There is a tradition[23]
that Thorkel founded the rock-castle of Borve, near Farr on the north
coast of Sutherland, which was demolished by the Earl of Sutherland
in 1556; but Thorkel is a common name among Vikings, and the story is
otherwise unauthenticated.
According to the Saga, Thorfinn died of sickness "in the latter days
of Harald Hardrada," (who was killed in September 1066), near the
church which he founded, in his Hall at Birsay, north of Marwick Head
in the north-west corner of Mainland of Orkney, within a few miles
of the scene of Earl Kitchener's recent death at sea, so that the
greatest of our jarls and of our earls rest near each other, the great
Viking on the shore, and the great soldier in the ocean.
The chronology of Thorfinn and Ingibjorg his wife is extremely
difficult, but on the whole we incline to think that he was born in
1008, and, as grandson of the king regnant, was created an earl at his
birth, married Ingibjorg, then quite young, in 1044, and died in 1057
or 1058, after being an earl for his whole life of "fifty years,"
while his widow married Malcolm III in 1059. The phrase "in the latter
days of Harald Hardrada" is after all an expression wide enough to
cover the last seven years of a reign of twenty-one years, and it is
unlikely that a marriage of policy would be postponed for more than
the year or two after Malcolm's accession in 1057, during which he was
engaged in defeating the claims of Lulach to his throne and settling
his kingdom.
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