Introduction

This paper asks when Christian practice was adopted in Viking Age Scotland. It focuses on the Northern Isles, Orkney and Shetland, which ultimately emerged as the medieval earldom of Orkney (Crawford 1987). The chronological range is from the initial phase of Norse settlement in the mid ninth century (Graham-Campbell 1998: 106; Barrett in press) to the establishment of a formal bishopric around AD 1048 (Morris 1996: 188).

It is useful to begin with three general observations. First, the available evidence is meagre from a pan-European perspective. Richard Fletcher's (1997: 375) 562 page volume, The Conversion of Europe, relegates it to a single pithy paragraph. Nevertheless, the region is important, both in a particularistic sense and as a possible route for early transmission of Christian ideology to Norway and elsewhere in the Norse North Atlantic (e.g. Myhre 1993; Solli 1996; Vésteinsson 1999: 18). It is worth extracting what one reasonably can, accepting that the result must presently serve as a heuristic tool.

Second, any attempt to define and recognise ‘Christianisation’ must confront fundamental epistemological issues. Was it the adoption of a mentalité (e.g. Lönnroth 1987: 27), a political ideology (Earle 1997: 143; Carver 1998: 11) or both? Did either exist as discrete facets of experience and action in early historic Britain? Can patterns in material culture provide unambiguous evidence of Christian practice as mentalité or ideology (Abrams 1998: 115–6; Carver 1998: 13–6)? These questions are probably unanswerable in the abstract, but must be confronted in concrete terms within the specific context of Viking Age Scotland.

Third, the study of early Christianity in northern Scotland has a complex historiography far too lengthy to review here. Much of the relevant work has been summarised by Christopher Morris (1996; see also Smith 2001: 9–14), who identifies two broad models. The first follows medieval Icelandic tradition regarding the forced conversion of Earl Sigurd Hlodvisson of Orkney by Olaf Tryggvason c.AD 995 and Adam of Bremen's account that a bishopric was subsequently established at Birsay, by Earl Thorfinn Sigurdarson, around AD 1048. Despite its attractive simplicity, this traditional account has long been challenged by a second, alternative, view that Christianity was also practised earlier in Norse Scotland (e.g. Wainwright 1962: 158; Stevenson 1981; Lamb 1995).