The Viking Earl Killed by the Severed Head of His Defeated Enemy in 892

Sigurd Eysteinsson (died c. 892) — known to Norse tradition as Sigurd the Mighty — was the second Norse Earl of Orkney. He had inherited the title from his older brother Rögnvald of Møre, who had been granted the islands as a Norwegian royal fief by Harald Fairhair around 875 AD in the substantial Norwegian unification campaign. Sigurd substantially extended the Orkney earldom’s territorial reach southward across the Pentland Firth into northern Scotland, establishing Norse control over Caithness and Sutherland and producing the Norse mainland presence that would persist there for the next four centuries.

He is principally remembered for an unusually specific manner of death.

The battle

The Orkneyinga Saga — the 13th-century Icelandic compilation of the earlier Norse traditions of the Orkney earldom — records that Sigurd had arranged a pitched-battle confrontation with the local Pictish ruler Máel Brigte (known to the saga as Melbrid Tönn, ‘Máel Brigte the Tooth’, from a prominent canine tooth) on the southern shore of the Dornoch Firth in approximately 892 AD. The agreed terms had been that each side would field 40 mounted men; Sigurd betrayed the terms by fielding 80 (two men per visible horse, the second rider concealed behind the first).

The Pictish force was defeated. Máel Brigte was killed in the action. Sigurd’s victorious party beheaded the Pictish dead in the standard Norse trophy-taking practice; Sigurd personally took Máel Brigte’s head and tied it to his saddle horn for the ride back to the Norse camp.

The death

The ride back was several hours. Máel Brigte’s prominent canine tooth — the feature that had given him his Norse nickname — scratched Sigurd’s right leg through the saddle-position contact. The scratch developed a infection within days. Sigurd died of systemic sepsis approximately a week later at his Caithness camp.

He was buried at Sidera (now Sidwick) at the mouth of the River Oykel — the site that the saga identifies. His burial mound was still visible in the 19th century.

What it meant

The story has the characteristic features of a medieval Norse moral tale: pride punished, trickery rebounded, death by unlikely mechanism. The saga treats it as such — the author notes that the death was a just punishment for the battle’s broken terms.

The historical reliability of the story is uncertain. The Orkneyinga Saga was compiled approximately 300 years after the events it describes; the specific medical mechanism (sepsis from a corpse-tooth contact wound) is medically plausible but the specific detailed circumstances are the sort of folkloric elaboration that the Norse saga tradition routinely produced.

The point of the saga is the moral one: the enemy you have defeated and beheaded can still kill you. The pattern recurs in the Norse saga tradition through the subsequent centuries — Egil Skallagrímsson’s saga, the Njál’s Saga, the Heimskringla — as a standard motif.

Sigurd’s Orkney earldom was inherited by his brother Hallad and then by his cousin Torf-Einar, who produced the direct ancestral line of the subsequent earls of Orkney through the entire medieval period to the 1469 Scottish absorption of the islands.

The moral remained available. The French president Felix Faure died similarly unexpectedly a thousand years later; the medieval Norse tradition would have recognised the principle.