The True Tale of Macbeth as recorded in the
contemporary Irish and Norwegian annales
first printed in
Chamber's Edinburgh Journal for the year 1844.
The marvellous genius of Shakspeare may be
said to have made Macbeth, for without that
illustration, of what interest or value would
have been the name of a semi-barbarian Scottish
monarch of the eleventh century? But it has also
destroyed him, for it has fixed the
misrepresentations of his character on such a
basis, that nothing can ever annul them: Macbeth
must be the moral of murder and usurpation in
his rank unto all time. Nevertheless, our
curiosity is interested to know who and what
this man really was, and perhaps all the more
so, that our poetical conception of him is so
different from the reality. It chances that on
this point some new historical light has of late
been thrown, which may be presumed to give an
additional interest to the subject; we shall
therefore, without any apology or further
remark, proceed to give a brief account of the
Macbeth of fact.
The true history of this period is for the
first time related in Mr. William Skene's work
on "The Highlanders of Scotland" (2 vols.
Murray, 1836), being compiled mainly from the
Irish and Norwegian annalists. It is surprising
how much it differs from the meagre and
semi-fabulous accounts which descended, becoming
more fabulous as they went along, from our early
native historians to Hollinshed, who finally
gave the full-blown tissue of marvels to
Shakspeare. It appears that, in the year 1034,
the Scottish monarchy came to a sort of pause on
the overthrow and slaughter of a King Malcolm by
a powerful Norwegian chief or Earl of Orkney
named Thorfinn. By this great warrior the
northern and eastern parts of Scotland were
subdued, as far as the Firth of Tay, but
leaving, apparently, certain districts still
under their native chiefs. And this division of
the country by a Norwegian sway lasted thirty
years, though it is a fact hitherto totally
unknown amongst us. The rest of the people of
Scotland raised up a monarch in the person of
Duncan, whose mother was a daughter of the
deceased Malcolm, his father being Crinan,
nominally Abbot of Dunkeld, but in reality a
powerful chief in the district of Athole. To
pursue Mr.Skene's intelligent narration: "In
personal character Duncan was far from being
well-fitted for the difficult situation in which
he was placed, but being the only chief of the
northern Picts who remained unsubdued by the
Norwegians, he was the most likely person to
preserve the rest of Scotland from their grasp;
and during the whole of his reign, he appears to
have been unmolested by Thorfinn in his
circumscribed dominions. The Scots having thus
enjoyed, during Duncan's reign, six years of
repose, began to consider their strenth
sufficiently recruited to attempt the recovery
of the extensive territories in the north which
Thorfinn had conquered. Taking advantage,
accordingly, of the temporary absence of
Thorfinn, who was engaged with the greater part
of his Norwegian force in an English expedition,
Duncan advanced towards the north of Scotland,
and succeeded in penetrating as far as the
district of Moray, without encountering
apparently any resistance. The Gaelic
inhabitants of the north, however, who preferred
remaining under the Norwegian yoke rather than
submit to a chief of their own race whose title
to the throne they could not admit, opposed his
farther progress, and Macbeth, the maormor of
Moray, attacked him near Elgin, defeated his
army, and slew the king himself. Macbeth
immediately took advantage of this success, and,
assisted by the Norwegian force which still
remained in the country, he overran the whole of
Scotland, and speedily made himself master of
all that had remained unconquered by the
Norwegians. The sons of Duncan were obliged to
fly; the eldest took refuge at the court of
England, while the second fled from the
vengeance of Macbeth to the Hebrides, and
surrendered to Thorfinn himself. Macbeth, with
the sanction, probably, of the Earl of Orkney,
assumed the title of king of Scotland, which he
claimed in right of his cousin Malcolm, and,
notwithstanding all the efforts of the Scots, he
maintained possession of the crown for a period
of eighteen years.
Although Macbeth was a native chief, and one
of the Gaelic maormors of the north, yet his
conquest can only be considered with regard to
its effects as a Norwegian conquest. He had
previously been tributary to that people, and it
was by their assistance principally that he
became king of Scotland; so that at this period
we may consider the whole country as having been
virtually under the dominion of the Norwegians;
Thorfinn himself ruling over the northern
districts, while with his concurrence Macbeth
reigned in the southern half.
During the reign of Macbeth, the adherents of
the Atholl family made two several attempts to
recover possession of the throne, but they were
both equally unsuccessful. The first occurred in
the year 1045, when Crinan, the father of
Duncan, attacked Macbeth at the head of all the
adherents of the family in Scotland. Crinan's
defeat was total, and the slaughter very great;
for in the concise words of the Irish annalist,
"In that battle was slain Crinan, Abbot of
Dunkeld, and many with him; namely nine times
twenty heroes." This defeat seems for the time
to have completely extinguished Duncans's party
in Scotland, and it was not till nine years
afterwards that the second attempt was made.
Malcolm, Duncan's eldest son, who had taken
refuge in England, obtained from the English
king the assistance of a Saxon army, under the
command of Siward, the Earl of Northumberland;
but although Siward succeeded in wresting
Lothian from Macbeth, and in placing Malcolm as
king over it, he was unable to obtain any
further advantage, and Macbeth still retained
the kingdom of Scotland proper, while Malcolm
ruled as king over Lothian, until, four years
afterwards, a more favourable opportunity
occurred for renewing the enterprise. The son of
the king of Norway, in the course of one of the
numerous piratical expeditions which were still
undertaken by the Norwegians, had arrived at the
Orkneys, and on finding the great state of power
to which Thorfinn had raised himself, he
proposed that they should join in undertaking an
expedition having no less an object than the
subjugation of the kingdom of England. To this
proposal the enterprising Earl of Orkney at once
acceded, and the two sea-kings departed for the
south with the whole Norwegian force which they
could collect. It was not destined, however,
that they should even land on the English coast,
for their fleet appears to have been dispersed
and almost totally destroyed in a tempest; such
was probably at least the calamity which befell
the expedition, as the words of the Irish
annalist, who alone records the event, are
simply, "But God was against them in that
affair."
It appears that the king of England
(Edward the Confessor) had no sooner become
aware of the discomfiture of the threatened
invasion of his territories, than he sent an
English army into Scotland for the purpose of
overthrowing the power of the Norwegians in that
country, and of establishing Malcolm Kenmore on
his father's throne; and in the absence of the
Norwegians, the Saxon army was too powerful for
the Gaelic force of Macbeth to withstand. The
English accordingly made themselves masters of
the south of Scotland, and drove Macbeth as far
north as Lumphanan, where he was overtaken and
slain in battle. Upon the death of Macbeth,
Lulach, the son of his cousin Gillcomgain,
succeeded him; but after maintaining a struggle
with Malcolm for the short space of three
months, he was also defeated and slain at Esse,
in Strathbogie. In consequence of this defeat,
Malcolm Kenmore obtained, by the assistance of
the English, quiet possession of the throne of
Scotland, which his own power and talents
enabled him to preserve during the remainder of
his life. He was prevented, apparently by the
return of Thorfinn, from attempting to recover
any part of the northern districts which the
Norwegian earl had subjugated, and consequently
his territories consisted only of those southern
districts which Macbeth had acquired by the
defeat of his father Duncan.
From the accession of Malcolm Kenmore to the
death of Thorfinn, which took place six years
after, the state of Scotland remained unaltered,
and the country exhibited the remarkable
spectacle of a Gaelic population, one-half of
which obeyed the rule of a Norwegian earl, while
the other half was subdued by a prince of their
own race at the head of a Saxon army.
This narrative puts the idea of murder and
usurpation entirely out of the question. Duncan
was only an adventurer himself, slain in battle
by another, who, it now appears, had pretensions
to the throne according to the Celtic mode of
succession, by which the ablest collateral
relative of the deceased king was always
selected, passing over all hereditary claimants.
Macbeth, as we learn from George Chalmers, who
investigated his history with great diligence,
was by birth maormor, or chief of Cromarty and
Ross, and by marriage enjoyed the same dignity
over the more important region of Moray, which
is described by Mr. Skene as almost a kingdom
itself, extending from sea to sea. His wife
Gruoch, the widow of the former maormor of
Moray, and whose progeny actually succeeded in
that character, was granddaughter of a former
king of the Scots who had been slain by Duncan's
grandfather. Macbeth was a sort of pacha or
hereditary sheriff; but, it will be observed, in
a district over which Duncan only aimed at
establishing a government, so that he never was,
properly speaking a subject of that monarch. He
is rather to be considered as the representative
of an opposite interest in the country, that of
the northern Highlanders and the Norwegians; and
his warfare with the gracious Duncan seems
therefore to have been as fair as any warfare of
that age ever was.
