War, in fact, paid; and, after generations of harrying, many of the raiders concluded that the western lands in Britain were fairer and more fertile than their native shores, and desired to settle in the west.
Finally the feudalism of Charlemagne was imitated by Harald Harfagr in Norway; and, against that, Norse independence revolted and rebelled. The true Viking would be no other man's man, and to secure Harald's feudal power he was driven forth from Norway by an organised navy manned by those of his countrymen who had agreed to accept King Harald as feudal overlord and to pay him tribute. Defeated, as we have seen, at the naval battle of Hafrsfjord in 872, the rebel remnant of the Vikings found their return to Norway barred; and those of them who became pirates in Orkney and Shetland and raided Norway as such, were, in their turn, assailed in these islands by King Harald, and destroyed. Others of them colonised Ireland, the Hebrides, and the Faroes; and from all these islands as well as from Scotland and Norway issued the swarms that settled in Iceland, and afterwards gave us a code of law, our system of trial by jury, much of our legal procedure, and, when crossed with Gaelic blood, produced the glorious literature of the Sagas. But in their exodus, whencesoever they started, what all alike sought was liberty; which, for them, meant the right to do exactly as they pleased to others, and freedom from paying "scat" or dues to a superior lord.
When the Vikings came, they came as worshippers of Thor and Odin and the old Teutonic gods. To them the Christianity of the Pict was "a weak effeminate creed." They, therefore, slew its followers, plundered its shrines, and drove its clergy south from Orkney, from north-east Caithness and the coasts of Sutherland, and from the seaboard of Ross and Moray, and for a century and a half Christianity was uprooted and almost wholly expelled. No jarl before Sigurd Hlodverson was a Christian, and he was baptized by force, and died fighting for Odin at Clontarf. With all "the fury of an expiring faith, its last lambent flickering flame, against a creed that seemed to contradict every article of the old belief,"[2] wherever they came, they destroyed the cult and culture of Columba, which it had taken several centuries to establish in the north and west of Alban.