Special Guest Post by JR Tomlin, Author of On a Sword's Edge: A Historical Novel of Scotland (William the Bold Book 1)

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Scotland. 1263. The scent of rain mingles with the smoke of campfires as word spreads: the Norse are coming… As tempers rise between King Alexander and the Norse King Haakon, at the center of it all is sixteen-year-old William Douglas, a squire in service to Sir John Stewart, Lord High Steward of Scotland.

What first spurred my interest in this period is that it might be considered the last fight of the ‘Viking Age’. Although that age is usually dated as ending earlier, it was in the Viking Age that the Norse conquered all the Scottish Isles and Caithness in the north Scottish mainland.

 

When the Jarl of Orkney, Jon Haraldsson, encouraged farmers in his lands of Caithness, claimed as part of his Orkney Jarldom, to murder Bishop Adam of Melrose, it gave King Alexander II exactly the excuse he was looking for. In 1222, he personally led an invasion of Caithness. He subjugated it to Scottish rule, executing the farmers guilty of the murder.

This ended Norse rule on mainland Scotland, but the Isles were still ruled by the Norse with fealty to the King of Norway. Around 1230, the Stewarts of Dundonald took the Isle of Bute, which is in the Firth of Clyde, from the Norse, but all the other Isles remained under Norse domination.

King Alexander had other portions of Scotland to bring firmly under royal control, so it was not until 1249 that he turned his attentions once more to the Norse and to the Western Isles. He began negotiations to buy them, but when that failed, he was about to lead an invasion when he died, leaving a seven-year-old boy, Alexander III, as his heir. Not surprisingly, this ended Scottish attempts to gain the Western Isles for quite some time. As usual in a regency, the regents were more interested in fighting each other for power than conquest. 

From the second young Alexander reached his majority and threw off his regents, he determined to finish what his father had begun. Once more, he opened negotiations to purchase the Western Isles. The negotiations failed. It was in 1263 that the King of Norway, King Haakon, gathered a vast fleet of more than a hundred ships supposedly to defend the Hebrides, even though the Scots had not raised an army to attack those islands.

Rather than remain to ‘defend’ the Hebrides, King Haakon sailed his fleet hundreds of miles south to the Firth of Clyde. There they retook the Isle of Bute and ravaged parts of the Scottish coast. At that point, we come to what I mentioned might be considered the last battle of the ‘Viking Age’, the Battle of Largs.

The saga of that battle when, for the last time, the Scots fought, but this time drove off an invading Norse army is an amazing one involving a storm so severe there were accusations of witchcraft, wrecked ships, a fierce, bloody fight, and the Norse sailing away. If, as some claim, the results of the battle were indecisive, the Norse retreat was very clear.

This time, it was the King of Norway who died in the Hebrides, where his fleet had taken shelter. His heir was more willing to negotiate, and only four years later, the Western Isles finally became part of the Kingdom of Scotland. 

JR Tomlin

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About the Author

J. R. Tomlin is the author of more than twenty historical novels, set for the most part in Scotland. Her love of that nation is traced from the stories of King Robert the Bruce and the Good Sir James her grandmother read to her when she was small to hillwalking through the Cairngorms where the granite hills have a gorgeous red glow under the setting sun. Later, her writing was influenced by the work of authors such as Alexander Dumas, Victor Hugo, and of course, Sir Walter Scott. When JR isn’t writing, she enjoys spending time hiking, playing with her Westie, and killing monsters in computer games. In addition to having lived in Scotland, she has traveled in the US, Europe and the Pacific Rim. She now lives in Oregon in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Find out more at https://www.jrtomlin.com and follow JR Tomlin on Bluesky and Twitter @TomlinJeanne