whole we incline to think that he was born in
1008, and, as grandson of the king regnant, was created an earl at his
birth, married Ingibjorg, then quite young, in 1044, and died in 1057
or 1058, after being an earl for his whole life of "fifty years,"
while his widow married Malcolm III in 1059. The phrase "in the latter
days of Harald Hardrada" is after all an expression wide enough to
cover the last seven years of a reign of twenty-one years, and it is
unlikely that a marriage of policy would be postponed for more than
the year or two after Malcolm's accession in 1057, during which he was
engaged in defeating the claims of Lulach to his throne and settling
his kingdom.

CHAPTER V.

_Paul and Erlend, Hakon and Magnus._

After Earl Thorfinn's death his sons Paul and Erlend jointly held the
jarldom, but divided the lands. They were "big men both, and handsome,
but wise and modest"[1] like their Norse mother Ingibjorg, known as
Earls'-mother, first cousin of Thora, queen of Norway, mother of King
Olaf Kyrre.

On Thorfinn's death, however, the rest of his territories, nine
Scottish earldoms, it is said, "fell away, and went under those men
who were territorially born to rule over them;" that is to say, they
reverted to Scottish Maormors;[2] but Orkney and Shetland remained
wholly Norse, and under Norse rule.

The date of the succession of Paul and Erlend to the Norse jarldom[3]
was, as we have seen, after 1057. Possibly in 1059, or certainly not
later than 1064 or 1065, Ingibjorg, Thorfinn's widow, as by Norse law
widows alone had the right to do, "gave herself away" to the Scot-King
Malcolm III, known as Malcolm Canmore.[4]

As a matter of policy, the marriage was a wise step. For it would
tend to strengthen not only the hold of Scotland on Caithness and
Sutherland, but also its connection with Orkney and Shetland, because
Ingibjorg's sons, the young jarls Paul and Erlend, would become
stepsons of the Scottish king and earls of Caithness. Nor was the
marriage unsuitable in point either of the age or of the rank of the
contracting parties. Married to Thorfinn about 1044,[5] Ingibjorg, his
widow, need not in 1064 have been more than forty. She may have been
younger, and Malcolm was, in 1064, about thirty-three. If the
marriage was in 1059, Ingibjorg would be only thirty-five and Malcolm
twenty-eight. That Ingibjorg was not old is proved by the fact that
she had by Malcolm one son and possibly three sons,[6]