings). This also accounts for the Mansie stones, distributed along the route believed to have been taken by his coffin from the site of his execution to his first entombment at Birsay and thence to its final resting place at Kirkwall, vertebrae of the recently opened St Magnus Way pilgrimage route and providing what Gibbon and Moore poetically refer to as ‘storyways’. www.amyjeffshistoria.com