ed 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:--

"He wa