Orkney (Hrosseyjar)

Orkney is the great Norse earldom of the western seas — the islands off the north of Scotland that the kings of Norway claimed and the earls of Orkney ruled, a crossroads of the viking world where the sagas' characters forever pass through, raid from, or flee to. It is the seat of Earl Sigurd, in whose hall Kári hunts down one of the burners of Njáll; the base from which fleets harry Scotland, Ireland, and England; and the half-independent borderland between the Norse North and the British world. Magnus Barefoot seized it on his western expedition and set his son over it. Orkney is the corpus's image of the far-flung viking diaspora — Norse-speaking, Norse-ruled islands a long sail from any homeland, where the feuds of Iceland and the ambitions of Norwegian kings reach out and touch the wider sea.