General Notes

EARLDOM of ORKNEY [NOR] - subject to King of Norway until after 1379

PAUL II Hakonsson the Silent (? 1126-1137) divided the Orkneys with his brother Harald, and after his death (? 1131) rook all the Orkneys and Caithness and banished his mother and her sister Frakok to the latterís estates in Helmsdale in Sutherland. Paul held the whole of both Earldoms, but in 1135 Jarl Kali-Ragnvald III asked Paul II to surrender St. Magnusís half of the Orkneys. Paul refused and in 1136 Ragnvald seized the Shetlands. He was helped by Frakokís grandson, Olvi Riot (to whom he had offered Jarl Paulís half of Orkney in return for alliance against him); but Olvi Riot was defeated at Tankarness (? 26 June 1136), and on 27 June Ragnvaldís men were defeated in Yell Sound. In the autumn Ragnvald returned to Norway, but next summer (1137) he again seized the Shetlands and captured Westray in the Orkneys. Paul agreed to a truce and surrendered half Orkney, but was captured while otter-hunting by his own warden in Caithness, Sweyn Asleifsson (whose father Olaf Hrolfsson had been burned in his house by Olvi Riot), and was carried off to the house of his brother-in-law Maddad or Madach, Earl of Atholl, husband of Margaret. Paul was thus deposed, and never returned to any of his dominions. He is not recorded to have married or had issue.  [Complete Peerage, X:Appendix A:18-19]