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Earldom Of Orkney
The Earldom of Orkney is the official status of the Orkney Islands. It was originally a Norse feudal dignity in Scotland which had its origins from the Viking period. In the ninth and tenth centuries it covered more than the Northern Isles (''Norðreyjar'') and included Orkney, Shetland, Caithness, and Sutherland. The ruling position of Jarl or Earl of Orkney was heritable. Orkney and Shetland lie off the northernmost tip of Caithness on the modern day Scottish mainland. The Picts came to Orkney during the Bronze Age, and the archaeological data shows that there were people living there prior to the Vikings, who came to Orkney probably by the latter part of the 8th century, although this is disputed. Norse Vikings probably either came to the islands first as farmers seeking land or as warriors who were claiming territory and riches, or both, as was common with Viking conquests elsewhere. The question of whether the Picts were completely massacred by the settling Vikings, migra ...
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Kingdom Of Norway (872–1397)
The term Norwegian Realm (Old Norse: ''*Noregsveldi'', Bokmål: ''Norgesveldet'', Nynorsk: ''Noregsveldet'') and Old Kingdom of Norway refer to the Kingdom of Norway's peak of power at the 13th century after a long period of civil war before 1240. The kingdom was a loosely unified nation including the territory of modern-day Norway, modern-day Swedish territory of Jämtland, Herjedalen, Ranrike ( Bohuslän) and Idre and Särna, as well as Norway's overseas possessions which had been settled by Norwegian seafarers for centuries before being annexed or incorporated into the kingdom as 'tax territories'. To the North, Norway also bordered extensive tax territories on the mainland. Norway, whose expansionism starts from the very foundation of the Kingdom in 872, reached the peak of its power in the years between 1240 and 1319. At the peak of Norwegian expansion before the civil war (1130–1240), Sigurd I led the Norwegian Crusade (1107–1110). The crusaders won battles in ...
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Norsemen
The Norsemen (or Norse people) were a North Germanic ethnolinguistic group of the Early Middle Ages, during which they spoke the Old Norse language. The language belongs to the North Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages and is the predecessor of the modern Germanic languages of Scandinavia. During the late eighth century, Scandinavians embarked on a large-scale expansion in all directions, giving rise to the Viking Age. In English-language scholarship since the 19th century, Norse seafaring traders, settlers and warriors have commonly been referred to as Vikings. Historians of Anglo-Saxon England distinguish between Norse Vikings (Norsemen) from Norway who mainly invaded and occupied the islands north and north-west of Britain, Ireland and western Britain, and Danish Vikings, who principally invaded and occupied eastern Britain. Modern descendants of Norsemen are the Danes, Icelanders, Faroe Islanders, Norwegians, and Swedes, who are now generally referred to as ...
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Harald Fairhair
Harald Fairhair no, Harald hårfagre Modern Icelandic: ( – ) was a Norwegian king. According to traditions current in Norway and Iceland in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, he reigned from  872 to 930 and was the first King of Norway. Supposedly, two of his sons, Eric Bloodaxe and Haakon the Good, succeeded Harald to become kings after his death. Much of Harald's biography is uncertain. A couple of praise poems by his court poet Þorbjörn Hornklofi survive in fragments, but the extant accounts of his life come from sagas set down in writing around three centuries after his lifetime. His life is described in several of the Kings' sagas, none of them older than the twelfth century. Their accounts of Harald and his life differ on many points, but it is clear that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Harald was regarded as having unified Norway into one kingdom. Since the nineteenth century, when Norway was in a personal union with Sweden, Harald has become ...
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Vikings
Vikings ; non, víkingr is the modern name given to seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway and Sweden), who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded and settled throughout parts of Europe.Roesdahl, pp. 9–22. They also voyaged as far as the Mediterranean, North Africa, Volga Bulgaria, the Middle East, and North America. In some of the countries they raided and settled in, this period is popularly known as the Viking Age, and the term "Viking" also commonly includes the inhabitants of the Scandinavian homelands as a collective whole. The Vikings had a profound impact on the early medieval history of Scandinavia, the British Isles, France, Estonia, and Kievan Rus'. Expert sailors and navigators aboard their characteristic longships, Vikings established Norse settlements and governments in the British Isles, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, Normandy, and the Baltic coast, as well as ...
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Bronze Age Britain
Bronze Age Britain is an era of British history that spanned from until . Lasting for approximately 1,700 years, it was preceded by the era of Neolithic Britain and was in turn followed by the period of Iron Age Britain. Being categorised as the Bronze Age, it was marked by the use of copper and then bronze by the prehistoric Britons, who used such metals to fashion tools. Great Britain in the Bronze Age also saw the widespread adoption of agriculture. During the British Bronze Age, large megalithic monuments similar to those from the Late Neolithic continued to be constructed or modified, including such sites as Avebury, Stonehenge, Silbury Hill and Must Farm. That has been described as a time "when elaborate ceremonial practices emerged among some communities of subsistence agriculturalists of western Europe". History Early Bronze Age (EBA), c. 2500–1500 BC There is no clear consensus on the date for the beginning of the Bronze Age in Great Britain and Ireland. Some ...
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Picts
The Picts were a group of peoples who lived in what is now northern and eastern Scotland (north of the Firth of Forth) during Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Where they lived and what their culture was like can be inferred from early medieval texts and Pictish stones. Their Latin name, , appears in written records from the 3rd to the 10th century. Early medieval sources report the existence of a distinct Pictish language, which today is believed to have been an Insular Celtic language, closely related to the Brittonic spoken by the Britons who lived to the south. Picts are assumed to have been the descendants of the Caledonii and other Iron Age tribes that were mentioned by Roman historians or on the world map of Ptolemy. The Pictish kingdom, often called Pictland in modern sources, achieved a large degree of political unity in the late 7th and early 8th centuries through the expanding kingdom of Fortriu, the Iron Age Verturiones. By the year 900, the resultin ...
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Jarl (title)
Jarl is a rank of the nobility in Scandinavia. In Old Norse, it meant "chieftain", particularly a chieftain set to rule a territory in a king's stead. ''Jarl'' could also mean a sovereign prince. For example, the rulers of several of the petty kingdoms of Norway had the title of ''jarl'' and in many cases they had no less power than their neighbours who had the title of king. It became obsolete in the Middle Ages and was replaced by duke (''hertig''/''hertug''/''hertog''). The word is etymologically related to the English earl. Etymology The term ''jarl'' has been compared to the name of the Heruli, and to runic ''erilaz''. Proto-Norse ''eril'', or the later Old Norse , came to signify the rank of a leader. Norway In later medieval Norway, the title of ''jarl'' was the highest rank below the king. There was usually no more than one ''jarl'' in mainland Norway at any one time, and sometimes none. The ruler of the Norwegian dependency of Orkney held the title of ''jarl'', and ...
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Sutherland
Sutherland ( gd, Cataibh) is a historic county, registration county and lieutenancy area in the Highlands of Scotland. Its county town is Dornoch. Sutherland borders Caithness and Moray Firth to the east, Ross-shire and Cromartyshire (later combined into Ross and Cromarty) to the south and the Atlantic to the north and west. Like its southern neighbour Ross-shire, Sutherland has some of the most dramatic scenery in Europe, especially on its western fringe where the mountains meet the sea. These include high sea cliffs, and very old mountains composed of Precambrian and Cambrian rocks. The name ''Sutherland'' dates from the era of Norwegian Viking rule and settlement over much of the Highlands and Islands, under the rule of the jarl of Orkney. Although it contains some of the northernmost land in the island of Great Britain, it was called ' ("southern land") from the standpoint of Orkney and Caithness. In Gaelic, the area is referred to according to its traditional areas: ' ( ...
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Caithness
Caithness ( gd, Gallaibh ; sco, Caitnes; non, Katanes) is a historic county, registration county and lieutenancy area of Scotland. Caithness has a land boundary with the historic county of Sutherland to the west and is otherwise bounded by sea. The land boundary follows a watershed and is crossed by two roads (the A9 and the A836) and by one railway (the Far North Line). Across the Pentland Firth, ferries link Caithness with Orkney, and Caithness also has an airport at Wick. The Pentland Firth island of Stroma is within Caithness. The name was also used for the earldom of Caithness ( 1334 onwards) and for the Caithness constituency of the Parliament of the United Kingdom (1708 to 1918). Boundaries are not identical in all contexts, but the Caithness area lies entirely within the Highland council area. Toponymy The ''Caith'' element of the name ''Caithness'' comes from the name of a Pictish tribe known as the ''Cat'' or ''Catt'' people, or ''Catti'' (see Kingd ...
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Shetland
Shetland, also called the Shetland Islands and formerly Zetland, is a subarctic archipelago in Scotland lying between Orkney, the Faroe Islands and Norway. It is the northernmost region of the United Kingdom. The islands lie about to the northeast of Orkney, from mainland Scotland and west of Norway. They form part of the border between the Atlantic Ocean to the west and the North Sea to the east. Their total area is ,Shetland Islands Council (2012) p. 4 and the population totalled 22,920 in 2019. The islands comprise the Shetland constituency of the Scottish Parliament. The local authority, the Shetland Islands Council, is one of the 32 council areas of Scotland. The islands' administrative centre and only burgh is Lerwick, which has been the capital of Shetland since 1708, before which time the capital was Scalloway. The archipelago has an oceanic climate, complex geology, rugged coastline, and many low, rolling hills. The largest island, known as " the Mainland", ...
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Northern Isles
The Northern Isles ( sco, Northren Isles; gd, Na h-Eileanan a Tuath; non, Norðreyjar; nrn, Nordøjar) are a pair of archipelagos off the north coast of mainland Scotland, comprising Orkney and Shetland. They are part of Scotland, as are the Hebrides. The climate is cool and temperate and much influenced by the surrounding seas. There are a total of 36 inhabited islands. The landscapes of the fertile agricultural islands of Orkney contrast with the more rugged Shetland islands to the north, where the economy is more dependent on fishing and on the oil wealth of the surrounding seas. Both island groups have a developing renewable energy industry. Both have a Picts, Pictish and Norse activity in the British Isles, Norse history. Both were part of the Norway, Kingdom of Norway until they were absorbed into the Kingdom of Scotland in the 15th century. They remained part of it until the 1707 formation of the Kingdom of Great Britain and the 1801 formation of the United Kingdom. ...
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