The book Arran; - Cook Clan

16 THE BOOK OF ARRAN
to arise, and it happened that these took form at the ex-
tremities of the cord, the Orkneys and the Isle of Man, while
the supremacy of Norway waned or waxed with circumstances.
Strong local rulers might neglect it ; masterful
kings of Norway like Harold Fairhair in the end of the ninth
century, Magnus in the end of the eleventh, and, finally,
Hakon in the second half of the thirteenth, would find it
necessary to reimpose subjection with an over-cruel hand.
The first visit of Magnus ' west-over-the-sea ' in 1193 was
a sore smiting to the isles, repeating on a large scale the worst
features of a successful Viking raid, so that the northern
peoples fled before him, into Scotland, to Ireland, and to
Kintyre. But the ' valiant king ' followed after, and if ' the
men's children of the nation of Satiri (Kintyre) sunk under
the edges ' of his swords, it would be strange if next-door
Arran escaped a visit.^
Apart from this, the normal condition was for the rule
of the isles to swing between the powerful influence of the
Kingdom of Man and that of the Earldom of Orkney. On
the whole, the expression ' Man and the Isles ' or ' Man and
the Sudereys—where the Sudereys (Suder-eyar) are the
' southern isles ' or Hebrides, in contrast to the Nordereys
(Norder-eyar) or Orkney and Shetland—which survives in
the bishopric of ' Sodor and Man,' suggests that the grip of
the chief southern island was the more sustained, less accessible
as it was from Norway and enriched by the trade of the
Irish Sea. Orkney virtually goes out after the ravaging
conquests of its great Earl Thorfinn all along the western
border, and his death in 1064. Already, however, following
on the Norse disaster at Clontarf in Ireland in 1064, the rifts
had begun to show first where the cord of empire was weakest,
in the mainland and islands midway from the two powerful
extremities ; the mainland of the Gall- Gael, where the Gaelic
element of old Dalriada would still be strongest, and the
• 'Magnus Saga' in Collectanea de Rebus Albanicis, pp. 347-48.