When the Vikings came, they came as worshippers of Thor and Odin and
the old Teutonic gods. To them the Christianity of the Pict was "a
weak effeminate creed." They, therefore, slew its followers, plundered
its shrines, and drove its clergy south from Orkney, from north-east
Caithness and the coasts of Sutherland, and from the seaboard of Ross
and Moray, and for a century and a half Christianity was uprooted
and almost wholly expelled. No jarl before Sigurd Hlodverson was a
Christian, and he was baptized by force, and died fighting for Odin
at Clontarf. With all "the fury of an expiring faith, its last lambent
flickering flame, against a creed that seemed to contradict every
article of the old belief,"[2] wherever they came, they destroyed the
cult and culture of Columba, which it had taken several centuries to
establish in the north and west of Alban.
When the conquerors settled in the land, they enslaved such of its
inhabitants as remained among them for a time, and gave to the best
coastal lands and lower valley farms the Norse names which they still
bear, but they left the heads of the river valleys and the hills
mainly to the Moddan family and their Pictish followers and clansmen,
who held them tenaciously and extended their holdings, as the Norse
became less hostile through inter-marriage, or less strong.
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