It was the Icelandic people who started the practice of recording their history in ‘Sagas’, which are slightly fictionalised versions of real events, intended to be read to families who enjoyed hearing stories of their heroes and their ancestors. It was a stylised way of writing which includes the ancestry and relationships of each character as they are introduced into each story (or Saga). The set of Orkney Island Sagas was collected in the thirteenth century by an unknown Icelander. Of course up until this point the Orkney and Icelandic people spoke the same language and had much in common, with their Viking heritage; as the Orkney people had more to do with Scotland and the Icelanders to Norway, this bond was broken. The Orkneyinga Saga tells the stories of the Earls of Orkney who seemed to spend most of their time killing each other (although that might have simply been the highlights of the stories!). The Heritage Centre is built next to the remains of a round church which figures in the Saga; the church is surrounded by a very modern and neat cemetery, as all Orkney cemeteries are.

We spent the afternoon in Stromness, this time visiting the local museum, which has a special display right now about John Rae, the Arctic explorer from Orkney who discovered the North West Passage from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific via the Arctic circle and the north of Canada. He was never given recognition in his own time due to Victorian attitudes to his practice of learning and adopting hunting and survival skills from the Inuit, as well as his controversial (but now proven) verdict on the failed Franklin expedition to locate the North West Passage. He was born 200 years ago this weekend.