The Viking Earl Killed by a Severed Head Tied to His Saddle

Sigurd Eysteinsson — known by the epithet the Mighty (hinn ríki) — was the second Norse Earl of Orkney, holding the substantial Scandinavian-occupied territory of the northern Scottish mainland and the Orkney islands through approximately the last two decades of the 9th century. He was the brother of Rögnvald Eysteinsson, Earl of Møre, and substantively the founder of the Norse Orkney earldom that would dominate northern Scottish politics for the next four centuries.

The Orkneyinga Saga, written in Iceland approximately 300 years after the events, records the substantial circumstances of his death. In approximately 892 AD, Sigurd had been campaigning against the Scottish-Pictish chieftain Máel Brigte Tönn (‘Máel Brigte the Buck-Toothed’) in the contested borderland of Caithness and Sutherland. The two had agreed to settle the dispute through a formal combat of forty men a side. Sigurd brought eighty by the expedient of mounting forty additional men on horseback behind his original forty. Máel Brigte and his men were killed.

Sigurd beheaded Máel Brigte personally and tied the head to his saddle as a trophy for the return ride to his base camp at Ekkialsbakki. During the ride, the projecting tooth of the dead Máel Brigte — the feature that had earned the epithet Tönn — scratched Sigurd’s exposed calf. The wound became infected. Sigurd developed sepsis and died approximately three weeks later, aged probably about 50.

He was buried under a mound near the modern village of Sidera in Sutherland, sometimes called Sigurd’s Howe. His son Guthorm succeeded to the earldom but died within a year. The Sigurd-Rögnvald Eysteinsson dynastic line continued through Rögnvald’s other sons and substantively founded the medieval Orkney earldom that lasted until the 1468 Scottish absorption of the Orkneys.

The Sigurd death is one of the unusual recorded fatalities of the European medieval period and is occasionally cited alongside other peculiar deaths-in-office of European leaders as a documented case of unintended mortality from a completed successful action.