A Head For Vengeance
Being killed by a dead man is no Viking’s idea of a ticket to Valhalla. Yet despite his epithet of “the Mighty”, that is precisely what Sigurd, first earl of Orkney, will always be remembered for.
It all began heroically enough. Sigurd stood at the bow of a longship in the fleet of Harald Fairhair, renowned first king of all Norway, to quell renegade Norsemen who were raiding Scandinavia from Orkney.
Having dealt with them, Sigurd crossed the Pentland Firth and brought fire and sword to Caithness, Sutherland, and Ross, the first Norseman to do so in great numbers. The idea was to link up with Thorstein the Red, who led a major force through Argyll and the Hebrides, and together to crush the Picts.
Sigurd built a major fort somewhere in Moray, possibly upon the ashes of the once great Pictish fortress at Burghead. Every conqueror needs a good rival and it seems Sigurd found one in the form of Maelbrigte, the mormaer – a Gaelic term for provincial ruler – of Moray.
Maelbrigte is a fascinating figure not least because of his extremely unusual nickname,
“the Tusk”, apparently due to his starkly protruding bottom incisor teeth.
After dealing each other many blows, in
892 the men decided to settle things by arranging a duel between them and their best warriors. They agreed on 40 men each, but Sigurd insisted the Scots could not be trusted and so, apparently oblivious to irony, cheated by putting two men on each horse.
Maelbrigte’s warriors put up a good fight but Norse numbers prevailed and they fell to the last man. Properly chuffed with himself, Sigurd hacked the heads from several men including Maelbrigte himself, stuffed them in a cloth sack and tied them to the saddle of his horse as victory trophies before riding north in triumph. It was not to be.
As Sigurd rode along bumpy paths, Maelbrigte “the Tusk” made good on his name. His teeth slowly wore at the cloth sack until they cut clean through, and when Sigurd urged his horse up a hill his calf rubbed against it just enough the break the skin. Such a hardy Norseman probably didn’t even notice – that is until the wound became infected. Within days Sigurd the Mighty was dead in his bed. If this sounds suspiciously like a morality tale, that’s likely at least half of the truth. Such an embarrassing end could be a rebuke of Sigurd’s deceptive tactics and hubris. Recalling that the Norse sagas were written long after their conversion to Christianity, it could also be read as divine punishment for indulging in the “pagan” Celtic practice of decapitating fallen foes. Within Gaelic lore there is a popular storytelling motif of the “avenging head”, so Sigurd’s case is far from unique but at least secured him a memorable place in the annals of history.
“Within days Sigurd the dead” Mighty was