Nor was the
marriage unsuitable in point either of the age or of the rank of the
contracting parties. Married to Thorfinn about 1044,[5] Ingibjorg, his
widow, need not in 1064 have been more than forty. She may have been
younger, and Malcolm was, in 1064, about thirty-three. If the
marriage was in 1059, Ingibjorg would be only thirty-five and Malcolm
twenty-eight. That Ingibjorg was not old is proved by the fact that
she had by Malcolm one son and possibly three sons,[6] namely, Duncan
II, and, it may be, also Malcolm and Donald. As regards rank, also,
she was equal to Malcolm, being a cousin of the Queen of Norway, and
widow of Thorfinn grandson of Malcolm II, the great jarl of Orkney who
had then recently subdued all the north of Scotland and the Western
Isles and Galloway to himself, while Malcolm III was in exile in
England, whence he had been brought back with the greatest difficulty,
not by a Scottish force but by the help of an English, or at least a
Northumbrian army.
After his marriage with Ingibjorg it is clear that there was peace for
thirty years in the north of Scotland, so far as the Norse jarls
were concerned, a fact which of itself justified the marriage,
which, however, may have afterwards been held to have been within the
prohibited degrees, and therefore void, while its issue would be held
to be illegitimate, and not entitled to succeed to the Scottish crown.
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